The rationale for setting up the European Evaluation Network for Rural Development (EENRD) is drawn from the experience with evaluations of rural development programmes carried out during previous programming periods. In the past, the programme evaluations, which fall under the responsibility of the Member States, revealed shortcomings in applying the evaluation guidelines and indicators established at Community level. This led to a heterogeneous quality of the results and made it difficult for the European Commission to prepare syntheses of the evaluations at EU level with a view to monitoring and improving the effectiveness of EU rural development policy. The “ongoing evaluation” of rural development programmes as introduced by Council Regulation (EC) 1698/2005 and the creation of the EENRD are intended to address these shortcomings.
The EENRD operates under the responsibility of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development. Implementing the multiple tasks of the network exceeds the internal resource capacity of the Commission, therefore an Evaluation Helpdesk, established and operated by an external contractor, runs all the day-to-day operational matters. The Helpdesk is composed of a small permanent team of staff in Brussels and is supported by a core team of experts and around twenty geographic experts from across the 27 EU countries. In the case of the UK, Ireland and Malta John Grieve of The Rural Development Company john@rural-development.co.uk is the geographical expert, he is also a member of the Core Team.
The activities of the EENRD and its Helpdesk are supervised by the Expert Committee on Evaluation of Rural Development, which was established by the Commission Decision of 20 February 2008 (2008/168/EC). The EENRD is a distinct part of the wider European Network for Rural Development (EN RD - which is managed by a separate external contractor) but the two work independently in their daily tasks. The activities of both networks are coordinated in a way to ensure synergies and exchanges of information.
The work of the EENRD is organised on the basis of Annual Work Programmes, which are agreed with the Commission. These Annual Work Programmes are developed within an overall multi-annual framework and objective-led approach, which has the general aim to increase the usefulness of evaluation as a tool for improving the formulation and implementation of rural development policies. The AWP activities derive from three specific objectives:
- To increase capacity in the evaluation of Rural Development Programmes
- To increase capacity in managing evaluation processes
- To share good practice in the evaluation of Rural Development Programmes
Since the Evaluation Helpdesk started its activities in April 2008, one nine-month Annual Work Programmes has been implemented and a second twelve-month one started (for calendar year 2009). A key output of the 2008 Annual Work Programmes was the Development of guidelines for the application of the High Nature Value (HNV) indicator. These guidelines aim to help Member States to provide an estimate of how much HNV farming and forestry there is in a Member State/region, and to assess whether it is being maintained through rural development measures. It describes a common approach involving four key steps and how the Member States should operationalize this, taking account of good practice and data availability. Another exercise completed in 2008 was a SWOT analysis of the different elements of the current RD evaluation system 2007-2013 (including the CMEF) and evaluation processes. This activity was complemented by a needs assessment of the rural development evaluation community, which was conducted by the Helpdesk in autumn 2008 through the organisation of Focus Groups in the Member States, including Germany.
Key goals within the Annual Work Programmes 2009 are to further develop methodological and other content work, provide timely support for the mid-term evaluation of Member States’ rural development programmes and liaise with Member States and other networks.
The documents referred to in this article (Annual Work Programmes 2009, the HNV Guidance document, SWOT and needs assessment) are available to download from the EENRD website: http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/rurdev/eval/network/index_de.htm
EENRD Contact Details:
Evaluation Helpdesk of:
The European Evaluation Network for Rural Development
260 Chaussée St Pierre - B-1040 Brussels
Tel : +32 (0)2 736 18 90
E-mail : info@ruralevaluation.eu