State Chancellary: Ex-post Evaluation of the National Defence Training and Youth Guard Law

The State Chancellery is the centre of government in Latvia, ensuring that policy documents and draft legislation comply with applicable requirements, coordinating Cabinet of Ministers’ activities, and developing policy action plans. It provides the Prime Minister and the government with data- and research-based analysis, policy scenarios, and expert input to support informed, evidence-based decision-making.

Under the Public Administration Modernisation Plan 2023-2027, the State Chancellery is responsible for strengthening Latvia’s regulatory impact assessment system, including introducing the practice of ex-post evaluation of laws with a high impact level.

Civitta was tasked to conduct the first comprehensive ex-post evaluation of the National Defence Training and Youth Guard Law.

Led by the State Chancellery in close cooperation with the Ministry of Defence and the Youth Guard Centre, the assignment aimed to determine whether the Law was achieving its objectives and how it affected its target groups, while examining key implementation factors: the adequacy of related legislation, training tools and methods, personnel preparedness, alignment of training content with the Law’s objectives, material and technical resources, and the involvement of educational institutions and their founders.

The findings were intended to inform potential improvements to the Law and its implementation and to contribute to the development of Latvia’s broader practice of evidence-based ex-post legislative evaluation.

The Law underpins two flagship instruments of Latvia’s comprehensive national defence system: National Defence Training (VAM), a compulsory secondary-school subject reaching all students (26,613 learners in the 2024/2025 school year alone), and the Youth Guard, the state’s voluntary youth defence-education programme.

In the current security environment, the government needed reliable, evidence-based answers on whether these programmes actually build young people’s knowledge, skills, patriotism and readiness to defend the state, and where the regulation or programme design needed to change. 

The evaluation was commissioned and led by the State Chancellery, working in close cooperation with the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Latvia and the Youth Guard Centre as the key stakeholders responsible for the Law’s implementation. Its results were also intended to build Latvia’s institutional practice of ex-post legislative evaluation as such, promoting data-based decision-making and better-quality legislation.

Civitta designed the evaluation as a mixed-methods study combining qualitative and quantitative research.

Because the Law’s original annotation contained only limited information on intended impact and no concrete indicators, Civitta reconstructed the intervention logic of the Law, covering the rationale for its adoption, the intervention description (goals, stakeholders, target groups, activities), output and result indicators defined during the evaluation, and achieved results and impact.

This reconstructed logic model became the analytical backbone against which the eight research-question blocks defined in the technical specification were assessed.

Data collection combined five instruments:

1. Systematic document analysis of national and EU planning documents, the Law and its annotation, related regulations, informative reports to the Cabinet, Youth Guard Centre annual reports and the education programmes themselves;
2. 35 interviews (including 2 group interviews) with Youth Guard instructors, Youth Guard Centre regional administrations, educational institutions, the Ministries of Defence and Ministry of Education and Science, State Education Development Agency, NGOs and the youth self-government;
3. Three large-scale surveys (644 Youth Guard members, 2,205 VAM graduates and 198 educational institutions), providing demographically and regionally diverse, representative samples;
4. Four focus-group discussions with VAM students and with the officials implementing both programmes; and
5. Statistical data analysis for 2020-2025 (numbers of VAM learners, participating schools, camp participants, Youth Guard members and instructors, State Defence Service conscripts and defence-sector career pathways of former Youth Guard members).

A distinctive feature of the approach was the reconstruction of the Law’s intervention logic: as the indicators of the Law’s intended impact were not consolidated in any single document, Civitta identified and compiled them from across multiple sources (the Law’s annotation, related policy planning documents and informative reports), complementing them with information obtained during the evaluation and, through the surveys, creating a representative baseline the client can reuse for further impact analysis and long-term monitoring.

The data-analysis systematically disaggregated results by home language, gender, school type (including former minority-programme schools), region and type of settlement. Sector expertise was embedded by pairing Civitta’s evaluation team with recognised external experts in societal resilience and education.

The work was carried out under the leadership of the State Chancellery’s Public Administration Policy Department in close cooperation with the Ministry of Defence and the Youth Guard Centre, from an inception meeting on approach and methods, through progress and review meetings after each deliverable, to joint recruitment of respondents (schools, instructors, youth self-government) and presentation of the final conclusions and recommendations at an event organised by the client.

The evaluation gave the government its first robust measurement of the Law’s effects, based on more than 3,000 respondents across three surveys, 35 interviews and four focus groups.

Among the key findings, 76% of VAM graduates assess the acquired skills as useful, with discipline and responsibility (68%), cooperation skills (62%) and practical skills (61%) rated highest.

The Youth Guard programme achieves its goals even more fully. 93% of members enjoy participating, 95% consider it useful, 91% of schools rate instructors as professionally prepared, and 95% of schools rate cooperation with the Youth Guard Centre positively. 

The evaluation also quantified the core design problem of VAM. The programme allocates 102 hours to military content but only 6 hours to civic participation and 4 hours to crisis resilience, a disproportion directly mirrored in students’ lower self-assessments in exactly those competences. It also showed that only about 5% of VAM students attend the camps where practical skills are best consolidated.

The evaluation confirmed that the Law’s goal is being achieved overall, while pinpointing both where it is achieved only partially (in the civic-participation and crisis-capability dimensions of VAM and in the uneven impact across regions and language groups, weaker in Riga and among Russian-speaking youth) and the main areas for improvement: instructor workload and retention factors, urban infrastructure inequality, and under-used NGO partnership potential.

Civitta delivered ten actionable recommendations in two groups:

• three requiring amendments to the Law (broadening the Law’s goal to a comprehensive national defence perspective; simplifying the science-field requirement for instructor qualification; maintaining and developing the Youth Guard programme at secondary-school level),
• seven concerning programme content and implementation (rebalancing VAM content proportions; strengthening instructors’ methodological preparation; differentiated approaches for diverse student groups; a clear content distinction between VAM and the Youth Guard at secondary level; reducing urban infrastructure inequality; expanding direct NGO involvement; and establishing a systematic long-term impact data-collection mechanism).

In recognition of Civitta’s contribution, the Youth Guard Centre awarded SIA “Civitta Latvija” a Certificate of Gratitude “for contribution to the development of the Youth Guard Centre” (Riga, 20 May 2026), signed by the Director of the Youth Guard Centre.

The results provide the evidence base for reviewing and improving the Law and both programmes, and the indicator framework created during the evaluation enables ongoing monitoring of their long-term impact. Beyond the specific law, the project contributes to establishing the practice of ex-post legislative evaluation in Latvia, supporting data-based decision-making and improvements in the quality and effectiveness of legislation.

Ex-post evaluation is feasible and valuable even where the indicators of a law’s intended impact are not consolidated in any single document, provided the intervention logic is carefully reconstructed and the indicators are identified and compiled from across multiple sources and complemented during the evaluation.

Large, well-designed samples (over 3,000 respondents) make it possible to move beyond anecdote and identify statistically visible differences between regions, language groups and school types, which is where the most policy-relevant findings emerged. Evaluations of politically and socially sensitive programmes benefit greatly from triangulation: survey data, interviews, focus groups, documents and statistics consistently cross-validated each other.

Civitta combined public-policy evaluation methodology (intervention logic, mixed-methods design, representative sampling) with deep engagement of sector experts in societal resilience and education, and managed a demanding multi-stakeholder field programme (schools, instructors, ministries, NGOs and young people) within a strict six-month timeline, delivering clear, decision-ready conclusions and recommendations.

The approach is directly transferable to ex-post evaluations of any high-impact legislation or public programme (in education, defence, social policy or beyond), and is equally relevant to organisations (governments, agencies) that need to build an indicator and evidence base for policies whose intended-impact indicators were never defined or consolidated in one place, and then use it for ongoing monitoring.