The integrated approach in the 2007/2013 RDPs

Achievement of the objectives of the rural development policy, be they linked to sector competitiveness, to the development of rural areas or to institutional governance, also depends on the identification of effective intervention instruments.
This assumption has guided the implementation, in the National Strategic Plan (NSP) framework, of an action strategy focused on the integration of various intervention instruments as regards to the rural development policy objectives.
Three types of integrated approach are provided by NSP: for agricultural farms, for supply chains and for territorial development. Integrated planning should ensure efficacy of the interventions through procedures that are easy to access and whose leading theme is integration of objectives and action instruments. Integrated planning is not new; in fact, it had already been proposed as an implementation instrument during the 2000-2006 Planning period within the Regional Operational Programmes (ROPs)framework for the Objective 1 Regions, and it takes on particular characteristics since it is supported by the Community Strategic framework. Regulation 1698/05 and the Community Strategic Framework1 (CSF) support strongly, even if sometimes not in a very clear way, intervention approaches based on the concept of integration of instruments, agricultural farms, subjects and territories. It is not a coincidence that the rural development policy presents a methodological axis, the Leader one, aimed at the integrated management of rural development plans, with a programmatic approach that involves local players. To identify the strategic objectives of the rural development policy, in many passages the CSF highlights the need to develop integrated intervention strategies that can act upon the main sectoral and territorial issues and push the Member States to use complex instruments that go beyond the Leader approach which, while presenting new features than ever before, has specific objectives and reference territories (the most rural areas) clearly identified and can only meet some of the rural development policy objectives.