Evaluation of an Impact Assessment Process for Rural Development Plan Measures

Christina Moulogianni, Basil Manos, Stefanos Nastis, Stathis Klonaris

Abstract: Impact Assessment (IA) is an important process in order to help both researchers and policymakers to identify the vulnerable points of policies with final goal to improve them. For this reason, European Union introduced impact assessment, as a mandatory process in all new policies and directives. One of the main EU policies are the Rural Development Plans (RDPs), as a part of the second pillar of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which are implemented in every member-state. The aim of this paper is to evaluate an impact assessment process for the rural development plan measures. This process was implemented as case study for a specific measure of the Greek RDP. The implementation of the impact assessment process refers to a sample of farms participating in the measure 121 “Modernization of agricultural holdings” in the region of Central Macedonia in Greece for the programming period of 2007–2013. From the evaluation of the IA process very useful conclusions were raised. The results will help the researchers and the policy makers to make improvements in every step of the impact assessment process.

Keywords: impact assessment; impact assessment process; rural development plan measures

Date published: 2018-01-31