Approaches for Measuring Policy Effectiveness
Buy Clean is a procurement policy approach incorporating low-carbon requirements into government construction materials purchasing.
À propos
With so much recent and ongoing activity around Buy Clean policy passage and implementation, policymakers and their collaborators would benefit from (i) a clearly articulated Buy Clean theory of change, and (ii) tools to evaluate Buy Clean policy effectiveness.
We propose a Buy Clean theory of change that connects specific policy interventions to a policy goal via desired outcomes. A desired outcome is a condition that the policy intervention (hopefully) causes to happen. It is also a precondition for the goal to occur. Our proposed theory of change focuses on the climate goals of Buy Clean and defines the following components:Â
- Common Buy Clean policy interventions (e.g., requiring EPDs);
- Acheter Clean desired outcomes that provide the link between the interventions
- educed embodied carbon from agency procurement
- shifted industrial production practices
- better GWP data and reporting
- creation of low-carbon markets
- A major Buy Clean policy goal — improved material emissions intensity.
For assessing policy effectiveness, we propose a series of indicators and associated metrics to measure the extent to which the desired outcomes have been achieved.
We hope that agencies and organizations that implement or evaluate Buy Clean policies can use this resource to build policy evaluation frameworks that suit their needs. We also hope that other active organizations in the Buy Clean policy space will build upon and refine the initial proposals here and propose similar indicators for tracking labor and economic growth goals as a complement to the climate goals described in this report. Ultimately, more robust policy evaluation can inform new policies and help improve existing policies as agencies modify or add interventions.
Auteurs
The research team from the Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF) and the Life Cycle Lab at the University of Washington (UW) College of Built Environments:Â
- Brook Waldman, Low-Carbon Products Lead, CLF
- Jordan Palmeri, Senior Researcher, UW*
- Kathrina Simonen, Professor, UW
- Meghan Lewis, Program Director, CLFÂ
Author contributions: Writing — original draft: B.W.; Writing — review and editing: J.P., K.S., M.L., B.W.; Conceptualization: J.P., K.S.; Methodology: J.P., B.W.; Visualization: B.W.; Funding acquisition: K.S., M.L.Â
*Jordan Palmeri is also a part-time Senior Manager of the Low Carbon Products team at the CLF. His contributions to this work were in his role as Senior Researcher at UW.
Publié
November 2024
Remerciements
The research team would like to thank Charlie Martin (BlueGreen Alliance) for his thoughtful and insightful reviews of a report draft. His feedback led to many improvements in the final version. We would like to thank Sea Change Foundation for supporting this research at the University of Washington.
The research and project began while the CLF was hosted at UW. After the CLF became an independent nonprofit in the spring of 2024, this project continued as a collaboration between UW and CLF staff. The UW team appreciates the CLF’s commitment to disseminating this work broadly. The CLF team appreciates UW’s continued technical support of the publication.
Buy Clean Indicators Reductions is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Cover Image by arielrobin from Pixabay.
Citation
Waldman, B., Palmeri, J., Simonen, K., and Lewis, M. (2024). Buy Clean Indicators: Approaches for Measuring Policy Effectiveness. Carbon Leadership Forum.