According to the European Commission:

The Common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework (CMEF) provides a single framework for monitoring and evaluation of all rural development interventions for the programming period 2007-2013. The CMEF establishes means for improving programme performance, ensuring the accountability of programmes and allowing an assessment on the achievement of established objectives.

At a European level, the Rural Development Programme 2007-2013 defines three core objectives:

• Improving the competitiveness of agriculture and forestry by support for restructuring, development and innovation;
• Improving the environment and the countryside by supporting land management;
• Improving the quality of life in rural areas and encouraging diversification of economic activity;

A fourth “horizontal and methodological axis” is dedicated to the mainstreaming of the LEADER approach.

Each European Member state developed their National Programme in “light of these objectives and European priorities and, based on the analysis of their own situation, choose which measures are the most appropriate ones to implement each specific strategy”.

The CMEF adopt a hirearchy of objectives to allow for the common monitoring and evaluation of member state programmes. The hierarch of objectives is described as:

a tool that helps to analyse and communicate programme objectives and shows how local interventions should contribute to global objectives. It organizes these objectives into different levels (objectives, sub-objectives) in the form of a hierarchy or tree, thus showing the logical links between the objectives and their sub-objectives. It presents in a synthetic manner the various intervention logics derived from the regulation, that link individual actions and measures to the overall goals of the intervention.
The rural development regulation contains also horizontal objectives that cut across all programme measures.

For more information on the CMEF please refer here http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/rurdev/eval/index_en.htm