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Publication on “Policy Assessment: the state of the art” by Sabine Weiland

Dr. Sabine Weiland, member of the Policy Assessment Research Group at FFU contributed, together with LIAISE researcher Dr. Camilla Adelle, University of East Anglia, an article on "Policy Assessment: the state of the art" to a special issue of “Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal” on the state of the art of impact assessment.

News from Apr 13, 2012

The volume contains six papers, covering Environmental Impact Assessment, Strategic Environmental Assessment, Policy Assessment, Social Impact Assessment, Health Impact Assessment, and Sustainability Assessment. The contributions provide a comprehensive and insightful overview of the current state of these fields of practice, and point to some interesting and challenging directions for the future.

The paper of Camilla Adelle and Sabine Weiland presents the state of the art in policy assessment. It illustrates how the diffusion of policy assessment has led not to one standard ‘correct’ way of conducting policy assessment but to a great deal of diversity in how policy assessment is practised as well as researched and even theorized. Although the ‘textbook’ concept and everyday practices of policy assessment are based on a traditional rational linear concept of policy-making, policy assessment has become the latest arena for post-positivist conceptions of policy-making and assessment to resurface. This paper suggests that the future agenda for both research and practices could – indeed should – attempt to straddle these two theoretical approaches.

Adelle, Camilla/Weiland, Sabine 2012, Policy assessment: The state of the art. Special issue on 'The State of the Art of Impact Assessment', Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal 30 (1), pp. 26-34.