CECAN Rural Development Programme for England – DEFRA
Scrum Masters: Frances Rowe and Adam Hejnowicz
On 19th July CECAN held the first of two joint and linked workshops with DEFRA. The purpose of the first workshop was to develop a more complexity-sensitive understanding and approach to the evaluation of the current Rural Development Programme for England (RDPE).
RDPE is a major policy instrument funded out of Pillar 2 of the Common Agricultural Policy, which seeks to promote environmentally sensitive land management, community development and rural business growth.
Workshop 1 incorporated the testing of the Evaluation Assessment Tool developed by Dr Barbara Befani and BOND – the first time it has been used in a nexus policy setting. The Tool helped policy makers and evaluators to better understand the appropriateness of various complexity-sensitive evaluation methods in relation to specific evaluation questions reflecting the complex nature of the policy.
A second workshop on 20th September will bring together multiple stakeholders in a day orchestrated around exposing policymakers and analysts to systems mapping approaches that can be used to co-design the rural development policy space in a post Brexit context.
The work with CECAN will help build capacity for complexity-sensitive evaluation within DEFRA and contribute to the commissioning framework for the 2019 evaluation.
