AGENDA FOR FUTURE REFORMS".

Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies. 2 In the years to come Rural Development Policies will be an increasingly important part of EU Cohesion Policies. In particular, Convergence Regions with a high percentage of rural areas and a major development gap will be the most affected by this scenario. The objectives of this paper are twofold. The first is to analyze Italian Rural Development Programs in order to investigate how the Italian regional authorities have interpreted the potential role of the new RD programs and identified the specific strategies to be pursued. The second objective is to evaluate the coherence between strategies and tools indicated in the different programs. The financial plans will be compared in order to detect the possible different strategic approaches existing among regions characterized by different situations and development levels of the agricultural sector and the rural economy. For developing the analysis we will adopt the menu approach (Terluin, Venema