The President of the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF), Cristina Herrero, took part today in the event “Looking at the Future. A view of public policy evaluation”, organised by EY. In her remarks, she underlined how AIReF has consolidated its position as a leading institution in the evaluation of public policies.
She outlined how AIReF’s evaluation work has developed over the years and is now firmly embedded as one of the institution’s core functions. Strengthening this role was one of the major targets Cristina Herrero set in AIReF’s Strategic Plan 2020–2026 for her term.
She noted that the process has been strongly shaped by developments at European level. The 2017 ECOFIN recommendation led to the commissioning of the first Spending Review; this was followed in 2021 by the creation of the Public Expenditure Evaluation Division and by the continuation of evaluation work under the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan. A further ECOFIN recommendation in 2025 now calls for evaluation to be integrated into budgetary decision-making before 2027.
Stable structure
Although embedding evaluation as a core function within AIReF has been a significant challenge, the President noted that the institution now has a stable structure, supported by specialised in-house staff, strong data-access and data-management infrastructure, and the use of increasingly advanced evaluation techniques. She added that AIReF’s evaluations have also shifted from studies aimed mainly at identifying fiscal space to analyses focused on efficiency and effectiveness as a way of ensuring a better use of public resources.
AIReF’s methodology is aligned with OECD standards and best practices. It is organised around a three-phase model: definition, evaluation, and communication and implementation. AIReF attaches particular importance to this final phase, as ensuring that its evaluations have practical value is one of the main aims of the work. To this end, the institution publishes the evaluations on its website, presents them to the Government and to stakeholders, and disseminates the main findings through press conferences, videos, infographics and summary documents. It also provides an interactive tool that supports monitoring: The AIReF Observatory of Findings and Proposals. This Observatory has also been recognised by the OECD as an example of best practices.
Challenges and future prospects
Looking ahead, Cristina Herrero emphasised the need for a budgetary planning framework in which evaluation is built into every stage, helping to improve spending efficiency and strengthen accountability to citizens. She noted that some regional governments have already begun to incorporate AIReF’s recommendations into their budgetary policies, for example Aragon’s initiatives to encourage the use of biosimilar medicines.
She added that, although significant progress has been made, important challenges remain if high-quality and policy-relevant evaluations are to be sustained. These include the need for a regulatory framework that supports the continuity of evaluation activity. More specifically, she referred to the importance of explicitly incorporating the evaluation function into the Organic Law governing AIReF, establishing a transparent and consistent system for organising and prioritising evaluation requests from all levels of General Government, and giving the institution greater scope to determine the studies it undertakes.
Criteria for commissioning and suggestions for areas to evaluate
She announced that AIReF is preparing to publish a resolution setting out the criteria for prioritising evaluations and the procedures for commissioning them, together with a list of areas that the institution considers important to assess. It will also open a participatory space on its website to gather suggestions from the public.
Cristina Herrero identified three additional challenges: ensuring transparent follow-up of AIReF’s proposals by all levels of General Government, including through their inclusion in the Observatory of Findings and Proposals; organising dissemination events in the Autonomous Regions that request evaluations, to strengthen their impact at regional level; and improving access to, and the use of, anonymised public data, supporting its wider use across the evaluation community.
