EVENT: Value for Money in Environmental Policy and Environmental Economics

There is significant potential to improve the value for money generated by public investments in environmental projects and in environmental economics, although there are significant challenges in each case. Environmental managers and policy makers should select for funding those projects that offer the most valuable environmental outcomes for the available resources. In doing so, they should carefully consider the extent to which potential policies and investments deliver environmental outcomes, not just outputs and activities. Processes for ranking potential environmental investments need to consider a sufficient set of information to properly evaluate benefits and costs. That information must be integrated in a rigorous way. Many ranking systems in practical use do not meet these requirements. In some cases environmental economists could increase the value for money from investments in their research and analysis by avoiding the over-concentration of effort into a subset of the many types of information needed to make sound management and policy decisions. There are several reasons to expect that relatively less detailed or sophisticated information may provide greater value for money: diminishing marginal benefits from sophistication and detail, increasing marginal costs of sophistication and detail, and the limited capacities of potential users of this information.