 Welcome everyone. I'm pleased to be here. I was going to talk to you a bit about my thesis work when I was at Edinburgh University and draw some comparisons to what we're trying to learn for Red Plus, because it's still early days, so there's not so much we can say, so we look to other initiatives that are similar to learn lessons. And often, I think, by nature, we are drawn to areas where we learn lessons within tropical regions or developing countries, but there are still useful insights we can learn from similar initiatives, but in very different contexts. So that's what I'll talk about today. So it's about the rural development policy. It's one such mechanism. It was implemented since 2005. It's revised every six years, and so it has almost a decade of experience and lessons which we can draw. So what is rural development policy? I'm not sure if many of you are familiar with it, but rural development policy is a European policy mechanism that, like PEZ and such like instruments, it provides payments to incentivise voluntary actions towards multiple objectives, so economic, social and environmental. And so these aim to contribute to improve the rural landscapes across the EU. Rural development policy is very much a multi-level governance system. It's framed and guided by the European Commission, but it's implemented and developed at a national level, so countries will design the rural development policy so it suits their own needs and priorities. With rural policy, this rural development policy, a common policy is justified because you have these transboundary issues. As climate change, biodiversity conservation, these aren't limited to country borders, so you can justify having this common policy. That's why huge funds are directed into this policy, and it's one of the key mechanisms across the European Union for environmental matters in particular as well. So, for the period 2007, 2013, there was $118 billion that was allocated across the 27 member state countries, and this fund is then matched by national funds, so double that amount that is contributing to rural development. In terms of the actions of rural development policy, as Grace said, a lot of these measures are in environmental, not all of them, they meet different objectives, but for the environmental ones, you have climate change actions, so these will be reforestation, sustainable forest management practices, so that people will receive payments for such activities. But one of the key measures, and one you might have heard of, is the agri-environmental scheme, so this is predominant in rural development policy, and probably one of the most widely supported in terms of expenditure and participation. So then, what are these key lessons that we can draw from this policy? I mean, there's many similar challenges to red, especially when we're talking about monitoring and evaluation. It's multiple scales, multiple actors, and in order to address these challenges, in 2007, the Commission introduced the CMEF, which is the Common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework. So these are mainly quantitative indicators that measure policy performance at different policy stages, in order to provide a consistent way of assessing data across the 27 countries. So these indicators are mainly five groups. You have the input, which is Exante, so that's allocated expenditure. You have baseline, which is the conditions, the pre-existing conditions. You have output, which is committed expenditure and participation result, so that's completed contracts, for example. And you also have impact indicators, so these match to the wider objectives of the policy. So if it's reducing biodiversity decline, we're looking at farmland bird species, for instance, to measure how agor environment has had an impact. But are these indicators enough to understand policy performance? Arguably, no. It's just one step, so it's a snapshot of what policy is perhaps doing, not necessarily causative. Fudgen Barrett is essential to look at implementation, not solely in terms of putting policy into effect, but also in terms of observing what actually happens or gets done and seeking to understand how and why. So this highlights the need merely to go beyond identifying change and differences of objectives and outcomes, but also to assess determinants and processes. So this is where the project that I worked on came in, so this was called SPARD. Okay, thank you. We aim to assess the potential for these indicators that were introduced in 2007 and also to look at exploring some of the determinants of policy performance. So we applied spatial econometrics. I'm not going to go into details about what this is, but just briefly, spatial econometrics is models that includes assessing social dependency. So it's considering the first law of geography. So simply put, everything is related to everything else, but those things that are nearer are more so than distant things. And with our models, we did identify spatial dependency for these measures. We also explored the types of spatial relationships, as well as tested 40 explanatory variables for the agri-environmental measure implementation. I mean, I won't go into the results. That's in the paper and I've only got 10 minutes, but just a quick insight into some of the conclusions. So basically, with the CMEF, although it's a good step in the right direction, they come with many limitations. And of course, the models we can create are only as good as that data. So it's very clear that for the CMEF, there are data gaps. It wasn't consistent across the EU. There's different abilities to capture that information, different capacities. There's temporal lags in terms of when something is committed or implemented to when you actually might see an impact. As obviously, uncertain causation, you might be implementing something, but it might be external factors that may be influencing how outcomes turn out. It's also the inability of these indicators to address the less tangible, such as other aspects of policy performance. So for that reason, in this study, we could assess only the output indicators in terms of expenditure and participation. Although that's still important, because that's still given you an indication of initial policy performance, it still means you don't know really how those actions are playing out in practice. And it's also, as I mentioned in the abstract, it's interesting to consider the context because in the EU, compared to many sites that we look at with red, the situation is different. You have secured tenure rights, you have arguably more financial resources available, better capacity, strengthened governance, you have all these things, but still it appears that the ability to assess policy performance on impact is elusive. Another point to be raised is that the models we use had quite low predictive capacity, so indicating there's a strong explanation of variants in the dependent variables that we couldn't identify. But this is very consistent with other studies similar to this, whereas with agri-environment, there's a whole array of factors that could be attributed. And as I just mentioned, those are often intangible, such as policy design, behaviour, attitudes, but that's another paper and another talk. I mean, the argument is then that you have to go beyond just the quantitative indicators. You need to also look to other approaches to be able to understand more comprehensively why policy is performing a certain way, how it works in order to be able to improve our understanding of RDP and also to improve our understanding for other such-like initiatives. Thank you. Thank you, Annie. Any questions from the audience? Harria and then Lou. Thank you very much. I have just a question trying to find out analogies with what we are doing, and I have a question regarding the interaction between this policy, which is a central policy, and local policies. Did you find some conflictual situations between the two policies, like we do sometimes in our work in other countries, or some synergies? Or how did you, if there any information about that? Thank you. Thank you. Shall I answer that? Okay. Thank you, Harria. The rule development policy is the key policy. Maybe that was before the time that I was studying it, that they might have had these more local national policies to account for the same challenges or issues that rule development policy is addressing. In the study, as I said, there were other approaches that I used to look at these intangible aspects, as well, that do not come out in quantitative indicators. For the study, we did look at governance, and some of the conflicts in Scotland were more to do with auditing and accountability and some of the resistance to that, because there seemed to be a lot of efforts that goes into assessing the processes, but less so on the outcomes. That is good in terms of making sure everyone is doing things right and accounting for where funds are going, especially public funds, but also that just needs to be a balance as well, because it diverts resources to actually achieving policy goals. Sorry, I am not sure I have that quite answered. Yeah, thanks. My question is about the way the incentives are structured, and red mechanism is supposed to be organised as a payment for performance, and you've shown that actually measuring performance or measuring outcomes is difficult, and I assume that this mechanism is not set up as a payment for outcomes, but a payment for actions, so sort of an input side payment scheme. But the EU has really been a champion of this payment for performance for developing countries. If it's so hard to do in the EU, what's the prospects in countries that are less advanced in this? Are there some key lessons from that that we would begin to try and apply to a payment for performance type of mechanism like red? Yeah, I mean, because I wasn't able to go into details. I mean, they do attempt to address it in terms of other sort of follow up activities, but often, I mean, similar to the Vietnam case study that I look at now, but I mean, they're asking people themselves what is the impact, so do you think those activities are having, so you're asking people to assess themselves, which also comes with its own biases, I suppose, but they also do inspection, so I mean, maybe that's one avenue, so you're not assessing every single activity, every single participant, but you go in and do random assessments to see how these activities are playing out on the ground. Maybe that's an affordable way to do it, instead of assuming that everyone could produce this information and data, but that would be a third party, you know, as opposed to people assessing themselves. Perhaps we have time for one more question, no? Well, just to say that Annie is actually working on an info brief bringing out these lessons for red and particularly for the benefit sharing aspects of red, so there should be more information and more details about this work as we move forward. Thanks, Annie, and thanks, everyone.