BRUNETIERE Jean Rene

The theme of the seventh "Rencontres internationales de la gestion publique", organized in June 2008 by the Institute for Public Management and Economic Development in partnership with the OECD, was "Evaluating public policies to improve public action". In France, the evaluation of public policies is part of a new trend. Article 47-2 of the Constitution makes it mandatory. However, the attempts at evaluation made since 1989 have given a negative image: heavy and abstruse studies, hardly leading to decisions, work bogged down in plethoric committees... How then can we take up the challenge of the Constitution while not reproducing the real or supposed errors of the past? The international experience can be a source of inspiration, in particular by making it possible to find a middle way between rapid audits and evaluation or by inviting the strengthening of the work between evaluators, administrations and civil society. The confrontation of different points of view and plural expertise allows public action to lead to better results. France has the LOLF and the RGPP: how can we build on these foundations by drawing on the experience of countries that also practice program-based management? This book draws a picture of the concrete concerns that various countries have in developing evaluation: the United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden, Italy, France, and the Netherlands. The multiple questions of methods, strategies, and the relationships between actors are addressed here. This book is intended for those who are interested in evaluation but also in social issues, particularly those related to the organization of public debates in the context of the implementation of public policies.

The initial idea of the French White Certificate (WC) scheme, which entered into force in 2006, was to rely on a tradable WC on the basis of market development leading to save energy at the lowest cost. However, the WC market lacks of liquidity and the majority of the trading is done over-the-counter 1. Thus the question of the energy savings cost arise, especially to better understand where are the "low hanging fruits" and the highest ones. Given the dominance of the residential building sector in the scheme (about 80 % of total WC have been issued in this area since the beginning of the program), we confine our study to the energy refurbishment market for residential buildings in this paper. An economic model, based on standardized operations' monotonic functions of abatement costs (on the same model as Marginal Abatement Cost curve), is designed to estimate the distribution of energy saving costs (Euro per saved kWh). At the opposite of what is usually available in the literature, the costs are described using log-normal distributions, and not mean values, to take into account the scattering of retrofitting prices for the same operation. So we can take in account for each type of action the mean and marginal costs of refurbish-ment. This more realistic approach gives results that are significantly different from using mean values.