Evaluation der Charta für Holz 2.0: Methodische Grundlagen und Evaluationskonzept

The Charter for Wood 2.0 (CfW 2.0) aims to increase the contribution of forestry and forest-based industries to climate change mitigation; maintain and improve value creation and competitiveness of the forestry and wood cluster; and conserve finite resources through the sustainable and efficient use of forests and wood. The CfW 2.0 is implemented through a dialogue process covering six thematic fields of action. It involves actors from politics, the public sector, industry, science as well as civil society. The Charter process is accompanied by an evaluation whose task it is to provide Charter actors with science-based information on progress in the fields of action. The following report discusses the methodological basis of the evaluation and develops the evaluation concept. As a long-term process which involves diverse actors and governance levels, the CfW 2.0 possesses several distinctive features. With three primary aims (climate change mitigation, value creation and resource efficiency) and various intermediate aims in the fields of action, the Charter is characterised by a complex system of policy aims. Its implementation requires coordinated action on different policy and administration levels. Moreover, it is based on the active involvement of actors from science, industry and civil society. Consequently, responsibilities for the implementation of measures are allocated in the course of the Charter process. Similarly, the Charter’s instrument mix is deliberately not defined ex-ante, but results from the Charter process and evolves over times. Given diverse interactions between instruments, isolating the contribution of individual measures to a specific development can be associated with high uncertainty. In handling complex cause-effect relationships in the context of multiple aims, actors and instruments, the evaluation builds on insights from systems-oriented evaluation research on innovation policy. Its focus is the long-term support of learning and decision processes. By combining different methods and levels of analysis, it aims to cover information requirements concerning developments in the Charter’s fields of action, but also facilitate learning regarding the design of the Charter process. A participatory approach, which actively includes members of the Charter’s steering and working groups in the evaluation process, ensures that the evaluation generates information useful to the Charter process. The evaluation concept was developed in coordination with the Charter actors and encompasses three elements: (1) An outcome evaluation, which a) employs monitoring indicators to analyse the development of important variables in the Charter’s fields of action and b) conducts in-depth analyses to explore what role Charter measures play in influencing these developments, within the context of wider instrument mixes (2) A process evaluation, which a) reflects on results and procedures of the Charter process and b) develops recommendations for the further development of the process (3) Short analyses of selected focus topics, to document current changes in framework conditions which may prove relevant for the Charter’s system of aims