On the 7th of November 2023 the first focus group meeting of the Tools4CAP project took place on the topic "Monitoring and data collection tools"
On the 7th of November 2023 the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences (LCSS), Institute of Economics and Rural Development organized the first focus group meeting of Horizon Europe project “Tools4CAP - Innovative Toolbox empowering effective CAP governance towards EU ambitions” on the topic “Monitoring and data collection tools”.
Representatives of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Lithuania, the National Payment Agency, the Lithuanian Farmers' Union, the Chamber of Agriculture of the Republic of Lithuania, UAB ESTEP Vilnius and LSSC Institute of Economics and Rural Development participated in the focus group discussion. The discussion was based on three sets of discussion questions: 1) What tools can be identified in the design and implementation of the CAP Strategic Plan? How would you assess the functionalities of the tools? 2) What are the challenges faced by policy-makers’ in the different SP steps for which they have used monitoring and data collection tools? 3) What are the policy-makers' needs in improving the tools or adopting new tools?
Focus group discussion revealed that the commonly applied tools for the design and implementation of CAP Strategic Plan in Lithuania are Focus Groups, Cumulative voting approach, Expert Judgment, Socio Economic Analysis, and Comparative analysis. More rarely applied, but very informative tool is Scenario Building, or Scenario Modelling. The listed tools In Lithuania are used in a particular sequence or particular SP design and implementation ‘policy steps’. Functionality of the tools varies, and it was revealed that focus groups tool is a good tool to collect different opinions but also it can be very political as every member of the focus group represent certain interests and seeks to represent them. However other used tools such as comparative analysis, expert judgement or socio-economic analysis are accurate and provide valid results.
The main challenges faced by Lithuanian policy-makers are related to different aspects, mainly considering: institutionalization issues (compulsory pre-defined national and/or supranational tool exploitation requests), various objective technical constraints (time, volume, budget, expertise), relevance (rationality of taking a long retrospective data, its reflectivity to actual ongoing transformations, flexibility to empower alternative tools), and general availability issues (data protection and openness, communication, user-friendly access). Next to the listed challenges, there are proposed detailed solutions to overcome them.
Focus group expressed opinion that policy-makers need a good quality and timely national data, users friendly digital platforms and better time management in improving the existing tools or adopting the new ones.
Project implementation team in Lithuania:
Dr. Živilė Gedminaitė-Raudonė, zivile.gedminaite@ekvi.lt
Dr. Rita Lankauskienė, rita.lankauskiene@ekvi.lt
Dr. Rasa Melnikienė, rasa.melnikiene@ekvi.lt
Dr. Vitalija Simonaitytė, vitalija.simonaityte@ekvi.lt
More information on project website: https://www.tools4cap.eu/