Approfondimento

Governet Project - Work Package n. 5

Simulation and validation of rural development models
Authors: Luca Ciresola, Riccardo Dalla Torre, Oreste Del Re,
Giovanna Guzzo, Paolo Rosato, Giuliano Zanon
COSES - Consorzio per la Ricerca e la Formazione
October 2006

The Work Package n. 5 aims at the definition of an optimum model for rural development governance, through simulating various alternatives. Both an expert team and the whole Governance Council contributed to the evaluation.
In order to give concrete form to the various steps of this plan, the project partner PP2 (Province of Venice) decided to focus the analysis on three different actions: training, marketing, exploitation of local typical productions.

Methodology

The Work Package n.5 was subdivided into consecutive steps:

• determination of the expert team for the periurban area of Mestre. The team included 9 experts, which represent different scientific competences and territorial ambits. The experts' team was involved in all passages established by the methodology
• indicators selection, basis for the expert team's evaluation. The expert team's evaluation was based on 18 potential indicators;
• the meetings for the evaluation:
  • pairwise projects evaluation (fuzzy numbers);
  • evaluation of projects impacts on the indicators;
  • use of direct impacts evaluation, for fixing a punctual value of the various actions importance (non-fuzzy numbers).

The whole evaluation procedure established in WP5 brought to the definition, for each evaluator, of a ranking among alternative projects. Despite a unique result was not reached, it has however been possible to make some considerations about the projects orders.

Conclusions

The expressed evaluations demonstrated that training has been considered absolutely the winning alternative, with respect to the other ones. It seems to be the initiative that better feeds the development path outlined in the previous project phase (WP4), which has the target to increase, in agricultural operators and consumers, an adequate culture of the product and of the environment where it comes out.

On the contrary, it is not so clear the preference among the remaining actions. In this regard, we must underline that the analyzed actions are not alternative choices between them (they don't exclude each other). The uncertainness about the second and third placed actions may therefore express the evaluators' groups' different sensibility among projects that could be carried out even at the same time.

The clearness and essential agreement between experts and Governance Council in choosing the training project demonstrate that, despite the analysis multiplicity and the different origin of compilers, the evaluation method was effective for both groups. The meeting between judgements expressed by the two groups on the winning alternative is a signal of success of the whole analysis process.

Fondaco Venezia - Cap. 16 Governet Project