Rural policy reform and local development programmes: appropriate evaluation procedures

Abstract

As a result of various political and economic pressures, European polices that affect rural regions have evolved to become more local and participatory, reflecting diverse and rapidly changing circumstances. The experimental LEADER programme has attempted to instigate innovative responses to characteristic rural problems by focusing on very small districts and providing funding directly to local people and their representatives, and this has raised problems in assessing their impact and success in conventional terms. Few accurate statistics are available at such a disaggregated level, and the greater impact of external influences obscures quantitative relationships that could be investigated using conventional cost-benefit analysis. Several illustrative individual LEADER group evaluation studies are used to construct an account of the difficulties involved in use of project outcomes, targets and indicators to describe the qualitative changes resulting from local, integrated projects. The major approaches, of semi-structured in-depth interviews, participant observation and documentary analysis are considered and used to place evaluation in the theoretical context of Habermas's concept of communicative competance. It is concluded that evaluation should be integral to lcoal rural development projects, and that whilst a range of investigative approaches have been used, in contrast there is scope for extension of the range of analytic approaches.