Public organizations and local rural development: an empirical study

This paper describes an empirical approach designed and adopted to analyze and qualify the role of some public agencies devoted to rural development. These public organiza-tions operate as critical agents in managing local public goods within a complex relation system function-ing on a rural area. On the bases of the experiences and observations made on a case study in Central Italy, it emerges an analytical frame-work deriving from the correlation of an objective and subjective per-spectives in the evaluation of these organizations’ performances. From these correlations, it derives a model to empirically classify these agen-cies evaluating also their potentials in creating integration, condensa-tion and amalgamation phenom-ena based on trust, efficiency and effectiveness and their eventual potentials in determining positive impacts for the rural areas in which they operate.