  We perform a detailed phenomenological analysis of how well hadronization in
nuclear environments can be described in terms of effective fragmentation
functions. The medium modified fragmentation functions are assumed to factorize
from the partonic scattering cross sections and evolve in the hard scale in the
same way as the standard or vacuum fragmentation functions. Based on precise
data on semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering off nuclei and hadron
production in deuteron-gold collisions, we extract sets of effective
fragmentation functions for pions and kaons at NLO accuracy. The obtained sets
provide a rather accurate description of the kinematical dependence of the
analyzed cross sections and are found to differ significantly from standard
fragmentation functions both in shape and magnitude. Our results support the
notion of factorization and universality in the studied nuclear environments,
at least in an effective way and within the precision of the available data.
