Regional aspects of decision-making support for rural development in Poland

Measures for rural development should be adapted to the specific regional conditions and national programs should allow for different regional priorities. However, decision-making for policy measures often takes place under special conditions with many concerned actors, unstructured decision problems and time pressure. These conditions, decision-makers in administrations and institutions are faced with, make the formation of policy-measures for rural development a complex matter. Thus, there is the question arising how decision-makers can be supported in setting priorities for allocating budgets for policy measures among regions. Recently, multi criteria decision-making approaches are discussed to tackle these kinds of decision problems. We show exemplarily for the Polish program of rural development, how decision-making could be supported using a multi-objective programming approach. Different preferences of actors can be considered explicitly by visualizing “trade-offs” and an interactive use of the approach. For example, a political "equity" objective is implemented as a constraint in the programming approach, restricting the budget differences between regions to a defined level. By a parameterization of the bound for budget differences, the "trade-off" between three objectives is displayed and evaluated. Using the exemplary programming approach, it is shown that the objective values of the two main objectives of the PROW decline, when the budget differences between regions are restricted for pursuing a political "equity" objective