The Food Standards Agency, a non-ministerial government department, is currently revising its risk analysis process as part of the preparatory work for EU Exit. The food and feed safety risk analysis process contributes to the FSA objective to ensure that the high standard of food safety and consumer protection we enjoy in the UK is maintained when the UK leaves the EU.
To understand the complex systems we inhabit, surely, we must recognise a plurality of perspectives. After all everyone gets a different view. However mainstream economists, the dominant social scientists, only accept one perspective on how economies work drowning out others.
Helen, Dione and Martha are all part of a CECAN team that has been developing guidance for evaluation practitioners and commissioners struggling with complex interventions – and particularly those working in complex policy areas. The guidance was requested by the government team of evaluators who are revising the Magenta Book (Cross government guidance on evaluation) with the idea of having an annex on complex evaluation ready for when this is published.
We are pleased to announce that CECAN Research Fellows, Pete Barbrook-Johnson and Alex Penn, have published a report presenting a systems mapping project carried out by CECAN with BEIS between June 2017 and December 2018.
Wednesday 16th January 2019, 09:30 - 17:30 (registration 09:00), University of Surrey, Guildford, UK Tutor: Dr. Pete Barbrook-Johnson, UKRI Innovation Fellow and Research Fellow (University of Surrey) Course Details: This course is part of the CECAN Module for policy...
CECAN Co-Investigator Ian Christie presented the programme’s aims, projects and achievements to date in a talk at a conference in Berlin on 17th November on the political dimensions of policy evaluation.
The pluralistic evaluation framework is a new tool for policymakers that has gradually taken shape during the last 12 months of my CECAN fellowship. It is now ready to be presented at a webinar on 20 November, where I will be explaining the rationale in the space of 45 minutes. Here I want to share a little of the journey that it has been on, building on what I wrote here last January and June.
In a democratic system, how can we show that a policy has improved a complex situation in a way that represents good use of public funds? “Improve” and “good” are very general words, calling for pluralistic evaluation.
By Caroline Oliver, Reader in Sociology, Roehampton University and Research Affiliate at the Centre on Migration, Policy & Society, University of Oxford
We were delighted to have Stuart Astill and Simon Henderson host a CECAN webinar on 16th October on ‘Handling subjective views and bringing rigour to contribution analysis: Bayesian Belief Networks and evaluating likelihoods in action’.
This course introduces participants to the fundamental aspects of the evaluation processes that precede and follow data collection, analysis, and report drafting; and that are relevant when drafting Invitations to Tender (ITT) or Terms of Reference (ToR), when evaluating proposals, and assessing the quality of intermediate and final evaluation products / reports.
Over the last decade the UK Health Forum has been developing microsimulation models to estimate the future impact of public health policies targeting both behavioural (e.g. obesity, smoking) and environmental risk factors (e.g. air pollution) on the disease and economic burden to the health system and wider society.
ESRC has awarded transition funding to CECAN and eight other ESRC research centres to continue their pioneering social science research and to increase the use of their research in policy and practice.
Simon Henderson and Stuart Astill will give a talk showing how influence maps analysed using Bayesian Belief Networks can be used to add rigour to contribution analysis (and other evaluative judgements) in situations where subjective views rather than objective outcome data is the main source of knowledge.
CECAN researchers Dr Pete Barbrook-Johnson, Dr Amy Proctor and Dr Adam Hejnowicz presented at the British Science Festival in Hull on 12th September 2018.
This blog reports on recent presentations and discussions held at the Royal Geographical Society annual conference in Cardiff, at a special session on adaptive management and governance of the food-energy-water-environment nexus. The session was jointly organised by researchers from CECAN and the James Hutton Institute.
Many public natural resource management organisations are trying to institutionalise integrated approaches to natural resource management. These new approaches hold the promise of allowing them to better meet the complex institutional, policy, and natural environments in which they operate.
CECAN were pleased to host a webinar with Dr Martin Reynolds from the Open University on 24th July.
On 11th July nearly 200 delegates attended CECAN’s annual conference in the elegant and central London venue of One Birdcage Walk.
This seminar, led by Adam Stiles, will examine the application of process tracing methods within a realist evaluation. The evaluation of the ‘Transitional Arrangements (TA) for Demand Side Response’ scheme was commissioned by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and has been led by CAG Consultants in partnership with Charles Michaelis (CECAN).
Contact: Martha Bicket The Food Standards Agency and ‘Regulating Our Future’. The objectives of this case study were to support the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to define a Theory of Change (TOC) for Regulating our Future (ROF) and the know-how to update and use the...
On 25th April 2018, BEIS and CECAN held a workshop bringing together members of the CECAN team with analysis and policy leads in BEIS, responsible for this £505 million programme. The workshop explored options for the development of an evaluation strategy for the programme; it is the first activity in the ongoing support CECAN will offer in this key policy area. The programme is made of many projects with diverse aims and contexts, and has key objectives around energy innovation, meaning there are many evaluation challenges.
The aim of the case study was to apply Participatory Systems Mapping to support the current evaluation, and specifically to understand the causal and stakeholder relationships underpinning applications to the RHI to install biomethane and biogas plants, and their outcomes. BEIS and CAG Consultants, the evaluation contractors, believed that the approach would be particularly useful in this context as biomethane and biogas plants typically operate within a wide network of actors, stakeholders and beneficiaries.
On April 25, BEIS and CECAN held a workshop bringing together members of the CECAN team with analysis and policy leads in BEIS, responsible for the £505million Energy Innovation Programme (EIP).
Brian Castellani, CECAN Fellow, recently ran a workshop at Warwick University along with Pete Barbrook-Johnson. They met with Tim Sunderland of Natural England and what Brian describes as a group of great people from DEFRA and Natural England!
I wrote at the start of this year about my work on articulating values in evaluation. This has crystallised into a pluralistic evaluation framework, which I will shortly be presenting to policymakers from Defra and other agencies (in London on 12 June and in York on 3 July). This workshop is intended to offer fresh ideas and a simple template to assist at all stages of the policy cycle – from appraisal and impact assessment through to full evaluation.
CECAN Fellow Joanna Boehnert has recently published a poster associated with her funded fellowship project entitled, “The Visual Representation of Complexity.”
CECAN recently ran a systems mapping workshop at BEIS with a range of stakeholders from industry and government, looking at biogas and biomethane production and usage, as part of our case study on the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI).
On the 9th and 10th November 2017 CECAN proudly hosted a two-day International Symposium at Barnett Hill in Surrey, UK.
Late last year, a new CECAN syllabus was put together, as a training module for policy analysts and evaluators.The syllabus outlines 10, two hour sessions, which can be incorporated into a broader post graduate programme.