The 20-20-20 EU targets, the relevant Directives and especially the so-called Climate and
Energy Package in 2009 have been quickly adopted in Greece causing structural changes in the
country’s energy and climate policy over the last years. Moving towards and beyond 2020 targets,
empirical insights need to be gained as to why policy instruments did not perform the way they were
expected to. Building on the existing theory based policy evaluation, a multi-criteria assessment
framework is adopted and applied on selected renewable energy support (RES) and energy efficiency
(EE) policies in Greece. Within this framework the role of context, implementation and design in the
efficacy of policy instruments moving from theory to empirics is discussed. Enabling and
constraining factors to policy efficacy identified under the framework of analysis are: political and
social acceptance, policy coherence, policy consistency and implementability. The evaluation
approach demonstrated that the effectiveness of RES policies seemed to be less vulnerable to
unexpected exogenous changes, while the performance of EE policies and measures has been more
dependent on the general investment climate. Policy inconsistencies, distortion in competition and
implementation hurdles characterize the performance of RES policies, whereas EE policies
demonstrate notable fairness in their allocation of costs and principles as well as enhanced policy
integration. Overall, in light of the revision of the national strategy and objectives regarding both the
support for renewables as well as the promotion of energy efficiency improvement, understanding
the factors that reduce the efficacy of policy instruments in practice, is crucial for the attempts to
improve (ex-ante) policy design.
