Gateway 4: Rural development and the new rural economy ACHIEVING A COMMON STRATEGY FOR AN INTEGRATED RURAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN IN SOUTH ITALY USING ANALYTIC HIERARCHY PROCESS (AHP)

Rural development for objective 1 regions is also promoted through specific Integrated Plans, to be realized through the definition of Socio-Economic Partnerships. The members of these Partnerships are public and private subjects which represent the interests of local people and of the Government. The members of a Socio-Economic Partnership play different roles in society and thus have different opinions about the goals to be reached in order to promote rural development. The definition of common priorities for the Partnership as a whole is particularly difficult; as a consequence, conflicts may result in the decision making process complicating and slowing down the planning activity. The goal of this study is to present an interactive methodology that may be used in order to facilitate the convergence of the members of a Socio-Economic Partnership towards a common strategy for the definition of an Integrated Rural Development Plan of a certain area. The decisional problem consists in allocating the economic resources available among the several measures that can be promoted in the area. The methodology, based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), decomposes the decision problem in several levels which correspond to the different alternatives of development that can be promoted. The relative importance of every alternative is evaluate eliciting, through a questionnaire, the subjective preferences of each member of the Partnership. These preferences are successively transformed in quantitative terms and aggregated in order to define common priorities for the Partnership. For the aggregation of priorities a phased convergence process is proposed in order to facilitate the confluence of the individual preferences of the Partership members toward the definition of a common strategy of rural development for the area. The methodology was applied in order to allocate the financial resources provided by the EU to an Integrated Plan for Rural Areas in Calabria, in South Italy. The Socio-Economic Partnership was composed by politicians, experts, associations, extension services and Trades Union. Their different opinions on the best final allocation caused stong conflicts during the assembly. The method allowed to overcome these conflicts and it facilitated the decision making process. This led to the definition of an allocation of financial resources developed with contribution of each member of the Partnership.