Dear colleague,
The European Evaluation Helpdesk for the CAP is happy to invite you to the Good Practice Workshop on ‘Measuring what matters – Approaches to netting out CAP impacts’ in Bucharest, Romania, on 16-17 October 2025. The Workshop will be an in-person event, kindly hosted by the Romanian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, that will focus on the rationale, challenges, and key approaches for netting out CAP impacts.
Background
Measuring the CAP impacts is important because the impacts show whether the CAP is achieving its objectives and delivering tangible benefits for farmers, rural areas, the environment, and society as a whole. Per the 2023–2027 CAP programming period and its Performance Monitoring and Evaluation Framework (PMEF), impacts are central to understanding not just what is funded, but what has changed as a result of CAP support, and whether the policy is achieving a real change on the ground. As Member States are accountable for what they achieve (not just what they spend) the PMEF impact indicators (Annex I of Regulation (EU) 2021/2115) are essential to track strategic performance and enable policy adjustments.
Netting out CAP impacts (i.e. distinguishing policy-driven effects from other influences) is crucial. Per the Implementing Regulation (1475/2022), Member States are to measure the contribution of their CAP Strategic Plan (CSP) to the nine specific objectives based on the impact indicators outlined in Annex I of Regulation (EU) 2021/2115, as well as to quantify the CSP contribution(s) to at least the nine common impact indicators set out in Annex III of Regulation (EU) 1475/2022. Furthermore, according to the EU-level CAP evaluation framework, the cost-effectiveness calculation must be based on net impacts, ensuring that assessments reflect only those improvements directly attributable to CAP interventions.
In the context of CAP evaluations, impacts are netted out using methods like counterfactual analysis, comparing beneficiaries of CAP support with similar non-beneficiaries, econometric modelling that controls for external variables in statistical models, before-after comparisons that adjust for confounding factors and theory-based approaches that use logic models and contribution analysis to trace causality. However, evaluating the CAP net impacts encounters several challenges, such as how to identify a credible counterfactual, the availability and quality of data, the variability of effects across farm types and regions, the timing and lag effects, and resource constraints to name a few.
The overall objective of the eleventh Good Practice Workshop is to demonstrate and analyse approaches for netting out the impacts of the CAP. The Workshops’ specific objectives are to:
- Build capacity of CAP evaluation stakeholders about the rationale for netting out CAP impacts and ways to carry out the netting out exercise;
- Share knowledge through the exchange of practical experiences from evaluations of net impacts of the CAP under different CAP objectives;
- Provide an opportunity for networking and identification of needs for further support for Managing Authorities, Paying Agencies, CAP networks and evaluators in relation to the limitations and opportunities for netting out CAP impacts.
Target Audience
The Workshop will be an opportunity for Managing Authorities, CAP networks, Paying Agencies, evaluators, statistical authorities, and other evaluation stakeholders in the Member States and at EU-level to exchange with each other. The working language will be English, and participants are expected to interact in groupwork and jointly identify and discuss relevant issues and approaches for netting out CAP impacts in this language.
Please find the draft agenda for the event here on the EU CAP Network website. After the event, all presentations and a final report will be made available here as well.
