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When seeking to harness entrepreneurship and enterprise culture, governments often seek to transfer policy measures successful in another country to their own. Until now however, governments have often lacked a practical evaluation framework for selecting policy measures and then appraising the feasibility and transferability of such measures. The aim of this paper is to fill that gap. Reviewing the literature on cross-national policy transfer, this paper provides a pragmatic evaluation framework for selecting policy measures and appraising their feasibility and transferability from one country to another. This details how successful policy transfer and cross-national policy learning must be informed by prospective policy analysis and testing the features of the specific policy initiative against the specifics of the national context and circumstances, and then establishes the criteria and processes through which potential policy adopters can identify promising policies used elsewhere to tackle similar problems in their own country and assess their 'goodness of fit' prior to transfer to national realities.

This paper describes the development of a simple integrated approach to policy appraisal for use within the Environment Agency for England and Wales. The approach was developed by the Environment Agency's National Centre for Risk Analysis and Options Appraisal, and is intended as a first version of a tool to allow policy makers in the Agency to consider the possible environmental, social, economic and resource use impacts of the policy options available to manage risks, and to allow the monitoring of impacts of policy options selected.

The context within which the approach was developed is discussed — including existing literature on, and experience of, policy and integrated appraisal respectively, as well as the needs and resources of the Environment Agency with respect to policy appraisal. The paper provides a description of the approach developed before highlighting issues for further development.

The guidance summarised here is version 1, which is being rolled out for use by policy authors within the Agency in 2000 and 2001. The process will inevitably be iterative and it is intended over the next two years, following further application and road testing, that subsequent versions of the guidance will be produced.

Stockholm has set a target for greenhouse gas emissions in the year 2030, based on the United Nation's (IPCC) recommendations for an acceptable CO₂ level in the atmosphere. In this study we use a backcasting framework to analyze a range of specific transport policies and fuel technology related developments with respect to the emission target. Our study employs a transport modelling system, traditionally used for forecasts, to quantify the impacts of various travel demand measures (TDM). Our study shows that the change in travel demand, induced by various travel policies, will not suffice on its own to reach the target. Even if fuel price is tripled, a substantial share of renewable fuels is required for target achievement. While our study shows that travel demand measures have a fairly small effect on CO₂ emissions, it also hints at other compelling reasons for introducing such measures. Constructive strategies for the transport system would not only contribute to reduce risks with climate change. Even small reductions of transport volumes might imply large socio economic savings in traffic related costs, reduced emissions of substances with health impacts, fewer accidents, shorter travel times and higher travel time reliability. These aspects are arguably all part of a sustainable transport development.