The assessment of rural development: Identification of an applicable set of indicators through a Delphi approach

Abstract In spite of the decreasing differences between rural and urban areas (e.g. in their economic structures) there are still several limitations that the rural world has to deal with. In a constantly changing world, rural development policies are a crucial issue to respond to current and potential future challenges of rural areas. They must therefore be flexible to reinforce or discard objectives as new challenges arise, enabling the necessary adaptations in the territories. All this justifies the call for a set of indicators that allow an accurate evaluation of these policies and programmes. This paper presents a set of demographic, economic, environmental and social welfare indicators that must be taken into account to assess rural development and related policies. Using the qualitative Delphi methodology, a group of experts analysed 88 proposed indicators, after which a set of 25 was selected based on their importance and on the consensus of the panel. The panel also estimated the weight of each of the four dimensions considered (population, social welfare, economy and environment) within an index to measure rural development. It has therefore been found that, in addition to the economy, social welfare is one of the areas that contributes most to the development of rural areas, thus contradicting “traditional” indices based solely on economic and demographic indicators. All this points to the need to evolve towards an index based on the results of this paper.