Examples of Consistency and Variability: Rural Policy Reviews of OECD Countries

Between 2006 and 2009, the OECD undertook a series of reviews of national rural development policy. The reviews largely followed a consistent approach and used the OECD's New Rural Paradigm (NRP) as a common metric for assessing various national approaches. Although the reviews cannot be considered a formal evaluation of these rural policies, they do provide: a fairly uniform description of the policies being followed, a critique of the policies, and recommendations on how policies might be modified to make them more consistent with the philosophy of the NRP. In the paper we describe the review process and provide a synthesis of the OECD findings for the nine rural reviews. In all cases there was some evidence that parts of the NRP were being followed, but that significant parts of it were not yet adopted. Because of the diversity of situations, it is not surprising that each nation continues to follow an individual path in developing its rural policy, even though all members of the OECD have formally accepted the NRP as a guide for rural policy.