Multi-criteria decision approach and sustainable territorial subsystems: An Italian rural and mountain area case study

The paper aims at identifying opportune territorial subsystems using Rough Sets Theory (RST) to propose private and public leaders’ information for developmental tools combining economic, social, accessibility and environmental aspects. One of the most relevant characteristics of RST is traceability. The other determining property is that it is based on ordinal properties. Finally, yet importantly, is the fact that no weights are needed. Our case study, Belluno province, Italy, is, according to the EU, a predominantly rural and largely less favoured area. Following a bottom-up approach, different areas have been identified: in decline, rural at risk of decline, strictly rural, touristic and urban. As is well known, rural areas are complex territorial systems. The result of the RST application was the evidence of their complexity, which has been confirmed by the generated decision rules. The town and tourist centres are easy to describe: the identified rules are shown to be unambiguous. In contrast, our analysis confirms the great heterogeneity of places identified as rural. The decision rules obtained, suitable for the preparation of sustainable territorial development programmes, revealed the simultaneous presence of certain characteristics that lead to a different sustainability status. Moreover, they discovered factors causing disadvantage or risk and, at the same time, disclosed several important features aimed at reaching the desired level of sustainability. Even though they may point to conditional attributes, which, perhaps, cannot be modified in the short run, local decision makers may benefit from the results of the analysis through the explanation of the problems that may obstacle the expected development. We additionally demonstrated that RST has several properties and a high potential in this context of study.