ELARD and LDnet organized a workshop “Communities as change agents: local development in the EU beyond 2020” at EWRC on 10th October
European
LEADER Association for Rural Development (ELARD) and Local
Development Network (LDnet) organized a workshop “Communities as change agents: local development in the EU
beyond 2020” at European Week of Regions and Cities in Brussels on 10th
October.
As
time draws closer to start preparing for the post-2020 period, this was a good
moment to reflect on what CLLD (Community-Led Local Development) has achieved
and how its application and delivery systems can be improved in the future.
Over 150
participants attended the workshop, representing EU,
national, regional and local policy/decision makers, authorities managing and
evaluating cohesion policy programs and projects and other stakeholders:
private companies, financial institutions, European and national associations
and LAGs.
The debate on
“Communities as change agents: local
development in the EU beyond 2020” identified the following key points:
- Community-Led Local Development (CLLD) has high
potential to address challenges of different types of areas (rural, fisheries
and urban) and to contribute substantially to business development, job
creation, sustainable energy production, community cohesion, cooperation
between EU territories. In the period, post-2020 CLLD can be an important
factor in maintaining the relevance of EU cohesion policy for local actors.
The discussion confirmed that CLLD can deliver
sustainable solutions because of the unique methodology which it applies and
its ability to motivate and bring together different actors. Allocation of a
significant part of cohesion policy funding to CLLD in the next programme
period would help to bring out its full potential, also in urban areas, which
are in strong need of this approach but in which (in contrast to rural and
fisheries areas) there has been a relatively low uptake of CLLD funding so far.
- one of the key aspects of the “value added” of
CLLD is the empowerment of the local community and the participatory character
of decision-making. To stimulate this, the local action groups (LAGs) need
skills and resources for a wide range of animation activities, and this need is
likely to even increase in the future. One of the challenges is how to evaluate
the value added of animation and to be able to prove it has a tangible impact.
In CLLD, its capacity of bringing people together
to generate new ideas was considered to be at least as important as the funding
of projects. The discussion demonstrated that while CLLD does deliver tangible
results, its long-term impacts (e.g. in terms of community resilience or
changing mindsets), observed through success stories and case studies, are
extremely difficult to measure; a significant effort of practitioners and
researchers is needed to address this.
- the success of CLLD in this period and in the future,
will depend on efficient delivery systems which are adapted to the bottom-up
character of the approach, ensure a high level of autonomy of the local
decision-making process and enable a flexible, non-bureaucratic policy response
to local needs. An in-depth reflection of the CLLD delivery systems is urgently
needed.
There was strong agreement that the simplification
agenda needs to reach out to all the levels of the delivery chain, including
the local beneficiaries. A variety of solutions were suggested, including the
possibility of treating the whole local strategy as a single grant.
Participants stressed the need for proportionality of controls in case of
small-scale projects and improving access to EU funding for citizens and NGOs.
The importance of trust across the delivery chain, willingness to share power
with lower levels and avoiding “gold-plating” were mentioned, as well as the
need for programme authorities of the different EU Funds to fully understand
the specificity of the CLLD approach.