Development of an evaluation instrument for agricultural policy measures on a regional level with special consideration of regional sustainability

Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Culture

When looking at the problem of evaluating policies towards sustainable development it can essentially be seen as conflict analysis characterised by technical, socio-economic environmental and political value judgements. Therefore it is very difficult to arrive at straightforward and unambiguous solutions. This implies that evaluating such a multi-related policy field will always be characterised by the search for acceptable compromise solutions.

In this paper we will try to show the development of an evaluation instrument for agricultural policy measures - on a regional basis. This instrument should be able to measure the effects of single policy instruments (e.g. price subsidies,...) according to their capacity to reach regional sustainable development. It is basically built up in four parts: Economic model, agro-ecological model and a social indicator set. To be able to compare and thus to evaluate those sets of data it will be necessary to introduce - as a fourth step - multicriteria analysis.