With the reforms of Structural Funds there has been a considerable tightening of the guiding principles of Community actions. Among these, a primary role has been given to evaluation. In this context, the paper deals with what has been realized for the evaluation of rural development policy, comparing various experiences in Italy with reference to the Rural Development Plans. The aim is to verify, on the basis of (meta) criteria, the methodological contents of the mid term evaluation reports of 14 RDPs in the centre-north of Italy. Through the analyses and the comparisons of these reports, the paper is an attempt to reconstruct the “quality” of the evaluations with specific reference to the methodological aspects, the models and the procedures adopted by the evaluators.