International Review of Waste Management Policy - Department of ...

929
might be axed in times of funding cuts. Arguably, such services should not be
‘grant funded’, but where they are, longer-term commitments should be made,
alongside detailed delivery plans and reviews to ensure efficiency of delivery.
This also highlights the role of evaluation in seeking to ensure that priorities
are understood;
� The flip side of this is that projects which are supported should, where it is
reasonable to expect this, be capable of continuing beyond the grant funding
period. This is especially important with support for fledgling waste projects.
Projects need to be able to demonstrate that there is a realistic prospect for
continuing beyond the period where grant money is spent;
� As public funding the positive outcomes are very often described in case
studies of each funded project and readily available on the funding body’s
website. However, publication of raw data is lacking. Also, although it is
considered very likely that funding bodies assess the effectiveness of their
funding stream no evidence of this type of report being made publicly available
has been found;
The variety of schemes that are run, in terms of size of the fund available, the quality
of applicants and the funding rate, makes evaluating grant funding in generic terms
challenging. This would infer that looking at specific cases is a more effective
evaluation method, and in theory this may be the case, but the lack of available data,
due to funding body’s reluctance to release specific details, makes this impossible.
With regards to the Environment Fund in Ireland feedback from the waste
management industry suggests that there is a lack of support towards the private
sector, despite there being no barriers in the legislation in funding private operators.
Instead, the fund has developed into a source of money mainly for public sector
projects or those of other bodies.
International Review of Waste Policy: Annexes