The majority of Natural England’s work is in a place, ranging from agri-environment schemes, through landscape scale delivery projects, to statutory responsibilities within the planning system.
The evaluation of place-based environmental interventions is challenging. Spatially, no one project is similar to another, even if the overarching intervention is the same. Temporally, environmental interventions can take many years to demonstrate impact.
These challenges can make it difficult to apply experimental and quasi-experimental impact evaluation methodologies, resulting in a tendency to rely on largely theory-based methods.
We are keen to explore the full range of methods that are available to us, and to learn from the evaluation of place-based interventions in other sectors, to understand how we can do more robust impact evaluation.
This report presents the findings of a literature review, conducted by ICF, that aimed to provide Natural England with a better understanding of the evaluation approaches available to evaluate place-based programmes or projects. The review focused on environmental evaluations but also considered place-based evaluations from social policy and health sectors.
This report is largely technical in nature, aimed at evaluation practitioners, especially those in the environment sector, although we believe other sectors will also be interested in these findings.