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.
Developmental evaluation endeavours to reconfigure evaluation practice away from merely serving purposes of external accountability of policy towards making evaluation integral to the dualistic practice of policy making and policy implementation.
A new e-book on DPS, written by Phil Haynes of University of Brighton, has been published and is downloadable.
The following interview was between Phil Haynes (Professor of Public Policy, Brighton University) and Brian Castellani (Professor of Sociology, Kent State University) regarding Professor Castellani’s latest book, The Defiance of Global Commitment: A Complex Social Psychology, which is part of the series he edits, complexity in social science at Routledge.
The world is complex: it is made up of many different components which interact in messy, adaptive and unpredictable ways. Complexity poses great challenges to policy-making and evaluation because complex systems are fundamentally unpredictable.
When a problem is to be solved in a complex environment with a diversity of stakeholders, how can a policy be democratically justified as “good” use of public funds? How can we appraise policies in a more concrete way than resorting to vague general value judgements such as “enhanced” and “improved”?
This session introduces qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) – a case-based approach that relies on Boolean algebra, which crudely speaking is a way of sorting differentiating units or cases according to whether they share or do not share particular configurations of attributes.
We were delighted to welcome Wendy Olsen to give a CECAN seminar last week ‘Mixed Methods Evaluation, using QCA and NVIVO’.
In a 2014 paper in Futures we explored the relatively straightforward proposition that societal systems combine two qualities that are commonly referred to as complexity and complicatedness.
We were thrilled to welcome Zenda Ofir to give a CECAN seminar in February ‘How evaluation in the SDG era can mislead, and what to do about it.’
This blogpost highlights some of the points raised in a policy brief, New Directions: A public goods approach to agricultural policy post-Brexit. Following the Brexit referendum, the mantra “public monies for public goods” has been increasingly heard, especially in relation to agricultural and environmental policy.
The course covers the main strategies, approaches and methods that an evaluator or evaluation commissioner might want to use to tackle the challenges of complexity social science and policy evaluation.
Household food security is a classic complex system. Countries that are food secure when viewed at country-scale may nevertheless have considerable food security problems at household scale.
In development studies, one wants an evaluation team to face up to the challenge of combining surveys with semi-structured interview data. In this seminar I explain and show how these linkages are made with concrete data about villages in Bangladesh and India.
Here in CECAN, a lot of time is spent considering and analysing policies, projects and interventions. We also think about methodologies, approaches and systems that we can adopt to do this analysis in the best way possible.
Phil Haynes is Professor of Public Policy and researches and teaches public policy and management, as applied to a variety of contemporary circumstances. His research focuses on the application of complex systems theory, often using applied statistical methods. His research has been funded by the ESRC and the government and voluntary sector.
Along with several lead and co-authors, as part of a British Ecological Society Agricultural Ecology Group convened workshop held in December 2017, a report has been produced entitled “Finding the Common Ground”, which sets out an ecological perspective on how future agricultural policy should develop as a consequence, and in relation to, Brexit.