R URAL D EVELOPMENT P ROGRAMME – L OMBARDY R EGION, I TALY E X ANTE EVALUATION Davide Zanon 26th september, 2013

First time for EARDF in the family of the Structural Funds  common rules for evaluation (but specific guidelines by the European Evaluation Network for Rural Development) Italy: regional programmes (each programme  ex ante evaluation)  needs of coordination for the Partnership Agreement (summary of all ex ante evaluations needed) Lombardy (EARDF): Programming started in September 2012 (before then only activities of data gathering for the situation analysis) 2 Best practices: -ex ante evaluator chosen in july 2012 (before the beginning of programming!) -Adequate resources assigned for the evaluation excercise (but let me confirm at the end of the work…) 2 K EY POINTS

Formally (terms of reference): nothing more than what the regulation says In practice: a role of support, involvement in the programming process (but independent, of course!) 3 W HAT THE MANAGING AUTHORITY ASKED Reads the documents, gives opinions and recommendations Participates at meetings, talks with stakeholder, contributes to writing documents Gruppo CLAS More chances to really contribute to improving the quality of the programming process and the quality of the RDP. There is not always a process where the evaluator makes reccomendations and the programme developer decide the responses. Evaluator and Programme developer work together (but the evaluator does not play the role of the technical assistance!)

4 W HAT HAS BEEN DONE STEPWhat the PD did (is doing)What the evaluator did (is doing) Situation analisysGather data, organise data and fill in context indicator system Help PD in gathering data, organising data, and verifying the completeness of data and of context indicators SWOT analysis and needs assessment Organise thematic groups of experts with the aim of fill out the SWOT analysis (starting with a proposed SWOT) and the needs assessment Help PD in analyzing the results of the groups and the contributions of the participants Suggest the PD to use a specific tecnique to order the indications of participant Strategy and intervention logic Identification of objectives, specification of intervention logic, choice of articles of the Regulation to apply, Verification of the logical framework, from the articles chosen and the connected outputs to the results and objectives

Allocation of resources (currently the hypothesis is that the budget should be the same as that of the period ) Establishment of targets for output, results, milestones (we are sure that the most challenging task for the evaluation will be verifying the indicator system, the adequacy of target values and the suitability of milestones) 5 W HAT HAS TO BE DONE We are now arranging for a system, on an excel file, that will be useful to calculate target values on the basis of different hypothesis on the allocation of budget among measures Identification of the human resources and specification of the administrative structure envisaged for the management of the programme. A new task for evaluators, very important in Italy where often there has been lack of administrative capacity to manage programmes

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