Guidance document on evaluation plans

The regulation for the 2014-2020 European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) represents a radical change for operational programmes. The Common Provisions Regulation (CPR) emphasises programme objectives, the logic of intervention to achieve the expected results and the evaluation of effectiveness and impacts. Furthermore it requires from Managing Authorities and the Commission annual reporting on outputs and results, including findings of evaluations where available. In order to strengthen the contribution of evaluations to the effectiveness of the programmes, the CPR makes it compulsory for Managing Authorities to design evaluation plans at the beginning of the programming period.

In previous programming periods, evaluations have tended to focus more on implementation issues than capturing the impacts. For 2014-2020, the CPR requires Managing Authorities to carry out evaluations which assess the effects of the ESIF programmes. This is an essential element of the strengthened results-focus of the policy and is reflected in Article 56(3) of the CPR. The evaluation plans are therefore strategic documents setting out how these evaluations will be organised in order to provide evidence on effects for policy making.

This document provides guidance to Managing Authorities on the contents of evaluation plans.