West–East Differences in LEADER Program Results—The Expression of Wider Political and Governance Systems

Abstract

Rural development and reducing development disparities are two of the main objectives pursued at European level. Various development programs have been implemented, the LEADER program being one of the instruments offered to European rural areas for the financial support of disadvantaged communities. Despite its innovative bottom-up approach, the results on both the Western and Eastern EU countries sometimes question the program’s success. The present chapter intends to construct an overall assessment of the LEADER program by performing an analysis on its results in Romania, taken as a study case for the Eastern European countries, and comparing them to the LEADER results in Western European countries. The differences observed regarding the program’s performance in Europe will be discussed in relation to the wider political system and governance culture of the countries. The analysis aims at (1) drawing some general conclusions on the program’s results in Western European countries, based on the evidences existing in the literature and (2) assessing the quantitative results of LEADER in Romania, as an exponent of the peripheral, less developed postsocialists countries, which are less present in the literature. The key finding of our comparative work is that while the West faces a selective behavior of the program (in favor of already developed areas), in the East, in countries like Romania, a low impact is recorded, both in developed and disadvantaged communities, because of a chaotic behavior in the program’s implementation. This highlights the need to rethink the program's mode of operation so that it brings substantial results in terms of rural development. We argue that the adjustment of this mode of operation should be performed in relation to the prevailing governance culture in different countries.