ABSTRACT
In order to develop new environmental policies, it is important first to evaluate those that have already been adopted. However, this intuitively simple idea is difficult to apply in practice, no more so than in the complex governance context of the EU. Attributing impacts to specific policies is challenging, and making evaluations useful for political decision making is even more demanding. Five approaches for dealing with these challenges are discussed, namely: side-effect evaluation; intervention theories; triangulation; multi-criteria analysis; and participation-based evaluation. How and why these approaches are (or are not) utilized in the EU is described and explained. Recently, emphasis on retrospective evaluation has increased in the EU, and the focus has broadened from evaluating expenditure programmes to legislation and other non-spending policies. Nonetheless, more effort is needed to create a well-established culture of policy evaluation in the EU.
