I am looking for approaches and tools applied in European contexts for the evaluation of policies with a specific focus on territorial cohesion and local-regional development.
Policy assessment is one of the most important stage for the successful use of the public money for the benefit of society. Assessment/evaluation of policies is often comparation between what is expected and what is observed. Human development concept one of the important policy assessment process using by social sciences researchers. In the field of impact assessment, policy researchers have been considered independent variables and dependent variables as their tool. Independent variables such as demographic variables like size of household and socio-economic variables like as type of house, pattern of land ownership and income, occupational structure, income from wages, migration, income from other sources, consumption pattern, expenditure pattern and savings and indebtedness can be considered. Dependent variables also studied by policy researchers at the time of policy assessment.
this is an open EU platform (realised by DG Regio and JRC) useful for checking and downloading data (urban and regional ones). Hopefully it could be useful for understanding territorial trends and suggesting policy pathways accordingly. https://urban.jrc.ec.europa.eu/#/en/trends?context=Default&territorialscope=EU28&level=NUTS2&indicator=TOT_POP
I am not sure whether I understand what you are looking for, but as far as I understand using content analysis could help you through policy assessment. For instance, you can take a quick look at Lucio et al., 2013 and one of my papers named "celebrating diversity".