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CECAN Seminar: Learning Lessons from Practical Policy Evaluation: Reflecting on a Meta-Evaluation of UK/EU Policy and Practice Evaluations Across the Nexus

Aug 7, 2017 | News

CECAN recently held a seminar with Clare Twigger-Ross and Owen White from Collingwood Environmental Planning, which looked at the lessons learned from practical policy evaluation.

Numerous evaluations of natural environment policy and practice are commissioned by the UK and EU government in order to inform, develop and improve.

Typically these evaluations are dealing with complex “wicked issues” where that which is being evaluated is likely to have impacts that can’t be easily measured within the time frame of the evaluation; difficulty in unpacking causality and to be operating in less than perfect policy cycles.

CEP has been carrying out these types of evaluations over the past decade and as part of the CECAN centre took time to analyse 23 of their evaluations to learn lessons specifically around the evaluation of complexity, the role of methods and the nature of evaluation impact.

This brought out the key factors that affect evaluation progress and enable some understanding of how to navigate an evaluation through dynamic policy landscapes  so as to provide value and insight.

In this seminar Dr Clare Twigger-Ross and Owen White from CEP presented the findings from that research and facilitated a discussion around the key findings and approaches for managing complexity in evaluations.

You can watch the seminar movie here:

CECAN Webinar – The benefits and challenges of conducting research with impact ‘built in’: reflections and findings from an evaluation of Electronic Monitoring with the Ministry of Justice, with Ian Brunton-Smith. 23 Jun, 1 - 2pm BST. Includes live Q&A! Register free: www.cecan.ac.uk/events/cecan...

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— CECAN (@cecan.bsky.social) April 9, 2025 at 12:22 PM

*New Resource* - 'Guidance on using large language models to extract cause-and-effect pairs from texts for systems mapping', written by Jordan White and Pete Barbrook-Johnson. See: www.cecan.ac.uk/resources/to...

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— CECAN (@cecan.bsky.social) April 3, 2025 at 2:53 PM
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