Impact Evaluation. The case of the European project Woodie

2.1. The project and the impact evaluation objectives

“Whistleblowing protection and open data impact. An implementation and impact assessement” (acronnym Woodie) is a project funded by the EU Directorate-General Migration and Home Sffairs under the 2017 Calls for Proposal on corruption. The consortium includes the University of Turin (Italy - lead), the Vienna Centre for Societal Security (Austria), the University of Angers (France), the NGO Amapola (Italy), the Romanian Center for European Policies (Romania), and the University of Maribor (Slovenia).
The 2-years project (2019-2021) focuses on open data and whistleblower protection, two measures identified by the EU, the OECD and many international NGOs as crucial to reach transparency and integrity in public procurement and to deter and detect corruption as well.
Althought the EU, international institutions such as the OECD and the Council of Europe, and Non-governemental organizations at local and global level have recognised whistleblower protection and oper data as key tools to address corruption, there has been no assessment of the impact of these measures adopted by Member States or by European agencies and institutions. The project intends to fill in this gas. It aims to assess the implementation and the impact of these measures in some significant Member States in order to develop an impact assessment model that will be operationalized through an ICT tool for public authorities across Europe.
For more information, go to the project website.

The impact evaluation’s objectives are twofold: on one side, to analyse and understand, at national and European level, the impacts foreseen by the legislators in framing the legislative frameworks on whistleblowing protection and open data policy; on the other, to understand which measures, tools and mechanisms could more effectively facilitate the implementation of the anti-corruption measures within public authorities.

The evaluation questions for designing the evaluation process are as follows:

• To what extent and how the anticorruption misures - WB and OD - contribute to (cause-effect and descriptive question) reaching the expected results?
• To what extent do the stakeholders evaluate the impacts of the measures and agree on the causal processes to explain the impacts achieved/not achieved? Other linked questions are: are the results those that are expected? Are the stakeholders’ expectations on the results satisfied with the results achieved?
• To what extend are expected changes materialise? This question implies checking results against expert predictions; in other words, it means checking if predictions on the outcomes of whistleblower protection and Open data policy happen over time and under which conditions.