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On 13 October 2022, the report 'Dare to Learn, continue measuring' was presented to the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate. The report was co-written by Bas ter Weel and Michiel Bijlsma from SEO Economic Research, and Matthijs Janssen and Pieter Jan de Boer from Dialogic.
The government aims to improve innovation systems through the System and Transition Policy (S/T policy) to achieve the transitions towards a sustainable and digital economy in the Netherlands. S/T policy can be defined as influencing production and consumption and distributing public goods and services, where these goods and services result from an interactive process among different actors such as consumers, businesses, universities, and the government.
Due to its extensive reach and substantial total budget, it is crucial to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of the S/T policy as accurately as possible. In previous years, this policy was evaluated using solely econometric methods. However, it was found in practice that not all types of policy interventions can be assessed using econometric methods. Therefore, the mandate of the Evaluation Methods System and Transition Policy committee was to develop a new vision for evaluating S/T policy by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate. This new vision builds upon the vision of the Expert Working Group on Impact Assessment (Theeuwes Commission) from 2012.
Since there was no international scientific evaluation standard at the time, this report primarily established an evaluation framework based on a synthesis of available scientific literature and existing evaluation practices. This framework consists of six perspectives: intervention logic, governance processes and policy mix, alignment between policy (mix) and obstacles, system strengthening/transformation, structural change, and societal impact. Hence, this report serves as an initial exploration where various methods were tested for evaluating system and transition policy. Within the report, the evaluation framework was applied to four different case studies.
