Regions around the world employ cluster-based policies as part of their industrial, innovation and development policy mixes. They have become a key tool in smart specialisation strategies and are increasingly used to address societal challenges. Given their popularity and longevity, there is significant demand to better measure and understand the impacts of cluster policies. Yet the diversity of cluster policies employed in different regional competitiveness policy mixes, a complex effect logic and a variety of (mostly intangible) outcomes, and few recognised norms for guiding cluster policy evaluation all hamper a more holistic understanding of their patterns of effects and broader impacts. There lacks a common frame to guide cluster policy evaluation. This paper reviews international evidence on the effects of cluster policy programmes from academic and policy literature, which is then used as an input into a co-creation process with groups of cluster policymakers, practitioners and researchers. The result is a proposal for a generalised framework of effects for cluster policies to support the structuring of cluster policy evaluations and strengthen international policy learning possibilities.

世界各地的地区都采用基于集群的政策作为其工业、创新和发展政策组合的一部分。它们已成为智能专业化战略的关键工具，并越来越多地用于应对社会挑战。鉴于它们的受欢迎程度和寿命，迫切需要更好地衡量和了解集群政策的影响。然而，在不同的区域竞争力政策组合中采用的集群政策的多样性、复杂的效果逻辑和各种（大部分是无形的）结果，以及很少有公认的指导集群政策评估的规范都阻碍了对其影响模式和更广泛的理解影响。缺乏一个共同的框架来指导集群策略评估。本文回顾了学术和政策文献中关于集群政策计划影响的国际证据，然后将其用作与集群政策制定者、实践者和研究人员群体共同创造过程的输入。其结果是一个关于集群政策效果的广义框架的建议，以支持集群政策评估的结构并加强国际政策学习的可能性。