The building blocks of impact assessment

There are three phases in legislation. Firstly there is the intention to legislate, which becomes a draft until at least the legislation passed by Parliament comes into force. There are certain questions associated with each of these phases. So different IA building blocks or modules have been developed for each of these phases. If the legislative phases are aligned to the associated building block, it looks something like this:

Legislative phase	IA building block	perspective
Intention to legislate	prospective IA	anticipatory
draft legislation	accompanying IA	anticipatory
legislation in force	retrospective IA	retrospective

Ideally, all three IA building blocks, prospective, accompanying and retrospective, should be connected together, at least for important projects with a wide effective range.

You can find a more detailed description of prospective IA here.
Please click here if you would like to read more about accompanying IA.
You can find out more about retrospective IA here.

The implementation of GM within the administrative authorities is not taking place without resistance. It is constantly being claimed that an IA takes too long, draws out the legislative process too much and contradicts efforts at reducing bureaucracy and at deregulation as part of the modernization of state and administration. The IA, which has been a subject of discussion for over 20 years as a method in legislative theory, has, interestingly, gained a boost in connection with just that deregulation debate and the financial crisis in which public budgets find themselves.

The IA is a deregulation tool as well. For instance, the prospective IA is intended to show whether there is a need for legislation in the first place and how it can be implemented in the most meaningful way, i.e. easily understandable, brief, impact-conscious and oriented to effectiveness.