Law Commons^™

How Should Rural Policy Be Evaluated If It Aims To Foster Community Involvement In Environmental Management?, Katrin Prager, Birte Nienaber, Barbara Neumann, Alistair Phillips

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

This paper brings together different theoretical perspectives to propose an evaluation framework for policies which have the explicit aim to foster communities' involvement in the management of their natural environment in the context of sustainable rural development, such as the EU LEADER programme, Australia's Caring for Our Country, and UNESCO Biosphere Reserves. Previous policy evaluations have over-simplified the complex social-ecological systems on which these policies are intended to act, have lacked specification of the policy level they address and were predicated on the assumption that policies can be designed to produce predictable outcomes. Based on a concept of ‘complex realities’ …