Integrated approaches for evaluating development strategies in rural areas: case studies from Italy and China

The objective of this thesis is twofold: (1) to investigate the synergies arising from the implementation of multi-scale and multi-criteria approaches in the evaluation of rural development policies (RDP); (2) to explore the impacts and trade-offs of RDP in two selected case studies located in Italy and China. The thesis argues that multi-criteria and multi-scale approaches can be combined to provide a useful framework with which to structure an integrated analysis of RDP in order to assess their effectiveness in achieving sustainability goals across scales. The analysis is performed by selecting and evaluating multidimensional criteria, which represent the main goals of development policies in the areas of study. Moreover, multi-scale analysis is performed to define boundary conditions and trade-offs for future local development. The use of the two methodologies appears to be very significant to capture both the multidimensional and multi-scale aspects of the Rural Development Policies analysed and to generate several sets of “view-dependent” representations of rural systems that are useful for trade-off assessments.