Paris Time Webinar

Evaluating the impacts of energy innovation policies

Context

There is a growing recognition of the need to accelerate the development and improvement of clean energy technologies globally to enhance our ability to follow net-zero emission pathways. Initiatives like Mission Innovation have helped to grow public R&D funding for clean energy in many countries, and they take a variety of policy approaches to supporting researchers and entrepreneurs. Evidence about which support mechanisms most effectively drive clean energy innovations, and under which conditions, could help governments to adopt best practice in innovation policy design to meet clean energy goals.

Structured and comparable evaluations can contribute to the policy-making process in different ways: it facilitates learning about the impact of policy options nationally and internationally; it supports accountability for public spending; and it establishes the legitimacy of proposed new interventions. For each purpose, governments are looking to ensure that they have the best understanding and metrics to assess the efficiency, effectiveness and relevance of innovation policies, and are developing frameworks for evaluation approaches and data collection.

Objectives

The main goal of this CERT-EGRD thematic discussion is to bring together practitioners from governments with distinguished international scholars to exchange experiences and recommendations about how to design and implement evaluations clean energy innovation policies effecitiveness, from R&D funding programmes to broader support for the energy innovation ecosystem, as well as how to use these findings to improve policy design.

The virtual workshop will facilitate discussion around a number of key questions that face policy makers:

  • What are the overarching objectives of evaluation and of energy innovation policy?
  • What metrics and indicators are used?
  • How far in advance is the collection of data and inputs planned?
  • Against what criteria or counterfactual can performance be measured?
  • How have evaluation results shaped subsequent policies and programmes?
  • How can governments share the findings and lessons from their evaluations internationally in a timely manner?