Impact Evaluation: An Experiment on Development Policies in Agri Valley (Basilicata, Italy) Compared with New Urban Agenda Themes

The Cohesion Policy of the European Union was established with the aim of redistributing wealth between regions and countries and to stimulate growth in lagging areas. It is the most important structural policy in terms of financial commitment, geographical dimension and timing. The management of the EU Structural Funds (SF) highlights problems related to monitoring and evaluation; the latter aims to measure the effectiveness, efficiency and impact of programs; however, in the regional evaluations of operational programs, the impact assessment is underestimated. This paper is based on the results developed within the RI.PROVA.RE project and is aimed at defining an impact evaluation proposal based on the data emerging from the analysis of a specific case study. By the collection of territorial data on public investments financed by EU Structural Funds and other regional funds in the Agri Valley area, several graphic representations on the distribution of funds were made. In addition, the investment priorities were compared with the themes of the New Urban Agenda: the analysis of coherence between the objectives of the previous programs and the future perspective of urban development policies made it possible to identify weaknesses in rebalancing structural territorial trends.