Het effect van gebiedsgerichte maatregelen. Naar een ex-ante evaluatie van het gebiedenbeleid

During the last 10 years the Dutch national government has, in co-operation with regional and local authorities, implemented an integrated regional policy concept in which region-specific measures could be taken to enhance invironmental quality or the socio-economic structure. However, the effects of measures taken within regional projects to improve environmental quality were largely unknown. The aims were, in general, not defined specifically enough and an ex-ante evaluation of measures to be taken was not carried out. From the year 2000 onward, policy will demand more specific aims and an analysis of the effectiveness of the measures. In this study, applied to the regional project, NUBL (a region in the south of the Netherlands, including large parts of the provinces Brabant and Limburg), the proposed methodology for ex-ante evaluation can only be carried out if the aims of the measures are specified in terms of environmental quality parameters. For example, the aims of the measures to stimulate environmental-friendly production were only specified in economic terms. Furthermore, it is necessary to evaluate the set of measures as a whole, since measures may have synergistic or weakening effects on each other. For example, the reduced application of fertilizers will lower the nitrate concentration in the groundwater, but if the extraction of groundwater is also reduced this effect is strengthened