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.

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.