Summary:

Multifunctional rural development is a proven in many European countries way of improving standard of living of farming families. The term also describes a lifestyle, implies maintaining rural traditions without resigning from the conveniences of modern civilization. Developing rural areas in this manner means accomplishing multitude of diverse projects. Multifunctional rural development is not only siting non-agricultural enterprises in these areas, but also preserving the landscape, the environment and traditional rural culture.
The paper describes how AHP - Analytic Hierarchy Process - has been applied to assess multifunctional rural development of 11 randomly chosen rural communes located in Małopolska Province. The way of accomplishing the required tasks has been examined from a fresh perspective and a novel manner, taking into account numerous factors and relations between them, of arriving at the planned goals has been proposed.
Because of its complexity, the structure of the problem is presented hierarchically. Priorities (weights) of each component element of the structure has been estimated by comparing them one to another in pairs according to the 9-point Saaty scale. Determining the priorities of component elements allowed to rank the communes according to their multifunctionality. The conducted sensitivity analysis made it possible to dynamically change the elements' priorities and monitor the influence this exerted on the problem as a whole.