News

From April – June 2019, Betheney Wills, a PhD Researcher from CECAN/University of Surrey undertook a policy internship with the Marine and Fisheries Team at the Department for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

HM Treasury has today (Wednesday 1 April 2020) updated the Magenta Book, UK Government’s central guidance on how to evaluate policies, projects and programmes. 

The Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus (CECAN) has produced supplementary guidance for the 2020 revision of the Magenta Book, published on 1st April.

Pete Barbrook-Johnson, Alex Penn and Ben Shaw have begun a new CECAN case study working with DfT to support their work on ‘Mobility-as-a-Service’ (i.e. using data and software, such as apps, to manage and access transport services).

On 9th January 2020, Dione Hills (Tavistock Institute) and Pete Barbrook-Johnson (University of Surrey) delivered training on how to conduct evaluations in complex settings to a mixed group of practitioners and policy teams working on public health issues in London.

Alex Penn and Pete Barbrook-Johnson (CECAN Senior Research Fellows based at University of Surrey) and colleagues from Mott McDonald ran the first of three Participatory Systems Mapping workshops in the Eden river catchment in Cumbria on 15th January 2020.

On 4th October 2019, CECAN held a briefing and workshop session with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) on dealing with complexity in policy evaluation.

Pete Barbrook-Johnson, a UKRI Innovation Fellow hosted by CECAN, has published the first report from his 3-year fellowship. The report reviews innovative public-private partnerships working in the UK on food-energy-water- environment ‘nexus’ domains.

Alex Penn and Pete Barbrook-Johnson (Senior Research Fellows in CECAN) recently delivered a bespoke 1-day course on participatory systems mapping for researchers and policy makers in the new SIPHER project.

CECAN Fellow, Jayne Cox, has published a project report from her funded fellowship project entitled “How does the commissioning process inhibit the uptake of complexity-appropriate evaluation?”.

The field of complexity related research is growing apace, and CECAN has been at the forefront of exploring how research methods from this field can be incorporated into evaluation practice (given sufficient resources, expertise and willingness on the part of evaluation funders!).

On 6th February, Vanna Aldin (Head of Analytics and Chief Economist at the Food Standards Agency) kindly presented a CECAN Webinar on ‘Risk Analysis at the Food Standards Agency post EU-Exit: The role of economics and social science in informing risk management’.

CECAN Ltd is pleased to be working with Defra to develop a Complexity Evaluation Framework that will equip Defra commissioners of evaluation with a checklist of core considerations to ensure that policy evaluations sufficiently consider the implications of complexity theory.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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! 

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).