Building on the previous chapters, this chapter compares state and society funded climate policy evaluation with a view to the three foundational ideas of polycentric governance, namely self-organization, context and interactions between governance centers. While self-organization through climate policy evaluation is limited, the comparison reveals that society-funded evaluations engaged more deeply with the context of climate policy than the state-funded ones. Society-funded evaluation also used more evaluation criteria in their work. But state funders appear to have greater levels of resources, which manifest in terms of the numbers of methods that they use, as well as more quantitative comparability metrics. The latter may help to carry insights from one governance center to another. On the whole, society and state funded evaluation therefore appear complementary, each uniquely contributing to polycentric climate governance. However, in both groups, there remains ample room for development with a view to leveraging the synergies of polycentric governance by the means of evaluation.

Of the 618 climate policy evaluations collected for this research, only 84 were society-funded. This means that while self-organization represents not only a theoretical possibility but also an empirical reality, the capacities for doing so are limited. Environmental groups are particularly active in climate policy evaluations, while research institutes and private-sector consultancies also contribute. These evaluations engage with context to a moderate degree, and their level of reflexivity, or critical engagement with extant policy targets, is not as high as polycentric governance scholars may expect. Interestingly, only about a quarter of the society-funded evaluations identified and addressed gaps left by state-funded evaluation. In sum, while self-organization thus manifests through climate policy evaluation, there remains great potential for greater engagement of societal actors. This type of engagement is not only be desirable from a polycentric, but also from a democratic perspective.

This chapter presents a detailed analysis of state-funded evaluations collected for this research. State-funded evaluations are by definition not self-organized, and they comprise the lion’s share of the 618 climate policy evaluations unearthed between 1997 and 2014 at the EU level, in Germany and in the United Kingdom. The chapter presents an analysis conducted with a novel coding scheme and demonstrates the growth of state-funded evaluations in number over time, as well as the fact that most evaluation remain within their own governance center in terms of funding, evaluating and the policy on which they focus. There is a strong focus on certain types of climate policy, notably renewables, cross-sectoral and energy efficiency. However, legal requirements for evaluation are not the main drivers. State-funded evaluations show a cursory treatment of context, and limited realized potential for driving interaction across governance-centers.