Analysing and Validating Area-Based Policies’ Design. the Case of Urban Regeneration Policies in Spain

The literature on public policies sustain that ‘policy design’ is a critical issue in order to analyse and evaluate them. Nevertheless, the analysis of urban policies normally pays little attention to this aspect. The aim of this paper is to introduce this important issue in the analysis and evaluation of urban policies. In this sense, we present a proposal to analyse the design of urban policies oriented to improve socioeconomic profile of neighbourhoods and reduce their imbalance regarding other neighbourhoods. First, different indexes are proposed and validated in order to measure three main aspects of policies: diagnosis, objectives, and policy tools designed to accomplish objectives. Second, these indexes are used to analyse two main aspects of policies design that normally help to explain their implementation, results, and impact: ‘rationality’ and ‘coherence’.The analysis is applied by using content-analysis of documentation from projects of urban generation projects in Spain, in the frame of EU regeneration and social cohesion program. Results show the variability in the level of quality in the design of urban regeneration project that could affect the quality of their implementation, results and impacts.