Empowering Local Action through Neo‐Endogenous Development; The Case of LEADER in England

Abstract

Neo-endogenous rural development depends on 'bottom-up' activities that integrate external influences to increase local potential. This local focus calls for local knowledge, local resources and the engagement of local people to be central to development processes. Based on data from an evaluation of LEADER in England, we explore the scope for local control and the effective means of creating local empowerment within the neo-endogenous model. Interviews were held with policy actors and beneficiaries of funding across 20 of the 64 Local Action Groups in England. These highlighted a great diversity of projects generating an equally diverse range of outcomes. However, capturing their full value was problematic, suggesting that new approaches to evaluation should be explored to increase local control of the development process. Findings also indicate that the negotiation between top-down and bottom-up, and local and external influences is an ongoing process. Through this process, local learning has empowered local actors to develop flexible approaches tailored to their localities, but local empowerment is more effective when top-down parameters are clearly established.

Rural Marginalisation and the Role of Social Innovation; A Turn Towards Nexogenous Development and Rural Reconnection

“…The neo‐endogenous model acknowledges the importance of external relations and interaction between communities as contributors to local development (Bosworth et al . ), but it does not consider development as imported from outside, as in the exogenous model. Last but not least, the conviction that social relations and the reconfiguration of alliances are key to social innovation underlines social innovation's proximity to ideas of relational place‐shaping and place‐making where the relations and interactions between actors are expected to shape development (Woods ).…”

3.1 Is Social Innovation a Key to “De-peripheralization”? Dealing with Challenges of Peripheralization on a Local Level

“…When individuals or a small group of people come up with new ideas, bigger organizational and financial support will be needed to realize the project. A well-known EU-program is LEADER, which supports rural development projects initiated at the local level (Bosworth et al 2016). Although programs from superior levels that support bottom-up approaches in regional development do exist, there is a need to expand external support, which addresses the different character of regions.…”

A new approach for participative rural development in Georgia – refl ecting transfer of knowledge and enhancing innovation in a non-European Union context

“…LEADER is a placebased neo-endogenous rural development approach which aims at making effective use of local assets and resources by strengthening the regional identity of rural residents and integrating incentives from outside the region (Bosworth et al, 2016;Dax and Oedl-Wieser, 2016). It provides a proactive perspective towards nurturing potentials and addressing (social) innovation such as shared learning processes and the mutual exchange of knowledge and ideas (Bock, 2012;.…”