Evaluation, assessment, and policy innovation: exploring the links in relation to emissions trading

Abstract

Policy development and implementation should ideally be informed by assessments and evaluations, but research has shown that their use is far from straightforward in politicised environments. Their role in the adoption and evolution of policy innovations, which fundamentally change policy, has not been extensively analysed. Here, I show that the role can be understood using a new framework that bridges the gap between an agency-dominated innovation management perspective and a process-oriented transition perspective. I apply this framework to examine the evolution of an important policy innovation: the EU emissions trading system (ETS). In the political struggle to introduce and maintain the ETS, the role of evaluations and assessments has changed from destabilisation and reframing to consolidation. The analysis underlines the importance of the interaction between Member States, EU institutions, and non-state actors in the often-neglected stabilisation phase of EU-level policy innovations.