Rural Development Programmes and Strategic Environmental Assessment: towards a Sustainable Rural Territory

The rural landscape and the areas of the agricultural production represent, for Italy in particular, one of the main cultural and ecological richnesses of its territory. It is, however, a complex reality in continuous growth, contaminated by a growing urban sprawl, more and more dissimilar from its bucolic idealisations and less and less coherent with the rhetoric of the environmental protection and safeguard. In these months, all over Europe, the rural development programming 2007–2013 (RDP) is in progress, according to the EC Regulation n.1698/2005 that disciplines the support of the EAFRD of the rural development of the state members. On this subject, all the regions are elaborating their own RDP, equipping it with a strategic environmental assessment (SEA), according to the European Directive 2001/42/EC about the assessment of the effects of plans and programmes on the environment. The authors of this article elaborated the SEA for the RDP of two regions of Northern Italy (Piedmont and Valle d’Aosta). The article discusses how the combination of the two new instruments (RDP and SEA) can carry out an important role in determining the evolution of these territories in the dualism ‘urban-rural’. It considers the choice of impact indicators, the role of the participation process and the predisposition of a monitoring strategy of the program performance. The article discusses the ability of the SEA to produce sustainable endogenous development in a territory, in which the sustainable development of its rural areas and the neo-metropolitan dimension which it belongs to, can concur.