Interactive programming of rural development funds – lessons from the field

Within this paper, we present an interactive modelling approach to support budgeting decisions at the program level and discuss its potential and limitations to contribute to more objective-oriented policy-making. The central feature of the approach is a linear optimisation model which is interactively defined and used together with the Ministry of Agriculture and the Environment in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. We show how the current EAFRD framework can be translated into a model, and how this provides positive learning effects and increases in-house communication and transparency. From a conceptual point of view, the case study underlines the necessity to provide a simple and applicable methodology causing certain compromises with regard to theoretical soundness.