Impact assessment - making transition work for all
BiH/Croatia/Moldova/Serbia, 4 July 2008 – In Budapest last week, UNDP held the first training event in its regional project on ex-ante policy impact assessment. Participants included civil servants and civil society representatives, from the four countries involved in the project – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Moldova and Serbia. Ex-ante policy impact assessment (PIA) is a means of predicting the effect of policy measures, particularly the unintended effects, on a range of social groups, including those not targeted by the policy measure. This training focused on identifying the impact of proposed regulations on poverty reduction and on equal opportunities for vulnerable and marginalized groups.
In any situation, legislation and other policies can have unforeseen consequences. Where social protection mechanisms have been weakened in the course of economic and political transition, measures need to be taken to ensure that those groups left most vulnerable are not negatively affected, and that policy actions don’t undermine efforts to reduce poverty.
During the early transition period, concerns related to the introduction of instruments for evidence-based policy making, such as ex-ante Impact Assessment, were secondary, given the sense of urgency and the fact that the overall direction of reforms appeared to be obvious – moving from central planning and single-party regimes towards politically pluralistic, market-oriented societies. However, some reforms had hidden costs and unintended consequences, some of which disproportionately affected the poor and vulnerable.
The regional project, which works to improve policy development in the participating countries, is run together by the UNDP Bratislava Regional Centre and the Local Government Initiative of the Open Society Institute, Budapest. The project supports UNDP country offices to address weak national capacity for analyzing regulations.
This training introduced participants to a range of existing frameworks for impact assessment, developed in the EU, OECD and elsewhere, and covered a range of means for improving policy development, including considering alternatives to legislation, recognizing poor problem definition and various methods for data collection. As impact assessment methodologies have often been applied to judge the effect of regulations on doing business, specific forms of social impact assessment and poverty impact assessment were also presented.
According to Dan Dionisie, project manager and UNDP Public Administration specialist, “Eastern European countries started their post-communist transition with little to no policy making capacity in the modern sense of the word. However, as these countries consolidate their post-communist institutions, the additional reforms needed for EU accession or overall modernization and development are of a more fine-tuning nature and therefore require more sophisticated and broader-based policy processes.
“Ex-ante Impact Assessment, with a particular focus on vulnerable and marginalized groups, can help improve policy making in a way that makes economic growth and social development more sustainable and equitable.”
In addition to training activities, the main aspect of the regional project is the Virtual Resource Centre, compiled by UNDP as a place where a range of useful resources on policy impact assessment may be found. A mapping of PIA tools and experiences in Europe has also been published, in English and Russian.
Virtual Resource Centre on Ex-ante Policy Impact Assessment
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