Topic summary
LEADER programme
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Community-led local development.
History and funding
Writing in the Regional Studies Association blog, Haris Martinos of LDNet points out that the idea of local development arose spontaneously in the 1980s before attracting the interest of EU policy-makers and being operationalised within the LEADER programme in 1991. However policy interest declined in the 2000s. After 2010, interest resurged and the ‘CLLD’ label was introduced for the 2014-2021 EU programming period. However there are fears that CLLD has lost its strategic purpose and become reduced to a bureaucracy for spending relatively small sums of public money.