Critical Evaluation of Business Support in Wales
Researchers: Frances Hines (Alumni), Diego Vazquez (project manager), Lara Hopkinson and Renee van Baar.
Background
During the last two decades, environmental business support has become an important aspect of business support in general in the UK. In the 1990s, a number of strategies, policies and initiatives aimed to address the environmental responsibilities of the business community and, stimulated with a range of funding approaches, resulted in a number of environmental business support organisations being set up. The newly arisen organisations offered a wide range of support, but suffered from criticism about the non-integrated and loosely connected infrastructure it had formed. Other criticisms were a variety in the quality and the spatial coverage of the services, leading to high competition in certain areas and poor provision in others.
Wales showed evidence of these weaknesses, yet it received a substantial amount of funding. As a result of several issues arising from the provision of environmental business support of Wales, a new approach was developed to try and provide a more coherent and coordinated framework and delivery mechanism by which the provision of support could be more effectively targeted, and seen more economically and environmentally efficient and which could be more easily evaluated against a range of targets and indicators being developed both within the Welsh Assembly Government, and externally.
