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OECD Environmental Performance Review Programme: accountability (f)or learning?

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-07, 19:39 authored by Markku Lehtonen
The growing interest in evaluation as a new form of environmental governance stems from two developments: the movement towards New Public Management, and the search for new policy instruments for managing complexity, uncertainty and plurality of values in the pursuit of sustainable development. The former holds increasing accountability as the main purpose of evaluation, while the latter stresses the importance of learning. These approaches are often considered as mutually exclusive, but recent literature has underlined their complementary roles in policy making. This article examines to what extent the OECD Environmental Performance Review (EPR) programme has succeeded in combining the objectives of learning and accountability within a single evaluation framework. he EPRs have been relatively successful in avoiding the negative side-effects often associated with traditional performance measurement, but have usually ailed to generate broad debate. Focusing on enhancing accountability through social learning would probably contribute to overcoming this problem.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

Evaluation

ISSN

1356-3890

Publisher

Sage

Issue

2

Volume

11

Page range

169-188

Pages

20.0

Department affiliated with

  • SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit Publications

Notes

The role of evaluation of environmental performance programmes has been shifting from static `accountability¿, with adverse side-effects, to a more dynamic `learning¿ approach (feeding back into the policy process). The paper asks whether the two are incompatible, taking the example of the top-down peer review system developed by the OECD.

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2012-02-06

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