Towards impact assessment indicators for EU citizenship

Abstract

Tools and frameworks for executing impact assessments are useful to provide policy and decision makers with knowledge and guidance. This might help in identifying possible barriers – but also opportunities – for exercising European Union citizenship. Impact assessment is the systematic ex-ante evaluation of the likely or possible consequences of policies, project, programs and other forms of regulation. The existing Impact Assessment guideline in ‘Better Regulation guidelines’ (European Commission, 2015) focus on economic, social and environmental impacts. EU citizenship impacts need to be added to this list to overcome barriers for EU citizenship. Therefore, in the working paper (D11.1) ‘Assessing policy implications for EU citizenship’ (Bakker et al., 2016) options for an impact assessment framework for EU citizenship are explored. In the paper favorable impact assessment approaches are identified even as elements that should be included in the framework and what requirements the framework should meet. However, before to establish an impact assessment framework for EU citizenship, it is necessary to develop indicators to assess EU citizenship. These indicators need to be formulated based on existing (impact assessment) guidelines and documents and based on outcomes of the bEUcitizen project so far. Therefore, we analysed all the deliverables of the bEUcitizen project so far to determine whether attention needs to be paid to specific topics in an impact assessment framework for EU citizenship. Annex I shows an overview of the analyzed deliverables and their topics. In this report, we sketch an overview of the most remarkable topics from the deliverables. This leads towards impact assessment indicators for EU citizenship, which will be the starting point for the Impact Assessment tool for policymakers on the European and the national level (deliverable 11.3).