Enhancing objectivity and decision relevance: a better framework for evaluating EU cohesion policies

By international standards, the European Union’s Cohesion Policy (CP) evaluation system is well developed and institutionalised. This paper analyses the remaining shortcomings and proposes recommendations for further refinement. A broad CP objective function emerges as a key challenge. Evaluation culture is not equally developed in all member states, and evaluation markets suffer from a lack of international competition. There is still limited use of counterfactual methods which have become standard in the academic literature on the effectiveness of CP, and there may be tensions between policy learning and demonstrating accountability. The paper proposes innovations to make CP evaluations more credible and impactful.