Evaluating Local Economic Initiatives: an Assessment of the Rural Development Commission's Advance Factory Building Programme.

Abstract

This thesis presents the results of research which was aimed to develop and test a methodology to facilitate evaluation of the impacts, delivery systems and cost effectiveness of local economic initiatives in rural areas. The methodology was developed from a thorough review of recent evaluation theory, and was then used to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the Rural Development Commission's advance factory building programme within eight case study areas. The study demonstrates that by relating such an evaluation to an explicit hierarchy of objectives it is possible to establish the extent to which programme funding has been truly additional; to identify programme impacts; to distinguish between local, regional and national impacts; to evaluate impacts over time and to trace the impacts of local economic initiatives on local labour markets. The results show that, because of their failure to distinguish clearly between gross and net impacts, and between impacts at different spatial levels, previous researchers have probably over-estimated the cost effectiveness of such programmes. They also demonstrate that the employment impacts of the advance factory building programme had changed rapidly over the early years of an initiative, and "once-off" evaluations (such as those undertaken in the past) are therefore likely to provide misleading results. It is also clear from the present study that the wider impacts of local initiatives are unlikely to have been as significant as has been claimed by some previous researchers. On the basis of these findings a series of recommendations are made. This concerns firstly, the ways in which better evaluations might be conducted in the future, secondly, the manner in which the Rural Development Commission’s performance management systems could be improved, and thirdly, ways of enhancing the effectiveness of the advance factory building programme.