Christina Moulogianni

IA tools applied to impact assessment of EU policies in agriculture and environment

Demand for impact assessment (IA) tools by public administrations has increased significantly in the last decades, when the European Union has also increased its efforts to measure the impact of its agricultural and environmental policies. Different IA tools have been applied to assess EU policies in agriculture and environment, like the Common Agricultural Policy reform, decoupling, the Water Framework Directive, agri-environmental schemes, the Nitrates Directive, etc. This paper considers impact assessment tools that are commonly used in Europe and the rest of the world for carrying out assessments initiated by policymakers. The aim of the paper is to provide a review of the IA tools applied for the assessment of the EU policies in agriculture and environment, to analyse them and to classify them by different criteria according to the policy that they have been applied to and by the impacts that they have been measured. This paper reviews 116 published studies for impact assessment carried out in European countries.

The use of policy formulation tools in the venue of policy appraisal: patterns and underlying motivations

As described in the introductory chapter, this book is concerned with the ways that actors in particular policy formulation venues gather and apply knowledge derived from using particular policy formulation tools. This chapter examines the venue of policy appraisal, which has received widespread attention from both policy formulation researchers and practitioners in the past two decades (Turnpenny et al. 2009; Adelle et al. 2012). As a formalized venue in which analysis is undertaken when formulating policy, it corresponds to the ‘InternalOfficial’ type as defined in Chapter 1. Indeed, the use of policy appraisal is often required by law: by 2008, all 31 OECD countries had either adopted, or were in the process of adopting, a formal system of policy appraisal (OECD 2009). Policy appraisal systems may in turn harness a wide range of policy formulation tools to carry out the analysis (Carley 1980; De Ridder et al. 2007; Nilsson et al. 2008). All these elements mean that the study of policy appraisal can yield revealing insights into policy formulation as a whole, since it covers, often mandatorily, the key ‘tasks’ of policy formulation noted in Chapter 1, namely: characterization of the current situation; problem conceptualization; identification of policy options; assessment of potential policy options and recommending and/or proposing a specific policy design. This chapter uses policy appraisal as a window into policy formulation activities as a whole.

Regulatory impact assessment and its evolution in Greece and Cyprus

During the recent years an increasing demand emerged to improve the existing law systems through procedures that support the standards of better regulation. Such processes are the regulatory impact assessment (RIA) systems through which researchers, administrators and decision/policy makers can assess the economic, social and environmental impacts of any given legislation. Every country implementing RIA uses different tools to measure potential and expected impact. However, the key objectives that lead to the adoption of RIA are the same for all countries across Europe. The aim of this paper is to introduce to the readers the impact assessment procedure and especially RIA. Also, it describes the RIA systems and presents their evolution in Greece and Cyprus with some empirical results on the observed patterns of tools’ use at the level of individual policies. The paper has been developed in the framework of the FP7 research project Linking Impact Assessment Instruments to Sustainability Expertise – Network of Excellence (LIAISE).

Farm planning in nitrate sensitive agricultural areas

One of the main aims of the Rural Development Plan under the EU Common Agricultural Policy is the protection of nitrate sensitive areas through agri-environmental schemes. This paper presents a mathematical programming model for farm planning in agricultural areas that are sensitive to nitrates. A bilevel linear programming (BLP) model is developed, that can achieve the optimal farm production plan assuming two conflicting goals: the maximisation of farm gross margin and the minimisation of fertilisers’ use. The first goal is pursued by farmers, and comprises the first level of BLP. The second goal is pursued by society, through the government, and comprises the second level of BLP. The model is applied to an agricultural area in Northern Greece, which belongs to the nitrate sensitive areas scheme of the Greek Rural Development Plan 2007–2013. The model is further used to simulate the impacts of the measure under two scenarios proposed for farms located in nitrate sensitive areas. The result shows that the model can achieve the two goals set by increasing gross margin and reducing fertilisers use.