Short Abstract

UK SHORE was a large-scale programme funding innovation support to help decarbonise the maritime sector. This presentation explores the adaptive and collaborative approach taken to evaluate UK SHORE across multiple phases to ensure that insights could inform ongoing policy development.

Description

UK SHORE was a £200 million public investment in research, development and innovation in support of decarbonising the maritme sector, which ran from 2022 to 2025. Led by DfT, with delivery support from UKRI and the Connected Places Catapult, the programme invested in innovation support at different stages of technology readiness through a range of different funding schemes.

Frontier Economics, together with SYSTRA and ERM, led a multi-year, multi-phase evaluation of UK SHORE including process, impact and Value for Money components. Drawing on a mixed-methods, theory-based approach, the evaluation needed to assess both scheme- and programme-level impacts.

As the evaluation was taking place alongside programme delivery, with new schemes being launched as the evaluation was being conducted, we developed an adaptive and collaborative approach to ensure that emerging lessons could be taken on board to influence ongoing programme design. This included:

* developing a longer-term evaluation framework, drawing on the lessons learned from interim evaluation findings, to provide DfT with insights into how longer-term outcomes and impacts from UK SHORE could be evaluated in future.

* adapting the evaluation design to different schemes reflecting their different scale and focus in terms of technology readiness.

* adapting the value for money approach to consider both emerging and final insights, and developing a novel approach to assessing the environmental benefits based on expert judgement.

* working collaboratively with DfT so that emerging process insights could be adopted for new schemes launched as part of UK SHORE.

Emerging evaluation evidence was also used to inform the successful business case for further ongoing investment in UK SHORE.

The presentation will explore how the design and delivery of the evaluation was conducted and adapted to ensure policy could be developed in a dynamic and changing political and technological landscape.