6 - Comparing State-Funded and Society-Funded Evaluation

Summary

Building on the previous chapters, this chapter compares state and society funded climate policy evaluation with a view to the three foundational ideas of polycentric governance, namely self-organization, context and interactions between governance centers. While self-organization through climate policy evaluation is limited, the comparison reveals that society-funded evaluations engaged more deeply with the context of climate policy than the state-funded ones. Society-funded evaluation also used more evaluation criteria in their work. But state funders appear to have greater levels of resources, which manifest in terms of the numbers of methods that they use, as well as more quantitative comparability metrics. The latter may help to carry insights from one governance center to another. On the whole, society and state funded evaluation therefore appear complementary, each uniquely contributing to polycentric climate governance. However, in both groups, there remains ample room for development with a view to leveraging the synergies of polycentric governance by the means of evaluation.