Measuring progress towards a ‘Green Energy Economy’: Proposing and scrutinising a multi-level evaluation framework for policy instruments

Numerous economic recovery packages have been implemented to stimulate green economic growth through the deployment of low-carbon technologies. The emerging literature shows, however, that there is substantial ambiguity and discrepancy about how to measure the performance of policy instruments driving a Green Economy in general, and in our case, a Green Energy Economy (GEE) in particular. Identified approaches cover a spectrum from narrow concerns about job creation or growth of technological patents on the one hand, to broader aspects of sustainability on the other. Proposed evaluation approaches up to now tend to overlook policy instruments altogether, or focus on measuring the scale of ‘supply-driven’ policy impacts based on public and private expenditures (e.g. measuring progress according to expenditure on green initiatives as a proportion of GDP). The objective of our paper is to propose and assess a multi-level ex-post policy evaluation framework to quantitatively measure progress towards a GEE. The proposed framework aims at evaluating the performance of policy instruments encouraging a GEE, taking low-carbon energy technologies as the main focus. The evaluation framework is composed of: (1) multi-criteria policy evaluation, (2) socio-economic carbon and energy indicators; and (3) genuine (or adjusted savings) savings. We assess the proposed evaluation framework against the following criteria: policy compatibility, reliability and measurability