Measuring the impact of public institutions on lagging rural and coastal regions

Anne Busselot


A collaborative European RTD project is aiming to evaluate public policies or programmes of actions for rural development in lagging regions, to propose "guidelines" for the implementation of diversification policies in marginal communities and to forecast the impact of future policies under various scenarios and in different contexts. The six elements of the research are:

(1) to describe the institutional context dealing with rural development and its functioning

(2) to inventory the different policies implemented, with their area, target groups and potential recipients

(3) to understand the decision-making process of the institutions, i.e. on which beliefs do they base their policy-making decisions

(4) to evaluate these policies, characterising their impacts on local employment in a process or comprehensive evaluation

(5) to describe and analyse the local system with a focus on economic dynamics

(6) to simulate possible future policies or events

The research studies the hyper-complex system comprised of many interacting complex systems which are the institutions, the enterprises and farms, and the policies or programmes. The policies or programmes are most often negotiated by several organisations, as they may depend on joint-funding (e.g. EU Programmes 5b), or simply be implemented by several institutions. Considering this, we took account of the opinions and strategies of the actors in our analyses and evaluations.

The data used for the analysis derives from three main sources:

(1) documents : presentation of budget decisions, evaluations etc.

(2) business interviews and

(3) institutional interviews.

The first give information on the different policies operated by the various institutions, their reasons for operating them, their problems of choice in the drawing up of budgets, and the point of view of institutions on the evaluation of policies. The second give us more accurate information on which type of enterprises, farms or associations benefited from the policies, on the internal impact of the project on the businesses, in terms of outcomes, quantity and quality of jobs created or retained, satisfaction of the entrepreneurs, impact on the economic environment, as, for example, induced activity in other businesses. The third is a key source as the information recorded here will be useful for all of the points described in the structure.

This programme (European research project : AIR3 - CT94 - 1545) is co-ordinated by Dr Gordon Clark, Department of Geography, Lancaster University. The other participants are the departments of geography of the Universities of Leicester and Coventry, of the University College Galway, of the University de Caen (CERVIR), of the University of Valencia ; the departments of agricultural economics of the University of Patras, of the Scottish Agricultural College of Aberdeen and of the Cemagref of Clermont-Ferrand ; the Welsh Institute of Rural Studies, and the TEAGASC (Dublin).


Contacts:

Dr Anne Busselot

Cemagref Domaine de Laluas 63200 RIOM

Tel : (+33) 73 64 50 50  Fax : (+33) 73 64 50 51

Tel direct : 73 64 50 65

Dr Gordon Clark

Department of Geography, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YB

Fax : +44 1524 847 099    Tel : +44 1524 593 740



23 October 1996