IMPROVING EU ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY IN THE AFOLU COMPLEX THROUGH THE APPLICATION OF RASCH AND WEBER MODELS

Without public and private organisations interested in interactive partnership, no strategies of cooperation can be put in place. Despite this simple assertion the European Commission has often disregarded the importance and role of potential partners’ awareness of main strategic options in the past. This study aims to establish the awareness of potential partners concerning the policy options facing the EU governance for the inclusion of the ‘Agriculture, Forestry and other Land Use’ (AFOLU) complex of industries into the 2030 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) mitigation framework. The dataset is built by the preferences expressed by Governments, NGOs, Research Centres, Associations, and Citizens at the European Commission’s Consultation survey in the climate policies framework (2015). These data have been analysed by the Rasch Model and the Weber model. The results obtained show that a small number of respondents are aware of the issue of policy options above mentioned. This means that there is a lack of information in the documents that are disseminated to different actors involved in the decision process. The application of both the Rasch model and Weber model yielded information useful for improving both decision-making (ex-post) processes and the methodological tools that can be used (ex-ante) for future surveys. Moreover, suggestions regarding the way to improve research tools and the productivity of further surveys were revealed.