Building on the previous chapters, this chapter compares state and society funded climate policy evaluation with a view to the three foundational ideas of polycentric governance, namely self-organization, context and interactions between governance centers. While self-organization through climate policy evaluation is limited, the comparison reveals that society-funded evaluations engaged more deeply with the context of climate policy than the state-funded ones. Society-funded evaluation also used more evaluation criteria in their work. But state funders appear to have greater levels of resources, which manifest in terms of the numbers of methods that they use, as well as more quantitative comparability metrics. The latter may help to carry insights from one governance center to another. On the whole, society and state funded evaluation therefore appear complementary, each uniquely contributing to polycentric climate governance. However, in both groups, there remains ample room for development with a view to leveraging the synergies of polycentric governance by the means of evaluation.

Of the 618 climate policy evaluations collected for this research, only 84 were society-funded. This means that while self-organization represents not only a theoretical possibility but also an empirical reality, the capacities for doing so are limited. Environmental groups are particularly active in climate policy evaluations, while research institutes and private-sector consultancies also contribute. These evaluations engage with context to a moderate degree, and their level of reflexivity, or critical engagement with extant policy targets, is not as high as polycentric governance scholars may expect. Interestingly, only about a quarter of the society-funded evaluations identified and addressed gaps left by state-funded evaluation. In sum, while self-organization thus manifests through climate policy evaluation, there remains great potential for greater engagement of societal actors. This type of engagement is not only be desirable from a polycentric, but also from a democratic perspective.

Climate change governance is becoming more polycentric. From the global to the municipal level, an unprecedented number of actors are addressing climate change. But will polycentric governance generate significant emissions reductions? What brings disperse action together to build cumulative outcomes capable of limiting climate change to well below two degrees of warming? How will actors in different institutions and jurisdictions be able to learn from one another and thereby generate significant governance synergies? These important questions relate directly to the vexed question of policy evaluation, an underappreciated, but potentially highly consequential element of polycentric climate governance. In spite of substantial growth of evaluation activity and theorization, its role in assessing and possibly improving climate governance has been insufficiently explored. This chapter introduces the book, which tackles this challenge head-on by developing new, cutting edge theory and then conducting an empirical test in the context of the European Union, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Polycentric governance and evaluation literatures remain disconnected, as they have emerged from separate scholarly communities. This high level of fragmentation significantly impedes necessary theoretical development in order to leverage the synergies that emerge from a combination of the two perspectives. This chapter begins this work, by first assessing polycentric governance as an emerging theory, and then distilling three core, foundational ideas from it, namely that governance centers can and do self-organize, that context matters for governance and that there are interactions between governance centers. Drawing on thinking on monitoring in polycentric governance literatures, the chapter then reveals how these three foundational ideas connect to thinking in policy evaluation literatures, which had also addressed evaluation actors, context as well as, to a lesser degree, how evaluation may be a carrier of insights between different governance centers. The exploration of these ideas demonstrates that evaluation has great theoretical potential to enable polycentric climate governance by potentially linking the efforts of state and non-state organizations.

Policy evaluation has great potential to enhance polycentric climate governance, but that potential has not yet been fully realized. This concluding chapter draws together the key contributions of the book, which not only emerge from significant theoretical development, but also from a novel empirical analysis that is the first to investigate policy evaluation in the polycentric setting of the EU, as well as in Germany and in the United Kingdom. Future research should further explore causal drivers of the emergence of policy evaluation in polycentric governance systems, and unpack the actual use of knowledge in policy-making, a difficult, but necessary area of inquiry going forward. Additional aspects of polycentric governance theory, such as the role of evaluation in building trust and generating linkages between different actors, should also be explored. The collective research and climate governance endeavor will continue—this book has offered some new directions in which the journey may advance.

This chapter presents a detailed analysis of state-funded evaluations collected for this research. State-funded evaluations are by definition not self-organized, and they comprise the lion’s share of the 618 climate policy evaluations unearthed between 1997 and 2014 at the EU level, in Germany and in the United Kingdom. The chapter presents an analysis conducted with a novel coding scheme and demonstrates the growth of state-funded evaluations in number over time, as well as the fact that most evaluation remain within their own governance center in terms of funding, evaluating and the policy on which they focus. There is a strong focus on certain types of climate policy, notably renewables, cross-sectoral and energy efficiency. However, legal requirements for evaluation are not the main drivers. State-funded evaluations show a cursory treatment of context, and limited realized potential for driving interaction across governance-centers.

Following the theoretical rationale for a role of policy evaluation in polycentric climate governance, what can be said about its actual role in light of theoretical expectations? The empirical data show that the theoretical expectations play out insofar as the elements that were hypothesized do exist in the context of the EU, Germany and in the EU, namely that both self-organized and non-self organized evaluation exist. The collective action dilemmas that feature at the very core of polycentric governance theorizing also materialize through evaluation, pointing to a significant role of the state, while non-state actors also contribute. Lesson-drawing may thus emerge as a function of evaluation, but the full theoretical potential of evaluation has not yet been realised, given the various deficiencies that both state-funded as well as society-funded evaluations contain.

The European Union, Germany and the United Kingdom have been characterized as leaders in policy evaluation, including in the area of environment and climate policy. The first approaches to evaluation emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, as the EU started dispersing funding to new Member States and various types of reforms demanded more efficient and effective government action. Unpacking such developments, this paper focuses on the historical development of policy evaluation at the EU level, as well as in Germany and in the United Kingdom. It focuses particularly on the actors and institutions that have advanced evaluation, especially the area of environment and climate policy evaluation. The chapter closes with what we know about evaluation in these three jurisdictions and the three foundational ideas of polycentric governance, namely self-governance, context and interactions between governance centers. It provides the starting point for the empirical exploration in this book.