The Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) is in charge of the environmental education on the federal level. The unit for Environmental Education (EE) encourages the implementation of environmental education since 12 years. The activities in environmental education of the FOEN are mostly based on partnerships with the following four institutions: the Foundation for Environmental Education (SUB/FEE), the Education Centre of WWF, Partner for Environmental Training and Sustainability (sanu) and Silviva, an organisation for environmental education and forest. Furthermore the FOEN collaborates with the Federal Office for Professional Education and Technology (OPET) and the Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education. The evaluation of these activities intends to analyse the effects of the FOEN regarding the implementation of the environmental education in the educational system in Switzerland. It should give a basis for future activities of the FOEN in environmental education. The leading questions are 1) Did the division EE of the FOEN achieve their goals from 1993-2005? 2) How are the effects of the EE on a political level regarding the educational system in Switzerland and on a textual level in schools and education centres? 3) What can be improved regarding synergies with other domains like health and global learning in the framework of education for sustainable development? 4) What are the consequences of an abandonment of the EE in the FOEN? 5) What role plays the International Day of Forest? 6) What is the ideal institutional setting of the EE unit within the FOEN? The study follows a multi-methods approach with inter alia documentary analysis, surveys and expert interviews.
Many scholars have asserted that the legitimacy of democratic political systems depends more and more on the performance of public policies. Output of the political system is replacing input as the central criterion for legitimate public action. For a political system to achieve output legitimacy, it must incorporate information about the public’s perception of its performance into its policy-making processes. The question of how to measure public policy performance, the processes through which the media system selects and communicates news about public performance, and the utilization of information on public perceptions of performance in public decision-making have each received wide attention in the literature, some of which addresses the Swiss case. However, no research to date has attempted to show how these issues relate to each other. We propose to investigate these questions in a common framework, which will allow us to address how the interdependencies between the processes of creation, diffusion, and utilization of information affect public performance. Connecting these processes is a necessary step towards answering the question of whether information on performance can generate political legitimacy. To investigate these questions, four policy fields are selected, within each of which three to four case studies are conducted. Each of these embedded case studies deals with one policy-making process. The main questions are: 1) how is information about the performance of the public sector created? 2) How do the media (and other communication channels) select and frame information about public performance for diffusion to citizens and decision-makers? And 3) how does the public sector use this information about perceptions of its performance? This integrative approach will provide insight into the processes of creation, diffusion and utilization of information about public performance. In so doing, the project will contribute to the ongoing debate on whether democratic legitimacy can be secured by political system output and thereby covers a crucial topic for the future of democracy in the 21st century.
Background: HIV/Aids policies in Western Europe entered the phase of normalisation since the mid nineteen-nineties. The overall objective of this research project is to describe and to explain the development of HIV/Aids prevention policies in Western Europe in the current phase of normalisation, as well as to assess the capacity of national HIV/Aids prevention networks to meet current and future challenges in limiting the spread of HIV. Aims: During the first phase of funding, research activities were focused on the Swiss case (analysis of recent developments in HIV prevention policy at the Federal level as well as in seven cantons). The second phase of funding will be used to discuss the Swiss results in the light of developments in other European countries. Methods: The second phase of funding will entail comparative qualitative case studies in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, and compare them to the Swiss case. The international case studies will work out developments of the various national HIV/Aids policies, since the mid-1990s, at the level of (1) policy ideas, (2) actors’ interests and motivations, and (3) institutional structures and procedures. More particularly we will focus on four domains of the national HIV/Aids policies: (a) large scale information campaigning, (b) targeted prevention for female sex workers, (c) targeted prevention for migrants, and (d) clinical treatment for persons living with HIV.
Wie kaum ein anderer Politikbereich verdankt die HIV/Aids-Prävention in Westeuropa ihren Erfolg der systematischen Verwendung von sozialwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen. Auch in der Schweiz wurde seit dem Auftauchen des HIV Mitte der 1980er Jahre im Bereich der HIV/Aids-Prävention sozialwissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse gefördert, vermittelt und verwendet. Im Zuge der sogenannten Normalisierung wurde in der Schweiz die Förderung der HIV/Aids-spezifischen Grundlagenforschung im Jahre 2004 eingestellt, bzw. in die Strukturen der allgemeinen Forschungsförderung durch den Schweizer Nationalfonds übergeführt. Das Ziel dieser Expertise ist es, abzuschätzen wie sich diese Entwicklung auf die Erzeugung, Vermittlung und Verwendung von Erkenntnissen der sozialwissenschaftlichen HIV/Aids-Forschung auswirkt. Dazu wird erstens die Entwicklung der sozialwissenschaftlichen HIV/Aids-Forschungsförderung auf nationaler Ebene in der Schweiz aufgezeigt. Zweitens wird die Entwicklung der Forschungslandschaft anhand eines Inventars der geförderten Projekte im Bereich der sozialwissenschaftlichen HIV/Aids-Forschung dargelegt. Drittens werden die Auswirkungen der Veränderungen der HIV/Aids-spezifischen Förderungsstrukturen auf die Erzeugung, Vermittlung und Verwendung von politikrelevantem Wissen in diesem Bereich analysiert. Dazu wird einerseits ein Vergleich mit den Förderungsstrukturen von Frankreich und Deutschland sowie im Bereich der Suchtforschung in der Schweiz angestrebt, anderseits werden Interviews mit Experten aus der Forschung, Politik und Praxis geführt.
Since 1992 the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health and the Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education encourage prevention and health promotion activities in the educational sector. The predecessor project "Santé Jeunesse" and the impulse program "Schools and health" laid the foundation for the current framework program "education + health – network Switzerland 2002-2010". The current program is based on a network approach and aims to establish a well founded understanding of health-related subjects in the entire educational sector, from pre-school up to and including the tertiary level. It supports the creation and nationwide coordination of a network of so called national centres of excellence for different health issues (e.g. nutrition, sexual health, stress and resource management). The evaluation of this program has a formative orientation and intends to improve the ongoing program. Furthermore, it develops an evaluation design for an upcoming summative evaluation. The evaluation consists of three parts: first it assesses the general appropriateness of the program strategy. Therefore we reconstruct the program theories underpinning the program strategy at the different levels (network of the centres of excellence/networks of each individual centre/individual school setting). Second, based on a multilevel network analysis, it provides an intermediate evaluation of the current implementation state. Third it prepares the evaluation concept to be implemented in a summative evaluation in 2008. For reasons external to our study, the evaluation has to be prematurely terminated. Therefore no final report for the general public is available.
The goal of this project is to develop guidelines for the application of the Evaluation Standards of the Swiss Evaluation Society (SEVAL-Standards) (see www.seval.ch) in the Swiss Federal Administration. The guidelines will rely on the experiences made so far applying the SEVAL-Standards. In addition, the guidelines will be tested together with representatives responsible for evaluation tasks within the Swiss Federal Administration. This project is part of the activities of the Federal Administration to implement Art. 170 of the Swiss Federal Constitution.
Our project intends to improve our understanding of how measures against right-wing extremism can best be evaluated in terms of their effectiveness. As part of this effort, we will also gather empirical evidence about the conditions for success in measures already undertaken to combat right-wing extremism. The results of this research project will provide the underpinnings for guidelines to be followed in crafting evaluations of measures undertaken against right-wing extremism, as well as recommendations of how measures against right-wing extremism can themselves be successfully crafted. To reach these goals, the research project consist of the following elements: The first step will be to collect and synthesize information from existing evaluations of programs against right-wing extremism or similar measures in Switzerland and abroad. A metaevaluation will be conducted as part of this synthesis to provide knowledge about how the effectiveness of measures against right-wing extremism can be assessed. The second step will be to create an inventory of successful projects by surveying organizations active in employing measures against right-wing extremism. Third, using the Delphi technique, experts will assess the success of the measures contained in the inventory. The objective here will be to select two best practice examples from each of three areas (police and penal law, youth work, school) as well as two examples from other fields. The success conditions for each of these eight best practices will be worked out in detailed evaluative case studies in a fourth step. These eight evaluative studies will be compared systematically in a fifth step, primarily to provide evidence about the generalizability of the criteria for success. On the basis of the results from the preceding steps, the sixth and final step will be to provide recommendations for the future design of (1) measures against right-wing extremism in Switzerland as well as (2) evaluation of the effectiveness of these measures.
The Actor-Process-Event Scheme (APES) is a data transformation procedure that allows for a 1) systematic allocation of information on political processes gained from qualitative case studies, 2) visualization of the political processes under investigation, and 3) preparation of the data for standardized data analysis such as social network analysis. APES is easy to apply to any kinds of (political) processes. Own research currently focuses on the comparison of both policy formulation and decision-making processes in different policy areas and on the assessment of the democratic quality of selected policy processes. In its current version, APES is a web-based software application (http://pwi-apes.uzh.ch/) and free for non-commercial use.
Since January 1st, 2004, a new medical tariff system is implemented in Switzerland. The tariff system TARMED bases on an individual specification of all services provided by physicians and ambulatory in hospitals. It covers all services as defined by the mandatory basic plan of Swiss health insurance. The tariff system is implemented all over Switzerland and has to allow for comparing services provided in different regions and at different times. In Switzerland, so far, a similarly detailed comparison has not been possible. The tariff system also might have redistributed some income between groups of physicians and puts further decisions on costs of individual services on a more scientific base. TARMED has not been designed in order to decrease the raising health care costs in Switzerland in the first place. Nevertheless, it is a defined goal of the Swiss government that the tariff system at least should not increase health care costs. This study prepares the scientific bases for evaluating impacts of TARMED. In a first step, the study develops on a theoretical level the causal linkages underpinning the introduction of TARMED. In developing this causal model, we take diverging views of different stakeholders into account. Then, we study what existing sources of data can be used to measure the various variables of the causal model. Where data is missing, a design for new data collection has to be suggested. The main aim of the study is to develop and discuss a feasible research design for the evaluation of TARMED. In addition, the study provides a first evaluation of the short-term effects of the introduction of TARMED on health care costs.
This project deals with studies that have the goal to assess the fulfillment of performance contracts for Osec Business Network Switzerland. It consists of a meta-evaluative quality assessment of the studies under investigation as well as a synthesis of the information in the studies.