Assessment of Policy Interrelationships and Impacts on Sustainability in Europe

The specific objectives of APRAISE are as follows:

• Improve the decision basis for the selection of policy tools through a better understanding of the efficiency, efficacy and effectiveness of different sustainability-related policy tools.
• Include policy interrelationships (synergies and trade-offs) into efficiency assessment and policy design. Interrelationships include intra-sectoral, inter-sectoral, and EU Member States interactions.
• Develop an improved methodological framework for the ex-post and ex-ante assessment of environmental policies and policy mixes (mainly environmental taxes, tradable permits, subsidies, regulations and financial instruments for investments in green technologies) based on a review and expansion of existing approaches
• Empirically assess the existing and planned environmental policies in several EU Member States and selected sectors and expand the existing databases on cost, effects and social implications of environmental policies.
• Evaluate the role of sustainable development indicators for impact assessment. This includes:
• an analysis of the relevance of existing indicators,
• examining whether new or alternative indicators may represent a value added, and
• assessing the contextual factors that shape the degree to which indicators are used by various policy actors and influence policymaking.