Clarity DA --- the perm creates confusion --- the cp MUST happen over a NARROW set of well-defined ideas to avoid confusion and ineffective assessment

(European Space Agency, “The OECD’s stand of “What is Impact Assessment”,” pg online @ https://space-economy.esa.int/article/129/the-oecds-stand-of-what-is-impact-assessment //pa-ef)

Impact assessment is a central tool for policymakers to provide information on the outcomes of policy and regulation. At the end of 2021, the European Commission reconfirmed the importance of the tool by providing an updated version of its framework standardizing impact assessment approaches (see here). But what actually is impact assessment? The OECD tries to answer this question by breaking down the nature of impact assessment and its real-world policy application in its publication “What is impact assessment?”. The core of impact assessment is found to link causation from an intervention to an outcome while measuring the induced changes along the way. For this, the focus must be on a narrow and well-defined set of impacts to analyse, to allow for detailed effects in a clearly delineated framework. Different than in an evaluation, impact assessment does not aim to give an all-inclusive view or answer policy questions of the bigger picture but instead highlight one set of potential effects in rather isolation. In this exercise, it is especially important to avoid misinterpretation. While one set of effects might be highlighted extensively by an impact assessment, it can come at the cost of unknowingly neglecting other factors. Therefore, the OECD suggests experimenting with the assumptions included in the exercise. Moreover, individual context between observers is likely to vary enough to make “best practice” conclusions almost impossible to establish. The unique role of people and institutions need to be considered on a case-by-case basis. However, this also presents the opportunity to solve issues in different ways without the limitation of only one perfect solution.