The ‘Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus’ is a £3m national research centre hosted by the University of Surrey, to ‘pioneer, test and promote innovative evaluation approaches and methods across nexus problem domains, such as biofuel production or climate change, where food, energy, water and environmental issues intersect.’
The CECAN website sets out the nature of the challenge
Nexus issues are complex, with many diverse, interconnected factors involved. This presents a major challenge to policy making because changing one factor can often have unexpected knock-on effects in seemingly unrelated areas. We need new ways to evaluate policy in these situations.
There is a recognised need to develop a culture of evaluation and evidence based decision making across government so that civil servants are better able to address the frequent gap between policy development, implementation and subsequent evaluation.
CECAN will be hosting its first major event ‘Policy Evaluation for A Complex World’ on 13 September 2016, in London. For more information see the CECAN website.
