Territorial Impact Evaluation: The Target_TIA

Abstract

This article elaborates on the process of assessing territorial impacts, which can be used on the evaluation of the European Union policies and programmes. Alongside, it analyses the ever growing presence of the territorial dimension in the process of impact assessment, in order to complement the most common procedures of environmental and socioeconomic impact assessment. Furthermore, we propose a completely new model to assess territorial impacts (the TARGET_TIA) since, in our view, the existing methods suffer from several setbacks, for instance in neglecting important components of territorial analysis. Finally, we applied our proposed model in order to assess the main territorial impacts of the European Union Cohesion Policy in Portugal (1990-2010).