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monitoring & evaluation
AKIS strategies
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Concepts and usefulness of M&E of the AKIS strategies
Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) of AKIS strategies is a cornerstone for evidence-based decision-making within CAP. These processes support public authorities in making strategic, policy, and technical choices by providing insights into how AKIS functions, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and assessing the effectiveness of interventions under the CAP Strategic Plans (CAP SPs).
Monitoring involves the systematic collection of data to track activities and processes within AKIS, offering real-time insights for timely adjustments. Evaluation, on the other hand, is a structured expert function that interprets this data to formulate judgments, analyses, and robust recommendations. It assesses the effectiveness, relevance, coherence, and impact of AKIS strategies, supporting accountability and continuous improvement.
In practice, the M&E of the AKIS strategies serves several key purposes:
For example, the recent European Commission study on Operational Groups (OGs) provides valuable recommendations to improve AKIS interventions. It highlights the need to enhance communication and dissemination through practice-oriented channels and multipliers such as advisors and trainers. It also calls for reducing administrative burden by simplifying reporting and payment procedures, increasing the use of Simplified Cost Options (SCOs), and allowing flexibility in project planning. Strengthening OG partnerships through balanced expertise and early engagement of all actors—especially farmers—is another key recommendation.
Requirements and responsibilities on Monitoring & Evaluation of the AKIS strategies
Evaluating AKIS strategies is a legal requirement under the EU CAP 2023–2027. According to Regulation (EU) 2021/2115 and Implementing Regulation (EU) 2022/1475, Member States must assess their CAP Strategic Plans during implementation and ex post, focusing on effectiveness, efficiency, relevance, coherence, EU added value, and impact. AKIS, as a key component of the cross-cutting objective (CCO) to modernize agriculture and rural areas, must be evaluated accordingly.
The primary responsibility for monitoring and evaluation lies with the managing authorities of the CAP Strategic Plans, while evaluations must be carried out by independent evaluators.
According to the guidelines1for the evaluation of the AKIS strategies issued by the European Commission, the main objectives of the evaluation are:
These evaluations can be conducted at different stages (ex-ante, ongoing, ex-post) and levels (individual, organizational, system-wide), offering a comprehensive understanding to strengthen AKIS and agricultural policy outcomes.
According to the EC guidelines the aspects of the AKIS strategies to evaluate are:
Additionally, it should be taken into account that AKIS is a complex and dynamic system involving a wide range of actors—farmers, foresters, advisors, researchers, trainers, NGOs, and public authorities—who generate, share, and apply knowledge and innovation across agriculture, rural areas, value chains, and environmental domains. AKIS strategies aim to strengthen this system by enhancing its structure, functionality, and capacity.
Therefore, the evaluation must assess how these strategies influence AKIS structural components (such as actors, infrastructures and interactions), their operational dynamics (including entrepreneurship and innovation processes, knowledge development and flows, research direction and so on), and the systemic capacities of the actors (like collaboration, learning, and strategic engagement) that enable AKIS to function effectively.
Ultimately, Member States may expand the scope to include all AKIS-related CAP interventions, beyond those under the CCO, to assess their contribution to a well-functioning and integrated AKIS.
In any case, the evaluation should be tailored to the specific intervention logic and AKIS configuration of each Member State.
Advancing Evidence-Based Policy: Strengthening AKIS Evaluation and Data Systems
Although AKIS strategies are formally introduced in this CAP programming period, the CAP has supported knowledge and innovation systems for over 20 years. However, there is still a lack of robust data and indicators to assess their territorial impact and capacity-building effects. Monitoring and evaluation must generate meaningful evidence to demonstrate AKIS strategies’ added value in driving sustainable transformation. Persistent gaps—especially in farm-level impact and innovation scaling—require co-designed, robust methodologies. The EC study recommends strengthening evaluation and data collection, including AKIS staff in National CAP Networks, and requiring clear evaluation and dissemination plans in OG calls to improve design and tracking.
The practices presented in this Compendium illustrate a diverse range of innovative and replicable approaches that effectively harness the potential of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) to support evidence-based design and implementation of AKIS strategies. They offer Member States practical models to strengthen innovation governance, improve intervention design, and ensure that AKIS strategies deliver measurable and meaningful results.
A shared feature across all these practices is their innovative character, reflecting the need to address the novelty and complexity of AKIS and its support interventions through new approaches, methods, and tools for monitoring and evaluation. One particularly important common thread is the development of structured data collection protocols. This reflects a growing awareness of the scarcity of relevant and robust information sources on AKIS components and interventions, and the need to generate meaningful data tailored to the AKIS approach.
The Target Estimator tool (Italy) fully reflects this awareness by offering machine learning for setting realistic performance targets for AKIS-related interventions by ensuring accuracy and credibility of target indicators, which are essential for tracking progress and guiding resource allocation.
Equally significant is the active involvement of AKIS actors in evaluation processes. Their participation demonstrates a clear understanding of the added value of co-producing knowledge that is both relevant and credible—for themselves and for policymakers. In several practices, such as the FSDN pilot (Italy), the SRL tool (Netherlands), the Logical Framework (Italy), and the AdvInnoQual Index, AKIS actors are engaged from the outset to co-define indicators and assess project logic, ensuring that evaluation reflects users’ values, real conditions and supports learning, adaptation, and impact measurement.
Finally, the Swedish and Italian evaluations of Operational Groups highlight the diversity of evaluable dimensions—from success factors and innovation culture to system-level cooperation and knowledge flows—offering valuable insights for CAP Strategic Plan governance.
Questions for opening the discussion and reflecting on how to manage evaluations of the AKIS strategies are proposed by the Guidelines of the EC for the evaluation of the AKIS strategies (chapter 4). Moreover, some key questions might be proposed with a view to draw conclusions on the contribution of the AKIS strategies to the fundamental components, processes and capacities of the AKIS, such as:
