EVALUATION OF RURAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES FAILURES WITHIN THE 2007-13 REGIONAL POLICY FRAME

New 2007-13 planning framework of the EU keeps using economic criteria (GDP) to identify those regions requiring priority attention (convergence objective). Although these criteria are useful for the overall Regional Policy, nevertheless it might result some planning failures of the strategies of rural development. This work focuses in evaluating possible failures of the Rural Development Programmes. For this purpose, a wide range of member Estates and Regions has been selected and two analysis have been applied: first, the coherence analysis (in relation to the economic, social and environmental situation of territories); and second, the conflict (among the rural territories development objectives) analysis. As result of this evaluation, a typology of the analysed Rural Development Programmes will be shown, which identifies different cases of failures. This work concludes that the use of methodological criteria in Regional Policy complementing to the Efficiency criteria might improve the territorial cohesion process and reduce some of the analysed failures in rural areas.