Evaluating Policy Networks-Abilities and Constraints of Social Network Analyses

In the late 1990s the European Commission launched an initiative called “Territorial Employment Pacts ” (TEPs). TEPs are contractual alliances between protagonists from various sectors on local level in order to develop innovative measures for job creation and job protection in their area. This initiative therefore leads to the emergence of regional policy networks. These policy networks can be characterized as stable but only on a low level formalized communication and cooperation networks between governmental and non-governmental actors, involved in a political process. In the province of Styria (Austria) there were built up six TEPs on regional level and a research project was set up to evaluate their performance and to ensure their future development. This evaluation strongly focussed on the analysis of the policy networks themselves by using the method of Social Network Analysis (SNA). This paper sums up the results of this research project. On the one hand we are going to discuss our experiences in evaluating policy networks in labor market policy using the instrument of SNA in the field of the Styrian TEPs. We are going to unfold our research design and its features developed for initiating policy learning among the pact protagonists. On the other hand we are going to focus on a more methodologic question: Is SNA an appropriate tool for evaluating policy networks in general? We will try to outline a possible answer by deriving abilities as well as constraints of the method based upon experiences from the TEP evaluation. Our aim is to offer general thoughts on this topic and not a detailed universal statistical or explanatory model of policy networks. 1 Territorial employment pacts (TEPs) For over 20 years Europe has had to face certain labour-market problems that seem to be intractable toward national measures which had been set up to defeat them. According to this situation and the resulting growing demands of the heads o