Community-led local development

The approach is regularly evaluated, and also discussed widely in academic literature on local economic and social development.

Projects are implemented as part of local development strategies (LDSs), which include in-depth assessments of the area, objectives and expected results.

As the LDSs present the main backbone of a LEADER area, they are (in most cases) developed in close cooperation with local and regional stakeholders, such as citizens, members of the LAG and other private or public partners (bottom-up approach).

Writing in the Regional Studies Association blog, Haris Martinos of [LDNet https://ldnet.eu/] 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 there are fears that CLLD has lost its strategic purpose and become reduced to a bureaucracy for spending relatively small sums of public money.