Evaluation of Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) in ...

Evaluation of Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) in Europe – Final Report
The Evaluation Team
Throughout the evaluation process a team of evaluators covering all
coastal European countries was involved in assembling the information.
Team members were split into core and extended team members.
Extended Team members were working on information collection
assigned to specific countries and were developing the “country
cases”. The core team members guided the process (e.g. by providing
assessment formats), analysed, made comparison between
countries and constantly updated and consolidated the information.
Collecting and processing secondary information
To make sure that by the end of the evaluation a standard and
minimum set of information would be available for each coastal
country (“the country case”), a common format (assessment grid, see
Annex B) was developed which presents the essential features of the
development and implementation of the ICZM strategy (or alternative
policy approaches). The main source materials for this exercise were
the Member States reports that were expected to be issued around
February 2006. In case of absence of (final) reports informal drafts
and proxy-material was analyzed either derived from on-line research
or other sources.
A wide variation between countries as to whether they have developed,
or had still been on the way of elaborating a national ICZM
strategy was observed. Therefore, an explorative investigation of the
documents at hand was undertaken.
The assessment grid (see Annex B) contains the country case. It
was made available to and completed by the respective country
evaluator. The grid starts with the summary of the country analysis
including major findings (Section 1). This is followed by preliminary
information on the main country's institution driving the ICZM process
(Section 2).
The descriptive parts of the grid (Sections 3 and 4) follow in their
structure as much as possible the outline of Chapter III, National
stocktaking and Chapter IV, National strategies of the Recommendation
of the EU on ICZM in Europe. The main elements of the process
followed by each country to arrive at a national strategy were also
described. The process was regarded as important as the final output
of this process, i.e. the national strategy, and therefore a high degree
of elaboration was allocated.
The assessment part (Section 5) analyses the comprehensiveness
and quality aspects of the national strategy and the process that led
to it. Here the eight Principles of the Recommendation of the EU on
ICZM in Europe guide the evaluators to arrive at a balanced and fair
judgement.
The recommendation part (Section 6) draws conclusions on pitfalls
and lessons learned. Here the evaluators were asked to include
suggestions and recommendations for enhancing the ICZM process
in the countries.
Based on the country assessments, the core evaluators prepared
cross country assessments for each of the Regional Seas. Here
suggestions for the specific case of the countries were analysed on
Core
and extended
evaluation team
members
Developing
country cases
and clustering for
comparisons
across countries
All country
evaluators follow
common
assessment grid
Cross country
assessments
18 August 2006 64