Impact Improvement

Every EU funded Joint Action coordinated by PROSAFE creates multiple impacts on the EU consumers, the economy, the environment, and the market surveillance community itself. Positive impacts range from the development and deployment of new innovative digital tools and good practices in market surveillance to economic, health and safety benefits for consumers and businesses.

Recently, there have been attempts to assess the overall performance of the EU market surveillance and measure its impact despite all limitations. The way forward chosen by the market surveillance authorities in partnernship with PROSAFE for amplifying impact was to systematise the sharing of good practices and smart tools,and the adoption of harmonised approaches to market surveillance and enforcement to promote compliance.

One of the first systematic attempts to this end was a new method development activity on impact improvement that was implemented within the framework of Joint Action 2015 (JA2015). Its objectives were to identify ways to improve the impact of cross-border Joint Actions with a focus on communication strategies. Improved communication, based on inclusive modern Outreach, Dissemination and Communication strategies, empowers consumers to make better informed purchasing decisions and educates economic operators about legislative developments and on how to satisfy existing product-specific requirements to help them place safe and compliant products on the EU market.

All successor Joint Actions built on the results and lessons learnt in JA2015, with a view to improve the amplification of technical, social, environmental and economic impacts on target groups. The goal is not only to measure or describe the change/impact but also to examine causal attributions, that is, to understand how its particular activity/intervention of our projects contribute to producing these impacts.

To this end, a calculation model for energy and financial impacts of non-compliance was first developed under the EEPLIANT2 project and will be upgraded by the successor EEPLIANT3 Concerted Action. 

Also, Joint Actions seek to influence policy development by spotting gaps or areas to improve in regulations and standards by developing actionable and evidence-based structural, legislative, and resourcing recommendations.