Review of international approaches to evaluating rural and community development investment and supports. ESRI Research Series 124 April 2021.

Whelan, Adele and McGuinness, Seamus and Barrett, Alan (2021) Review of international approaches to evaluating rural and community development investment and supports. ESRI Research Series 124 April 2021. UNSPECIFIED.

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Abstract

The Department of Rural and Community Development (DRCD) was established in July 2017. Its mission is to ‘promote rural and community development and to support vibrant, inclusive and sustainable communities throughout Ireland’. DRCD’s Statement of Strategy 2021-2023 commits to building capacity to evaluate its work and impact to inform ongoing development of policies and programmes. As such, in September 2019 DRCD and the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) entered into a joint Research Programme to help inform the Department’s rural and community development policy. This report is the first output published under the Research Programme. Its aim is to identify international approaches to the evaluation of rural and community development activities. In turn, this will help to improve public knowledge of measurement and evaluation of projects with a rural and community development emphasis and help inform policymaking decisions of the Department. All DRCD programmes and expenditure are targeted at rural and community development. However, DRCD programmes and expenditure are categorised into different areas of activity in this report to provide focus for the analysis of evaluation approaches internationally. Six main areas of activity were identified to review and examine the associated international approaches to evaluation. The majority of DRCD expenditure is targeted towards programmes with community and/or rural related objectives. For example, four programmes, focusing on either rural or community development, account for approximately 50 per cent of all DRCD expenditure in 2019. Therefore, most emphasis is placed on assessing international approaches in these areas. Many department programmes also involve capital spending. As such, a greater emphasis is also placed on approaches to evaluation in this area compared to other areas examined in this report i.e. enterprise supports, employment supports, and supporting/ developing amenities, which are outlined more briefly. In general, there are specific challenges associated with measuring the causal impact of both community and rural development programmes. For other areas, such as capital expenditure, the framework is more easily defined with Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) being the main method of assessment. Enterprise supports, employment and provision/development of amenities also generally have a clearer method for analysis. These overall findings and next steps are discussed below for each of the six main areas of department activities.

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