Principles and purposes of European Union Cohesion policy evaluation

The paper provides a critical assessment of the evaluation of European Union Cohesion policy, focusing on the current regulatory framework, and the difficulties this poses for achieving rigorous and useful evaluation outputs. The paper argues that the evaluation framework for Cohesion policy is limited to three core purposes: accountability, improved planning, and quality and performance, but that it would benefit from widening this to include other functions. The decentralization of evaluation to the Member States means the evaluation of Cohesion policy relies on the presence of a pre-existing evaluation culture and skills base in the regions. Further, obstacles to effective evaluation arise from the lack of data comparability, rigidity of time-scales and a focus on performance approaches.