2 mins
Success story: Quick Check Territorial Impact Assessment
Identifying whether or not EU policies, or policies in general, have territorially differentiated effects, influencing some regions more than others, is a crucial task, especially in light of the EU’s goals on territorial cohesion. Territorial impact assessment (TIA) is one of the approaches that can be used to identify such differentiation in effects and, in addition, it can help guide proposals for adjustments to a policy itself or some of its elements to reduce territorially imbalanced effects.
ESPON TIA Quick Check, and its accompanying web application, is a decision-making support tool developed to serve this purpose. The tool is developed to support a moderator of a TIA workshop, feeding and guiding expert discussions. The method is based on considering different levels of territorial sensitivity to a certain policy process, and by combining expert judgement with a set of statistical data it projects potential territorial impacts. The workshop simulates a TIA process and assesses territorial impacts in a fast and elegant way. This unique ESPON service has gained traction among policy-makers, mainly in the context of EU legislation. Among the EU policies for which TIA workshops have been moderated using the TIA tool are the remotely piloted aircraft system and the bioeconomy. It is now a recommended method, listed in the Better Regulation Guideline Toolbox33 and has been used in several EU legislative proposal impact assessment procedures.
It is interesting to note however that this method can also be applied to other kinds of national and subnational policy processes.
The following two cases exemplify how the TIA tool can be applied in other circumstances.
Case 1: using the TIA tool to assess the impacts of a European Territorial Cooperation programme post-2020 programme European Territorial Cooperation (ETC) programmes have already started designing and setting up plans for the post- 2020 programming period. For the upcoming period, ETC programmes will be requested to use the concept of ‘functional areas’ to demarcate programming areas. Performing an ex-ante TIA to visualise potential common effects of policy objectives across borders may be a useful and effective way of responding to this request. The ESPON TIA tool offers for this purpose a specific cross-border portal that takes into account border regions only and offers crossborder-specific indicators.
Case 2:using the tool to determine whether or not territorial impact assessment would be useful for a certain policy proposal
Decision-makers often have difficulties predicting and assessing the territorial effects of a policy proposal in its preparatory phase. As a consequence, it is unclear to them whether or not a TIA is actually necessary or useful. For this reason, the TIA tool offers the function of a ‘TIA necessity check’ which provides interactive decision support, enabling users to check whether or not a TIA is actually needed.