Agroenvironmental policy assessment: a contribution to assess sustainable development policies ?

Abstract

As sustainable development is a spreading concept, the need for the actors to develop their capacity to assess sustainable development policies in progress has become a mid term stake for the success of the concept. Yet this kind of policy assessment raises some methodological difficulties that could be overcome thanks to the experience carried out through agroenvironmental policy assessment. First, agroenvironmental measures could be regarded as a sustainable development policy, besides they have been assessed all over the french territory in 1997 and 2003. Therefore, the author uses the analysis of these assessments to set out how to deal with four major difficulties concerning the assessment of sustainable development policies : (1) definition of the assessment references, (2) structuring the different scales, (3) taking account of long term, (4) participation of the public.