Indicators for regional environmental policy evaluation: a green perspective

In the last few years a wide literature on sustainable development and environmental accounting has been developed. Apart from academic contribution, there are many practical methodologies applied at different scale. In a scenario of growing regional scale decentralisation, green accounts assume a crucial role as an economic and environmental policy tool, considering the relevance of these dimensions for regional governance. Our purpose is to use the classification scheme proposed from Eurostat at national level, the CEPA (Classification of Environmental Protection Activities), as baseline to adapt it at regional level and analyse information about public environmental expenditures. The analysis has been conducted for the Region of Molise firstly evaluating the different performance between environmental policy and other sectoral policies. In this way, it is possible to understand if policy-makers use the same parameters to carry forward interventions in different fields; at the same time such analysis allows understanding even the stakeholders’ behaviours in terms of real demand of political interventions. Moreover, public expenditure has been analysed through reclassification and using different classification criteria: the first one is the environmental theme (as water resources, climate change, waste management, land use and biodiversity) and the others are more policy-oriented (the nature of expenditure, the accounting classification and the type of intervention on the territory). Using some budget indicators we compare the supply of environmental and other sectors policies defined as potential will with the policy demand represented by payments indicator.