Climate Change - Net Zero Nation: draft public engagement strategy - consultation

Monitoring & Evaluation

This document sets out the Scottish Government's strategic approach to engaging the public in addressing the global climate emergency. The successful delivery of this strategy involves the implementation of a wide range of policies and programmes under three different themes, and requires the collective effort of many different stakeholders. To ensure we stay on track and are held to account, it is important that we monitor and evaluate progress towards our strategic objectives.

We are committed to regularly reporting on our progress and we want to ensure we do this in a way that is as effective and useful as possible. There are different approaches we could take. In previous public engagement strategies, we have monitored progress using a set of national indicators (see Annex B). 

These are robust and reliable indicators and can provide a useful signal of our direction of travel. For example, we can track Scottish attitudes to climate change via the Scottish Household Survey (SHS). This provides annual statistics on the proportion of the Scottish population that consider climate change to be an immediate and urgent problem. The SHS also provides biennial statistics on the proportion of people who understand what actions they should take to help address climate change and the extent to which they believe their behaviours contribute to climate change^[23]. This gives us an indication of the level of awareness of the climate emergency within the Scottish population and the extent to which people know what action they can take to respond.

There are limitations of relying solely on our existing indicators for the evaluation of this strategy. The existing indicators do not provide full coverage for our new strategic outcomes and it is challenging to attribute the changes seen in these indicators to specific strategy interventions over the medium and long term. 

We are therefore currently exploring options for improving our monitoring and evaluation methods. 

An essential element of measuring the success of the strategy as whole is to have robust processes for evaluating the programmes and interventions contributing to each of our three themes. For example, evaluation strategies are being developed for the Communications and Marketing programme, Climate Assembly of Scotland, and Community Climate Action initiatives. By drawing together lessons learned about the effectiveness of all of these components, we can assess progress towards our overall strategic objectives.

In addition, we are also looking into the value of developing some new national indicators using new sources of data. One option is to develop a survey instrument to regularly gather data from people across Scotland on issues directly related to our objectives, such as: awareness of Scotland's climate commitments, the extent to which people feel able to participate in shaping climate policy, and actions they are taking in response to climate change. As well as quantitative indicators, we are also exploring the potential to make greater use of qualitative methods and data in our evaluation, for example, through regular consultations with the various stakeholders involved in the delivery
of the strategy. 

When designing our approach to evaluation it is important to consider both feasibility and appropriateness. Our approach must be proportionate, cost-effective, and efficient. Some methods will be able to answer more questions than others and some will be more cost-effective and easier to implement; all have pros and cons that need to be taken into account. We will publish our monitoring and evaluation plan alongside the final version of the strategy.

Consultation Questions: Monitoring and Evaluation

14) What are your views on how our progress towards our objectives could be most effectively monitored and evaluated?

15) How regularly – and in what format – should we report on progress on the strategy?