Third, the project puts potential innovative solutions into practice and tests their feasibility and viability through policy dialogues at the relevant territorial level.
The goal is to to put into practice innovative governance schemes for marine policies in several European regions and sea basins in order to improve their design and implementation and evaluate the impact of institutional innovations.
Case study planning
Task 3.1 has at its core the preparation of a Case Study Protocol, supporting the smooth policy experimentations across cases. The Case Study Protocol defines the common approach for the execution of policy dialogues in the different case studies, ensuring coordinated and consistent execution of activities in the case studies.
The Protocol will define the objectives, rules, and task schedule for a timely execution of the policy experimentations in the case studies, while ensuring the proper consideration of key insight from WP1, as well as the exploitation of the analytical tools and methods (WP2) in the real-world cases.
As a part of the Protocol, a “forward-looking workplan” for each case study will be also developed, to initiate and coordinate research and innovation activities across cases- providing scientific and technical advice to the case study teams.
Data-driven policy dialogues (“Niches of collaborative governance”)
Task 3.2 will operationalise the solutions co-designed under WP2 for each case study and define an experimentation pathway for each of the cases that will work as niches of collaborative governance. In other words, Task 3.2 will apply the knowledge coming from WP2 to the land-sea planning.
Specifically, it develops policy dialogues in the case studies of the project. The partners in charge of the case studies will select a representative number of stakeholders for each case, considering gender, age and socio- economic background, where relevant.
The policy dialogues will take the form of interactive workshops, focus groups or other activities according to the needs identified in each case. Each case study will conduct scenario planning as well as visioning and back-casting. The BGG Dashboard developed under WP2 will be used to support these dialogues and tested.
Evaluation and monitoring (and indicators)
This task aims to monitor and evaluate the policy experiments and their impact on institutional change. For that purpose, Task 3.3. will develop a set of key indicators based on the insights developed in WP1 and stakeholder views that can be used for monitoring and evaluation.
Information about these key indicators will be collected for each experimentation case at three different moments during the project, namely before the start of the policy experiment (ex-ante), halfway the policy dialogues (interim), and at the end of these dialogues (ex post evaluation).
The key indicators will address the different dimensions that characterise the role of the policy experiments in this project, focusing on stakeholder involvement, the use of scientific advice, the use of e-governance tools, the development of strategic foresight, and institutional change. Key stakeholders will be closely involved in the collection and interpretation of the information. Task 3.3 will furthermore specifically evaluate the performance of the co-creation governance model and the BGG Dashboard developed in Work Package 2.
The results of the evaluation can be used to improve both deliverables. This part of the evaluation will focus on clarity and useability of the co-creation governance model and e-governance tools from the perspective of the users, as well as on their role in and impact on the policy dialogues.