Local Action Groups and Rural Sustainable Development. A spatial multiple criteria approach for efficient territorial planning

Rural Sustainable Development is a very important topic under the European Union policy, and it is currently promoted through the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development 2014–2020. This fund is managed at sub-regional level by the Community-Led Local Development approach that involves Local Action Groups in order to promote the objectives of Rural Sustainable Development within rural municipalities. Each Local Action Group applies the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats analysis in order to identify for its own rural municipalities the strategic elements to which it will allocate the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development budget. Nevertheless, this analysis has some general shortcomings, including difficulties in managing a large number of Strength and Weakness factors. In addition, the importance of each factor cannot be measured quantitatively, and the same factor may be characterized both as a Strength and a Weakness. Further difficulties may occur in the case of partnerships between different Local Action Groups, such as disagreement about whether a given factor is a Strength or a Weakness, lack of information about the relationships between Strength and a Weakness factors and decision alternatives, as well as impossibility of ranking the decision alternatives. Thus, this research aims to overcome the drawbacks of the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats analysis and to support Local Action Group partnerships in the sustainability evaluation of their rural municipalities, and therefore to aid the identification of a common Rural Sustainable Development strategy to allocate the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development budget. This decision problem was tackled by applying a Multiple Criteria Spatial Decision Support System that integrates a Geographic Information System with the Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding methods “Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution” and “Dominance-based Rough Set Approach”. In order to demonstrate the validity of this methodological approach, this Multiple Criteria Spatial Decision Support System was applied to a study area of thirteen rural municipalities located in Apulia Region (Southern Italy); these municipalities belong to the same landscape unit, but they are managed by five different policy makers that represent the Local Action Groups. The results provided the maps of environmental, economic and social sustainability rankings of rural municipalities as well as their overall sustainability value. Based on these rankings, a specific Rural Sustainable Development strategy was identified for the allocation of the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development. This methodology provided a common decision making framework that can also be applied to Local Action Group partnerships within the European Union.