Policy performance in the EU

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The central question in this last module is: what happens to European policies in practice and how do they perform? In other words, what happens at “street level” with all policies coming from the EU? The first part of the module concentrates on the implementation stage of the policy cycle. In making its legislation work, the EU is strongly dependent on the  member states, as they are the ones responsible for policy delivery. National authorities may not always be willing or able to comply with new legislation coming from ‘Brussels’, as evidenced by the Dieselgate scandal, which identified national authorities as unwilling to enforce European emission standards. We analyze how Member States differently deal with the challenges of ‘doing’ EU policy. The second part of the module looks at European public policy by exploring how EU policies, programs and legislation are evaluated. What is policy success and what is failure? Who decides and on what basis? Is evaluation really independent and objective? These seemingly simple questions often prove difficult to answer, for both policy makers and evaluators because professional policy evaluation takes place in the context of highly politicized processes of judgment and reckoning. It considers how we might theorise evaluation, its purpose and value, and examines whether lessons from evaluation do or don’t influence future policy and brings about improvement. The course looks at developments since the Better Regulation Agenda and takes a practical perspective, engaging students in the analysis of real-life cases.