LIST OF PANELS

This panel aims to go beyond the traditional micro and macro approaches to policy analysis and evaluation to understand how to assess overarching policies geared toward development, growth, and structural change in socioeconomic systems. Drawing upon complexity paradigm, this panels intends to explore new theoretical and methodological approaches and present concrete examples of complex program evaluations addressing such complex issues as structural change, adaptation, and innovation, and multi-level coordination among different jurisdictional levels. Panelists are asked to present specific cases of real-world evaluations conducted within Structural Fund Programs, by highlighting the innovativeness of their approach and/or conduct, or develop the theoretical and methodological premises underlying their approach.

The current times of crisis, in which a reduction in sovereign debt and public spending in European countries is required, offer a key opportunity for learning and reflecting upon the experience of  economic programming for local development. Over the past decade, collaborative local institutional arrangements for the design of small-scale infrastructure, and the sustainable management of cultural and natural resources, have emerged among numerous political jurisdictions and actors. The European Cohesion Policy is, indeed, embedded within multilevel governance structures and relations, which have grown in parallel with European integration.  Across all European regions, intergovernmental partnerships have been widened and deepened, and in certain cases they have developed beyond Structural Fund programs.  While partnership was conceived primarily as the vertical relationship between the European Commission and national, regional, and local authorities, the horizontal dimension of partnership – including a wide range of stakeholders at local, regional, and national levels – has grown over time. Different actors, including resource users and government agencies, try to work together to solve shared dilemmas of coordination, as an increasingly common alternative to centralized institutions. Decision-making power is delegated to territorial government agencies on the assumption that local agents possess both contextual knowledge and political legitimacy to integrate different policy measures in a cooperative fashion. In these circumstances, problems of coordination are associated with (i) policy co-formulation among multiple actors (Hill and Hupe, 2009), (ii) management of complex governance networks (Koliba and Meek, 2008; Sørensen and Torfing, 2008), (iii) meta-governance processes of interest mediation and information transfer, and finally (iv) performance management and evaluation to ensure efficiency and the effectiveness of administrative action (Wholey, 2001). In such circumstances, traditional approaches to policy analysis and evaluation of structural change center on impact assessment through econometric simulations and macroeconomic models at different levels of data aggregation, which do not adequately address  the complexities of non-linear causation as well as institutional workings in highly uncertain contextual conditions.