The development of environmental policy evaluation has been slow, compared with many other realms, and many practices are still not well standardized. Environmental problems have some key features; for example they often have long time frames, are complex and concern geographically remote regions. Scientific knowledge is important in environmental policy but such knowledge is characterized by huge uncertainties. The key characteristics of both the problems and our knowledge of them should affect the evaluation of the policy instruments used to address them. An evaluation of Finnish wastewater permits is used as an example throughout the article. If evaluation of environmental policy is undertaken without due consideration of the specifics involved there is a great risk of identifying only minor impacts and low effectiveness. Properly conducted evaluations, however, can help us to make better decisions on both old and new environmental policy instruments.
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