Recently, the perception of farming and fishing villages has been changing from the simple food production space to the complex settlements space where life and relaxation and industries are harmonized together. Accordingly, the paradigm of the rural ...
Recently, the perception of farming and fishing villages has been changing from the simple food production space to the complex settlements space where life and relaxation and industries are harmonized together. Accordingly, the paradigm of the rural development policy has been changing, and amid these changes, the Block Grants System, in which autonomous and creative projects can be promoted by local governments through the amendment to the Special Law of Balanced National Development in April 2009, was adopted. So, more that 200 regional development accounts projects that were promoted separately will be merged into 24 groups so that they can be promoted with local governments taking the lead. Under these circumstances, institutional devices to enhance the outcomes of changing policies are needed, and it is the evaluation of the projects that plays the greatest role among such devices. The evaluation will become the surest institutional device to estimate how efficiently the costs of projects, which are suitable to the project goals in the systems that local governments choose, plan, and perform autonomously, are invested. Through the evaluation, whether or not the rural development projects are carried out efficiently and effectively can be checked, and they can be guided and led so that they proceed in the more expansive direction.
In accordance with such changes, the evaluation on a project group basis, which is more extensive and integrated than the existing evaluation that has been done on an individual project basis, is needed. Since individual projects are integrated into one project group in accordance with each local government’s long-term comprehensive development plan, the existing indicators in evaluating on an individual project basis are bound to have limitations in evaluating the future projectsthat are promoted on an integrated project group basis. Under these circumstances, the minimum common indicators of evaluating projects through using the same objective criteria are needed, and since the projects are promoted with local governments taking the lead, the local governments also need to have objective indicators, through which to judge whether or not the projects are promoted in line with their proper purposes.
The purpose of this research is to determine minimum common indicators through which to evaluate the projects of general rural development project groups in accordance with changes in the rural development policies with the same objective criteria, and to develop the evaluation program by utilizing this. To achieve this, the candidate group of the evaluating indicators was established through the cases of evaluation indicators at home and abroad and experts meetings, and the evaluation indicators were chosen through Likert scale and brainstorming. Also, in order to analyze differences in the degree of importance among indicators, weighting was calculated by utilizing AHP technique and by utilizing this, the project evaluation program was developed.
This research is meaningful in that it has developed the evaluation indicator to manage the outcomes in the new system of promoting rural development projects. Also, it could be seen objectively through conducting questionnaire survey on experts and analysis that, unlike the existing evaluation indicators on an individual project basis, the evaluation of the capabilities of the projects’ principal agent, ripple effects, and monitoring is more important. These indicators can be utilized as basic indicators to find which aspects of the project should be evaluated to make it possible to manage the outcomes. Together with this, the evaluation indicators by project stage which was chosen in this research are expected to be utilized as objective basic data for local governments or project performing organizations to make preparations for intermediate self-evaluation or main evaluation to identify the appropriateness of the projects and to establish the direction of the projects. Based on this research on the evaluation indicators, it is considered that follow-up researches on the role of the principal agent of evaluation to attain more objective and integrated evaluation should be made.