Synthesis Report - European Commission - Europa

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Synthesis Report Ex-post Evaluation of the ERDF 2000-2006 • There is a need in future for evaluations to be more focused on the effectiveness of programmes and different areas of intervention and on the physical outcomes and results rather than on process issues and absorption; in doing so, rigorous methods of evaluation should be used – making use of both qualitative and quantitative data – adapted to the policy area concerned. • Indicators need to be directly, and transparently, related to the objectives of programmes. This needs to happen from the beginning of the process, when programmes are formulated, so that it is clear what they are attempting to achieve. • Data on the indicators should be collected and published regularly to enable programme performance to be monitored. • It is unrealistic to expect – or aim for – these indicators to be common across the EU; instead they should be specific to the objectives set in the particular regions concerned and enable progress in pursuing these objectives to be tracked • Equally importantly, such a monitoring and evaluation system needs to be an integral part of the decision-making process. It should be recognised that the obstacles to the adoption of such a system are as much political as technical. There, therefore, has to be an acceptance on the part of Member States that a system of this kind is essential for improving the effectiveness of development policies. • There also needs to be a willingness to make policy, and evaluations of it, more open to public scrutiny and to encourage debate on both the objectives of policy and the performance in meeting them. Such a debate is perhaps the only way of ensuring that the targets set are meaningful and that the authorities concerned are accountable for their achievement. • The development of such a system would be facilitated by the concentration of funding on a limited number of priorities, as advocated above, which would make it easier both to set the objectives and to monitor performance towards achieving them. • To put a system of this kind in place implies more detailed negotiation between the European Commission and the Member States about the content of policy. • The ‘n+2’ rule should be reconsidered to determine whether there is a better way of ensuring that the funds made available are spent within a reasonable period of time. Such consideration should take specific account of the tendency in a number of countries for expenditure to be concentrated at the end of the programming period and beyond, to investigate whether there is a means of ensuring a more even profile of spending over the period. • Special attention should be given to the practice of allocating funding to pre-financed projects both to examine whether there are ways of avoiding this – in particular, through investigating how Member States which do not use the method manage to avoid doing so – and to ensure that the funds effectively freed up by the practice are used in an appropriate and effective way. • Member States should be obliged to produce data on the unit costs of large projects in sufficient detail to enable these to be compared across regions and the cost effectiveness of the projects concerned to be assessed. • DG Regional Policy should construct and maintain a database containing information on the various elements of the costs of large projects as they are completed across the EU in 168
Ex-post Evaluation of the ERDF 2000-2006 Synthesis Report the detail required so that the unit costs, which can be calculated from this, can serve as a benchmark for assessing the costs of similar planned projects. 6 • Arrangements should be established for exchanging information and experience between the authorities responsible for managing the ERDF and implementing cohesion policy in different parts of the EU. This would enable authorities to learn from each other. In particular, those with less experience could learn from those with more and the less successful from the more so, so serving to raise the level of performance across the EU. In addition, it would exploit the considerable amount of information and evidence (on, in particular, what works and what does not and the reasons why, as well as on practical evaluation methods) which has been built up and which is continuously being added to across the EU. 7 169
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Synthesis Report - European Commission - Europa

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