Overcoming challenges of evaluating integrated endogenous rural development and partnership interventions – A worthwhile exercise?

Supporting integrated endogenous regional development, community-driven initiatives and establishing partnerships are acknowledged as drivers of rural development. Common to these approaches is their potential for added-value creation, either through strategic planning and cross-sectoral consideration of resources like in the integrated approach and partnerships, and/or by forming social capital through joint actions. Though such interventions have been an inherent part of policy programmes for decades, evaluating the impact and legitimising public spending, as well as bringing systematic evidence for the added value of those interventions compared to conventional interventions still present a challenge. Evaluation methods, which allow one to underline added-value creation, mostly follow qualitative approaches that are not easily transferable and bring about non-comparable and non-summable results. Based on a review of existing evaluation approaches and their advantages, disadvantages and shortcomings, in this paper two novel evaluation approaches based on Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis and Social Network Analysis are introduced as a tool for evaluating endogenous and integrated approaches and partnerships. It is shown that when applied supplementarily within the proposed evaluation framework, both approaches can fruitfully address most of the identified common evaluation challenges, and are preferable to other evaluation methods in many regards, e.g. in making added value quantitatively feasible. The major drawback of the approaches is the high effort required for data collection.