The present work addresses effectiveness evaluation of environmental policies from a methodological point of view. The aim is to highlight some limitations and opportunities of the approaches currently used in (environmental) policy analysis and to suggest some preferable directions of application based on sets of indicators. The work refers to waste policy mainly as an area of exemplification of the various issues considered.
The work follows a conceptual scheme of policy effectiveness analysis which is based, in essence, on the combination of: (1) Achievement indicators, e.g. percentage of packaging recovered, reflecting policy objectives/targets; (2) Policy response indicators reflecting the (direct and indirect) action by policy-making institutions; (3) Methodological tools by which the role of policy response/action indicators in explaining achievement indicators can be evaluated.
A very general conclusion is that all quantitative techniques have some limitations and policy effectiveness evaluation cannot disregard the information coming form qualitative analysis of policy effectiveness. The latter can also supply very useful information for models building and specification. As a final point, we suggest a research direction aiming at developing detailed system representations as a basis of good and non-ambiguous definition of how policy works and through which channels it arrives to influence the indicators of target/objective. The detailed representation of both the socio-economic system and the policy process is therefore a necessary step in clarifying the causative relationships between, on the one hand, policy Responses and, on the other hand, Determinants and Pressures.