LDnet

Local Development Network

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LEADER: Where it came from and what’s still in it

LEADER has a long history and is still going strong. Robert Lukesch gave a talk in the final conference of the transnational project ‘LEADER/CLLD: Our common future’ on 4-6 November 2024, in Cheleiros/Mafra, Portugal, on the topic of ‘LEADER: Where it came from and what’s still in it’. This was based on a treatise in […]

European Court of Auditors report on LEADER and CLLD

The long-awaited special report of the European Court of Auditors on LEADER and CLLD has been published. The overall message from the ECA is that “LEADER and community-led local development facilitates local engagement but additional benefits still not sufficiently demonstrated”. We present below the Executive Summary and the Conclusions and Recommendations. We have also published […]

4th European Rural Parliament – Let Europe´s rural voice be heard

The 4th European Rural Parliament took place in the rural, green north of Spain, in the coastal village of Candás (Asturias) from 6th to 9th November 2019.  Alistair Adam Hernández participated and his report is presented below. I attended the ERP as LDnet representative and was kindly invited to join the German delegation. The choice […]

CLLD experiences and ‘hot’ questions for the future

There are many challenges facing the implementation of CLLD and the multi-fund approach. A recent seminar European Seminar on CLLD took place on 8-10 November 2017 in Győr, Hungary, focusing on capitalising and learning from experiences of applying CLLD in rural, urban and coastal areas. Participants also discussed how to use European programmes and funds […]

European Rural Parliament and the “Venhorst Declaration”

The 3rd European Rural Parliament took place on 18-21 October 2017 in Venhorst in the Netherlands. The European Rural Parliament is a long-term campaign to express the voice of rural people in Europe; and to promote self-help and action by the rural people, in partnership with civil society and governments. During these four days, around […]

Local development in the EU beyond 2020: Practitioners and researchers kick off the debate

On 10 October 2017, LDnet co-organised with ELARD a workshop on “Communities as change agents: local development in the EU beyond 2020” as part of EWRC 2017.  It was followed by a networking session co-hosted by the Regional Studies Association. An impressive line-up of local practitioners and international experts led a lively debate, with many […]

Resilience and its Core Principles – The key to Sustainable Rural Development?

Learning to Shape Change actively in European Rural Areas Since the late 1990s the use of the term resilience has experienced a bonanza (Bürkner, 2010; Vogt, 2015). It is now ubiquitous in European cohesion and regional policy and is often used in a transdisciplinary manner (Lukesch, 2015). In the meantime it has risen to become […]

Challenges facing the implementation of CLLD and the multi-fund approach

‘Community-led local development’ (CLLD), previously known as ‘the LEADER method’, is for many still a quite new way to work with local development. In the current programming period 2014-2020 there are even more possibilities available for funding. Four different EU funds can be used for CLLD and a successful recent European seminar, held on 7-8 […]

LDnet at EWRC 2016

LDnet’s workshop in this year’s European Week of Regions and Cities on ‘Achieving social inclusion in CLLD in the context of the results-orientation of the ESI Funds’ took place on Wednesday 12 October from 9:00 to 10:45 at the Committee of the Regions (Workshop Ref 12B76 ). It was very well attended and focused on the […]