Closing remarks on the Evaluation Report on the Analytical Capability of the ESM

Karin Creutz

Finnish Evaluation Society (SAYFES)

This methodologically creative and extensive evaluation report both assesses technical performance and invites critical reflection on the institutional culture, learning processes, and strategic foresight that underpin financial stability work in Europe. From the perspective of The Finnish Evaluation Society (SAYFES), several features are particularly noteworthy.

The work brings to the fore key aspects of both evaluation and foresight, resonating strongly with our association’s strategic focus on supporting evaluation-informed decision-making and promoting societal impact through high-quality evaluation. The report effectively maps achievements in integrating analytical tools and expanding preparedness. Notably, it points to a clear institutional shift from reactive to proactive and preventive orientations – a major cultural and operational transformation, which we perceive as welcome. This shift requires independent analytical capacity supported by partnerships with evaluation experts, and deep systemic insight in national and sectoral contexts. It also illustrates the need for well-documented adaption processes and for descriptions of how the tools in practice are brought to a domestic level.

Another important strength lies in the reflexivity and operationalisation of the recommendations, such as the double loop approach. They stand out for their pragmatism: institutionalising external vetting, promoting cross-departmental synergies, and enhancing the connection between analysis and policy action. This reflects a growing understanding that capabilities are not only technical assets but also organisational and relational ones, and aligns well with SAYFES’s commitment to fostering a learning-based evaluation culture that actively contributes to solving complex, multi-sectoral societal challenges. The evaluation points to the need for institutional elasticity in a crisis-prone world.

This brings to the fore a dilemma that the report also highlights – siloification – the lack of synergy across national, institutional, and disciplinary boundaries. For example, the ongoing difficulty in integrating market intelligence with macroeconomic monitoring signals an unresolved structural issue. While data may be collected, it is not always sufficiently contextualised or synthesised into actionable early warnings. This limits the ESM’s potential as a truly anticipatory institution. The constraints could be alleviated by insourcing knowledge through collaboration with the evaluation community, and through deeper access to country and sectoral insights.

From the perspective of our association, the findings also reflect a classic capability gap: tools and data exist, but are not yet systematised, accessible, or consistently usable across units. For an institution tasked with macro-financial surveillance and crisis response, this fragmentation creates vulnerabilities in both preparedness and execution. What is needed, therefore, is an analytical system capable of delivering timely, policy-relevant insights under pressure. This observation is supported by our aim to promote the visibility, usability, and influence of evaluation in high-stakes and time-sensitive policy environments.

The report furthermore provides a deeper understanding of the challenge of turning dispersed expertise into shared, policy-relevant knowledge. It also shows how risk is not merely identified, but constructed – filtered through institutional models, normative frameworks, and political sensitivities. This is a reminder that analytical capacity is shaped by institutional imagination and boundary work, and in this sense, the ESM plays an important role in epistemic governance. It does not merely respond to crises – it co-produces the knowledge through which crises are understood and interpreted. The way ESM frames vulnerabilities and stability conditions, shapes how markets, member states, and the public perceive economic risks and stability.

At the same time, it is essential to acknowledge the political sensitivities in which the ESM operates. To fulfil its enhanced preventive role, the institution must be able to act with sufficient analytical independence. This calls for anticipatory governance that fosters trust, transparency, and constructive collaboration among Member States, and that acknowledges how knowledge is mobilised, how policy options are framed, and how legitimacy is maintained. This highlights one conclusion of the report: the importance of common conceptual interpretations and understandings of key definitions. It also supports the call for cross-sectoral translation, such as turning numbers into policies, and interpreting weak signals in one domain into analysis of their effect on others.

SAYFES’s strategy for 2025–2028 explicitly aims at strengthening evaluation as a tool for understanding and addressing multi-layered societal challenges, and to ensure that decision-making is guided by reliable, timely, and independent knowledge. We share the view that institutions must be equipped for more than reacting to crises – they need the ability to learn, adapt, and shape futures in informed ways. In accordance with our strategy, this calls for a broader understanding of evaluation as a means of navigating uncertainty towards resilience. This evaluation report demonstrates the kind of forward-looking, learning-oriented work our association calls for.

Our association looks forward to continuing the discussion on how we can learn from crises in ways that shape future readiness. We invite evaluators, users of evaluation, and decision-makers across sectors and disciplines to join our endeavour in developing a dynamic, knowledge-based evaluation culture, and strengthening institutional capacities through collaboration, knowledge exchange, and shared learning. We warmly welcome everyone interested in advancing this mission to connect with us and become part of our evaluation community.