De onderbouwing van DGG-beleid (The Foundation of Freight Policy)

To encourage the development of evidence-based and effective policies and ensuring value-for-money within government, the Netherlands is in the process of implementing a new budgetary process (VBTB). To make better use of "hard evidence" in the policymaking process, the Dutch Directorate-General for Freight (DGG) commissioned RAND Europe to perform a process analysis. The analysis shows that at any time during a calendar year there are three different processes interacting and competing for the attention of policymakers:

1. the budgetary process, with a fixed time-frame of a calendar year;
2. the data collection process, with a fixed time-frame and time lag (for monitoring data) and variable length for specific research questions; and
3. the policy making process, with a varying time-frame.

At any moment these three processes braid together into a complex score of data streams and queries. RAND Europe prepared a briefing for the DGG staff engaged in policymaking and performance management. The briefing contained a simplified representation of this complexity and a flow chart indicating the moments within the budgetary year where up-to-date "hard" evidence on the effectiveness of policies could be included in the process.