Recently, significant economic, social and cultural changes take place in rural areas. Most countries faced the challenges of rural development when the focus on agricultural and agro-industrial production and support for farming ceased to produce tangible socio-economic results. The potential for sustainable development of rural areas is based on a whole range of material and intangible resources that can act as drivers of economic growth and achieve the quality of the socio-ecological environment by attracting investment, stimulating innovative processes, and engaging highly qualified human capital. The interdisciplinary approach can help to open up instrumental opportunities for developing methods for assessing and analyzing intangible resources for rural development. The aim of the research is to identify the advantages and limitations of using an intangible-oriented approach to the justification and implementation of rural development policies and to identify various types of intangible resources for rural development. The authors solve the problem of assessing the efficiency of use and the subsequent build-up of intangible resources for the development of rural territories based on the building of an appropriate toolkit. The authors propose an interdisciplinary instrumental approach to assessing intangible resources for rural development, which is the basis for the subsequent development of taxonomic signs of empirical models of rural development policy depending on the availability and characteristics of intangible resources, as well as introducing model strategies for incorporating intangible resources into rural development policies.