Is there room for equity in the European Commission policy-making? An evaluation of selected impact assessment reports.

Reducing inequalities has long been acknowledged as one of the main challenges facing planners and policy-makers, all the more when pursuing the objectives of Sustainable Development (SD) (Lehtonen, 2004). In the present chapter, we analyze how equity issues are addressed in the European Commission (EC) Impact Assessment (IA). Paying attention to inequalities when policy proposals are framed and alternatives are developed, could be a basic but necessary condition for the European Union (EU) to tackle more effectively these issues. One can argue that if the Impact Assessments addressed sufficiently inequalities, then they might be better integrated in the constellation of EU normative and administrative measures. This chapter dwells on the first part of this basic assumption, by illustrating critically a coherence analysis we carried out between selected Impact Assessment reports and the set of principles, standards and guidelines they were expected to follow. The chapter starts with a brief overview of the EC-IA system, the political processes at its roots, and its position in the evaluation culture domain. Section two weaves the role of equity into the general discourses we touch upon in our work, namely sustainable development, evaluation in planning and European policy-making. Then follows an account of our methodological approach, which describes into details the complete workflow and explains how we tapped into the traditions of meta-evaluation and multicriteria analysis. In section four we show the most interesting outputs of the empirical part of the research. We end by discussing some salient issues and research perspectives. For the purpose of this chapter, we intend Impact Assessment as a type of evaluation, rather than as a different construct, irrespective of the two related bodies of literature having grown largely isolated.