Tag: assessment

Municipalities in Austria have been exploring ways to adopt inclusive and sustainable development approaches based on the built environment. It is a fact that the tasks of municipalities are becoming more and more comprehensive, while the resources available are not increasing to the same extent. However, the sustainable provision of municipal public services must remain a key component in strengthening rural areas. One way is to conduct a CommunalAudit. In addition to the identification of optimisation and development options, the CommunalAudit tool serves as a basis for inter-communal cooperation. Moreover, it enables municipalities to look at their finances and entire infrastructure in an objective and systematic way and to compare them with those of others. Between 2008 and 2013, the CommunalAudit was one of the measures within the Rural Development Programme in Austria. This contribution (a) explores the implementation of CommunalAudit in Austria, (b) highlights the benefits and drawbacks for municipalities and citizenry, and (c) looks at the former’s further development.

We investigated the extent to which the Local Development Strategy (LDS) activities planned at the beginning of the European Union’s Leader programme implementation period, and the associated budget allocation in response to the defined local needs, were confirmed at the end of the period. We used as examples the implementation of two LDSs, one by a Local Action Group (LAG) in Poland and one in Italy. We applied some simple indicators to assess how much the budget assumptions at the planning level were reflected in the successful implementation of projects, and conducted interviews with representatives of the two LAGs. We showed that the two LAGs were generally working effectively but that excessive institutionalisation could be the major constraint to the proper design of the LDS and thus the implementation of the Leader programme. For the Polish LAG, it was because of the transfer of the evaluating role outside of the LAG: assessment of applications was undertaken by the regional institution, the Agency for Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture. In the case of the Italian LAG, the reason was an excessive formalisation of the rules concerning project applications.