Dealing with Uncertainty in Public Preferences for Rural Development Policies: A Contingent Valuation Survey

Dominguez-Torreiro M. and Solino M. Dealing with uncertainty in public preferences for rural development policies: a contingent valuation survey, Regional Studies. Rural development programmes are currently envisaged as a means to foster the provision of a broad range of non-commodity outputs emanating from multifunctional rural environments. This paper presents a contingent valuation survey that analyses individuals' perceptions of and willingness to pay for the implementation of a rural development programme in Cantabria, Spain. Uncertainty in individuals' preferences is explicitly acknowledged and introduced into the analytical framework. For that purpose, a comparison is made between the open-ended and the multiple-bounded uncertainty elicitation formats. The expectation of a positive welfare change constitutes a sound argument in favour of regional rural development policies.