Climate change - Net Zero Nation: public engagement strategy

Monitoring and Evaluation

To ensure we stay on track, it is important that we monitor and evaluate progress towards our strategic objectives. When designing our approach to evaluation, we must consider both feasibility and appropriateness, ensuring our methods are proportionate, cost-effective and efficient. We are also committed to ensuring that all our reporting is accessible and inclusive, using clear and straightforward language, supported where appropriate with images and infographics, case studies, and quotes to illustrate key findings.

In previous public engagement strategies, we have monitored progress using a set of national indicators (see Annex C). In our consultation on the draft strategy, we asked for views on whether there was a better way for us to measure and report our progress. Overall, consultation respondents supported a holistic, multi-method approach that incorporates a range of quantitative and qualitative data, from national performance indicators to individual community stories. Respondents also suggested we report on progress at various different intervals throughout our five-year implementation period. Based on this feedback, we will take a multi-stranded approach to monitoring and evaluation, as set out below.

1) National indicators

We will use the following three indicators from the Scottish Household Survey to monitor Scottish public awareness and understanding of the climate emergency and the actions they can take. We will continue to publish these statistics each year to provide an indication of Scotland’s direction of travel over time^[1]. Whilst we acknowledge that there is a multitude of factors that will affect these indicators, we expect the programme of work set out within this strategy to make a positive contribution towards these national statistics, in line with our Theory of Change (see Annex B). We will also continue to explore whether there is scope to develop and resource any additional national indicators to improve how we monitor progress.

2) Programme evaluation

The successful delivery of this strategy involves the implementation of a wide range of policies and programmes under the three strategic objectives. Therefore, measuring the success of the strategy as a whole requires robust processes for evaluating these various programmes. As the programmes are very varied – from national advertising campaigns to place-based community-led projects – each will need a tailored and bespoke approach to evaluation. We have already established our evaluation strategies for our Let’s do Net Zero marketing programme and Scotland’s Climate Assembly, and we are currently developing these for Community Climate Action, Climate Week and COP26. We will ensure that we have programme-level evaluation strategies for all the major programmes of work set out within this document and will report our findings.

Responses to our consultation highlighted the importance of involving wider stakeholders in our evaluation activity, including recognising the role of community-led methods and data collection. We are committed to working with our delivery partners in designing programme evaluations that not only track progress towards objectives but also provide opportunities for learning and development.

3) Mid-term review

In addition to annual reporting of our key indicators, we also will conduct an interim review of the strategy at the mid-way point of delivery in 2024. We will draw together all the data we have collected from our programme evaluations to date, our national indicators and any bespoke commissioned research to provide an assessment of our overall progress towards our strategic objectives. We will also use this as an opportunity to gather feedback from key stakeholders and delivery partners on what aspects of the strategy they think are working well and what could be improved. The findings of this review will be made available and we will use them to shape and inform the remainder of the strategy’s implementation.

4) Full-term evaluation

The Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009 places a legal duty on the Scottish Government to review the Public Engagement Strategy every five years. We will conduct and make available a full evaluation of this new strategy after five years. This evaluation will build on the mid-term review, incorporating new data collected, including a new and more comprehensive round of feedback from key stakeholders.