The Finnish way of CLLD: place-based or half-hearted implementation?

ABSTRACT

The European Commission proposed the community-led local development (CLLD) approach as a specific tool for place-based local development, offering a unique chance for an integrative use of European Structural and Investment Funds on a sub-regional level. But in Finland, as in most countries of the EU, the adoption of CLLD has so far been limited. Providing an insight into the rationales and the ways of reconfiguring the ‘original’ CLLD concept in Finland, this paper contributes to debates concerning a place-based approach to local development in the context of the European Union’s Cohesion Policy. It particularly addresses the persistent questions of what is gained and what is lost through adjusting a top-down policy instrument to diverse national and local situations? Despite its emphasis on a multi-scalar and cooperative application, the Finnish approach is by design mono-funded, remaining administratively and geographically distinct, and thus cannot serve as a truly integrated local development tool as envisioned by the EU. However, across governance scales and cross-cutting networks, processes of learning and policy negotiation have taken place, which are crucial in the creation of ‘place-based’ variants of the ‘European’ place-based approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Community-led local development
• place-based approach
• Finland

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 LEADER is the acronym for the French ‘Liaisons Entre Actions de Développement de l'Economie Rurale’, meaning 'Links between the rural economy and development actions'.

2 By region is meant the 19 NUTS 3 regions of Finland (maakunnat).

3 The “Sustainable growth and jobs 2014–2020 – Finland's structural funds programme” (OP) received a combined amount of EUR 1,299,461,095 from ERDF and ESF under the Investment Package for growth and jobs in Finland.

4 ‘Ry’ stands for rekisteröity yhdistys, registered association.

5 The 15 regional Centres for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment are more or less according to administrative regions. ELY-centres are governmental organisations with varying supervision tasks in their regions. Four administer ESIF, in Northern, Eastern, Western and Southern Finland.

 

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under grant agreement No. 727097, project RELOCAL (Resituating the local in cohesion and territorial development), 2016–2021.