Feeding Europe’s growing population requires more sustainable food production, but another summer of extreme weather, alongside severely disrupted supply chains, have once again highlighted the need to move towards a more resilient and regenerative food system – and the next Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) (2023 - 2027) is set to see EU Member States refocus the policy on results through new monitoring and evaluation expectations.

Putting the evaluation pieces in place is key with regard to assessing the performance of the next CAP as is the role of EU Member States in demonstrating its impact. 

Measuring real-world impact is vital for showing the success of a policy in meeting its objectives, particularly when the aim is to address a range of economic, environmental, and social factors. The next Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is therefore shifting EU Member States away from compliance and more towards results and performance, hoping it can show how their agriculture sectors and rural areas are on a sustainable path forward.

Results will be anchored in terms of how EU Member States contribute to the CAP’s objectives, from decreasing greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture to the stability or increase of the agricultural income and growing of rural businesses. The rulebook on how EU Member States will exactly demonstrate the CAP’s impact to these objectives is based around a new framework that provides a common understanding on monitoring performance and evaluating the implementation of Strategic Plans.

The Performance Monitoring and Evaluation Framework (PMEF) will “allow reporting, monitoring, and evaluation of the performance” throughout the implementation of EU Member States’ CAP Strategic Plans from 2023 until 2027. It will set the basis to monitor EU Member States’ progress towards achieving the targets of CAP Strategic Plans, to assess the impact, effectiveness, efficiency, relevance and coherence of the interventions of the CAP Strategic Plans and the EU added value of the CAP, and support a common learning process for monitoring and evaluation.

The PMEF also contains a set of common indicators for monitoring, evaluation and annual performance reporting, such as output indicators for monitoring the implementation of the CAP, result indicators to monitor EU Member States’ progress towards pre-set targets, and context and impact indicators to assess the overall policy performance against CAP objectives. This information will differ depending on how each EU Member State designs and implements its national CAP Strategic Plan because it covers the different measures available under direct payments and sectoral programmes, funded by the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund (EAGF), as well as rural development interventions, funded by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD).