Evaluation of the UVPG of the Federal Government
Subject matter
Evaluation des UVPG des Bundes
Evaluation of the UVPG of the Federal Government
Client
Federal Environment Agency
Duration
01.02.2006 - 29.02.2008
Co-operation partners
Society for Institutional Analysis - sofia, University of Kassel
Brief Description
The goal of this investigation was to establish the effect of the UVPG on the execution of environmental law and the implementation of certification processes for industry complexes. It was also to study infrastructure measures and evaluate all of the above, in order to identify any potential weak points and develop improvement measures in order to develop an effective and efficient execution. The evaluation of the UVPG is a retrospective assessment of the consequences of a law, at the heart of which lies an empirical investigation of 105 case studies between 1999 and 2005. In order to make the results representative and universal, the case studies were acquired with the help of a layered random sample from a basic concept of the whole which was built up step by step. The investigation shows that the UVP enabled a significantly higher level of goal-reaching than would have been possible without it using the comparison between policy on and policy off.
The analyses of the individual UVP stations in the policy on cases also shows, however, that the reaching of goals doesn't comply with the normative guidelines in many cases. The complete view shows that many members of the authorities feel overwhelmed, especially when faced with large or complex UVP-processes, and claim a lack of resources. This negatively impacts the quality of the processes in all stations, but is particularly obvious in the concluding summary and in the evaluation, when the various and, due to their different effectiveness, difficult to evaluate, results are brought together, possibly assessed and brought to an understandable decision.
On the whole, the actors view the instrument of environmental impact assessment as a basically positive institution. The stated deficits lead to the following considerations for the development of the instrument: the basic problem of the realization of the UCPG is that the members of the relevant authorities frequently work in very difficult frameworks, which make an appropriate implementation difficult. This is seen especially in a lacking environmental competence among these staff members. The goal of the instrument development must then be to offer aid particularly with this issue. Furthermore, the results of the study show that the actors work with very heterogeneous boundary conditions. The instruments should therefore be conceived of as offers of help which take into account the differing boundary conditions and make their usage seem beneficiary to the actors on the basis of their individual incentive situation. The development of the instrument aims furthermore to develop the UVP in and of itself. Die chosen pragmatic method of approach aims for an efficient implementation. To achieve this, it uses previously used best practice methods, strives for a stronger standardization in the UVP-implementation and respects compatibility and synergy with other instruments. On the whole, the project examined to main instruments in great depth and completed conception-based considerations on ten further instruments.
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