What the evaluation record tells us about European Union Framework Programme performance

The European Union's (EU's) Framework Programmes of Research and Technological Development are subject to increasingly systematic evaluation. This paper reviews available evalua-tion evidence from the period 1999 to 2004, and concludes that the Framework Programmes appear to bring many benefits for their participants. In a broad sense, they promote Framework's high-level goals of supporting the European scientific and industrial base. However, the way the Framework is planned ensures that links between low- and high-level goals are unclear, and many goals are actually undemanding. Framework needs more clearly and continuously to be linked to developments in EU policy as part of a more systemic approach to evaluation and strategic intelligence in the Commission. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.