Strategic Priorities and Implementation Gaps in Urban Agriculture Policy in Korea: An Integrated Analytic Hierarchy Process and Importance–Performance Analysis

Background and objective: Urban agriculture is increasingly recognized as a strategic instrument for sustainable urban development, but policy implementation often lacks clear prioritization under constrained resources. This study aimed to identify strategic policy priorities and implementation gaps in urban agriculture development in Korea by applying an integrated multi-criteria decision-making framework based on practitioner perceptions.Methods: Data were collected from 71 practitioners across agriculture, education, public administration, and on-site urban farming sectors in Korea. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to calculate priority weights for five urban agriculture policy domains, using 20 valid pairwise comparison responses that satisfied the consistency criterion of CR < 0.20. Importance–Performance Analysis (IPA) was conducted using the full survey sample to examine perceived importance, perceived performance, and implementation gaps across detailed policy actions.Results: The AHP results showed that climate-crisis response and carbon neutrality received the highest priority weight (0.33), followed by biodiversity conservation (0.21) and therapeutic value (0.20). ESG management linkage ranked fourth (0.15), while smart agriculture and smart farm technologies received the lowest priority weight (0.11). The IPA results indicated that perceived performance consistently fell short of perceived importance across all domains. Implementation gaps were particularly pronounced in biodiversity conservation and climate-crisis response and carbon neutrality, while deficiencies across implementation factors reflected broad implementation-capacity limitations rather than statistically distinct rankings among individual factors.Conclusion: The findings suggest that future urban agriculture policy in Korea should prioritize environmental, ecological, and social-value functions while strengthening implementation capacity in areas where practitioner-identified gaps remain substantial. By integrating AHP-based priority assessment with IPA-based implementation diagnosis, this study provides practical insights for improving the coherence and effectiveness of long-term urban agriculture planning and governance.