COHERENCE BETWEEN STRATEGIES AND TOOLS IN ITALIAN RURAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS 2007-2013: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

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, 2004). We will analyze three main steps which have to be taken in applying this method: (1) identification of rural development priorities; (2) selection of rural development measures to determine rural development priorities; and (3) allocation of finance to take such rural development measures. Following this approach, the 21 Italian Rural Development Programs will be compared. The first results show that the different regions selected quite a large number of rural development measures from the potential menu. Moreover, the different importance given to the agricultural and rural sectors in selecting various measures is never clear-cut