CADS10 Castellano. 2006 - Generalitat de Catalunya

The maximisation of political commitment therefore does not only materialise when
an act is passed to stipulate that the assessment is mandatory. Even so, at the central
Italian level and in Tuscany –with different political and administrative cultures to the
Netherlands and the United Kingdom– RIA has been introduced by means of a
legislative requirement. Taking into consideration the period of adaptation that is involved
in introducing any new instrument to the administration, it remains to be seen how
the introduction of RIA changes with time and the levels of compliance achieved in
these two areas.
In every case, the aim is to focus analytical efforts are on the proposals with the greatest
potential impacts, which achieves the following:
a) To limit the reach of the RIA in terms of:
• type of legislation that can potentially be subjected to assessment
• size of the impact and/or
• sectors affected.
RIA is never limited to lower-ranking laws, thus considering the legislative forms
that can potentially have the greatest impact. However, the criteria for differentiating
considerable impact from insignificant impact are not specified. In the Netherlands,
this does not seem to be a problem, nor in Italy or Tuscany, where the
experimentation period requires the selection of the regulation to be assessed
to be political.
b) To structure the process into two or more phases from least to most analytical
effort (except in the case of Tuscany). This option is not exempt from problems
since, at times, political pressure can block the process during the preliminary
phases and avoid in-depth analyses.
An essential part of the RIA should be assessing the impact of alternative options,
in order to be able to select the most suitable one among them. In reality, all the models
studies end by indicating which is the preferred option in accordance with their own
scales. However, the degree of prior study of the various options varies in each case.
In this way, whereas in the Netherlands the selection of an option for in-depth study
is very quick, in the United Kingdom and Scotland the various options are kept until
the end of the analysis process. The lack of a comparison between the impacts of
the various options spoils the RIA and detracts from it in terms of supporting the decision
makers in the regulatory decision-making process (Radaelli et al., 2001). If only one
option is presented, the “decision” has effectively already have been taken at a
technical level during the process of drawing up the RIA.
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