| The purpose of this study is to identify and measure the effectiveness of the Taiwanese Council of Agriculture's overall success in promoting "leisure agriculture" development. An 18-member expert panel, consisting of farm owners, scholars, and policy enforcers, was interviewed to identify the potential indicators for the performance evaluation. A panel of three researchers then reviewed these indicators and developed the evaluation framework. Thirty-three performance indicators for the performance evaluation were embedded within three dimensions: economy, enjoyment, and ecology. Using a mailed survey, 509 stakeholders (including farm owners, scholars, and policy enforcers) were asked how satisfied they were with each of these 33 performance indicators. Using confirmatory factor analysis, data were analyzed to confirm the content validity of these three dimensions as well as an evaluation framework developed for this study. After developing the evaluation framework, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was utilized to assign weights to selected evaluation indicators using the judgments of the 18-member expert panel. The AHP provided more useful quantitative information about group preferences, satisfaction levels, and an overall performance score then the importance-performance analysis did.; The results of this research show that the stakeholders deem these three dimensions of the evaluation framework as equally important. This suggests that future development should focus evenly on the economy, enjoyment, and ecology. On a scale of 0 (low) to 10 (high) these stakeholders gave an overall policy evaluation score of 5.9. The scholars assigned a slightly higher average rating (6.1) to the policy than did the farmers (5.8) and the policy enforcers (5.9). Thus, the policy was judged to be only marginally successful by all groups of stakeholders. From the micro view, the ratings of most economic indicators were below the average, indicating the economic performance needs to be enhanced. |
