The environmental challenges we are facing today are important, but the available resources and political commitments for tackling them are limited. This reality calls for a more efficient use of the scarce resources. Growing awareness of the interdependencies of our social, economic, and ecological systems requires well-integrated decisions and thus a sound evaluation practice. Besides, in this era of heightened accountability, policy makers as well as evaluation users in non-governmental organisations and companies want evidence of what works, and what does not. This calls for improvement in the quality of environmental evaluations to meet the requirements and desire for better and more accessible evidence of policies’ (cost-)effectiveness.

Objectives
The objective of the forum is to advance the field of environmental evaluation, which we define as environmental policy and programme evaluation, through more systematic and collective learning among evaluators and evaluation users. At the EEEN forum we aim to bring together practitioners and users of environmental evaluation at any level and provide them with the opportunity to share views, knowledge and experiences about the use, importance and future of environmental evaluation in their respective organisations, domains and disciplines. We will also define what role the EEEN could or should play. This may be the formalisation of the EEEN forum, the formation of (a) working group(s) in a European context, etc.

Themes
At the 1st EEEN forum we will approach environmental evaluation from three different perspectives:

• demand side expectations
• side effects
• methodological challenges