Participatory Development of Rural Regions. Negotiating the EU-LEADER Program in Everyday Culture

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ove Sutter
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2016 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 322783243

Despite increasing processes of urbanization, a large part of the European Union's population still lives in rural areas. Subject to pressure, these areas are defined as problematic in EU development programs regarding issues of demographic change, ecological sustainability, social cohesion, or economic growth. EU regional development agenda such as LEADER aim to address these deficits by calling upon local actors to develop rural areas as part of the economic competition between regions and to arrange them according to entrepreneurial logics. In the process, the everyday life world becomes an object of regional planning in two ways: 1) The participatory community-led local development-approach of LEADER aims to include residents by requesting them to get involved with the drafting and implementation of regional development projects. 2) LEADER policy measures aim to change aspects of everyday life by trying to foster citizens' involvement, strengthen regional identity and to develop regional networks. From the perspective of European Ethnology, the project analyzes how the LEADER development program is implemented by local actors and in which ways it influences the everyday life of the population of rural areas. The study works with two main hypotheses: 1) The effects and functional principles of LEADER can only be analyzed if not only institutional frameworks and policy discourses, but also their implementation and their impact on the everyday life of the local population is considered. 2) The implementation of LEADER is shaped by processes of appropriation and translation of the development program in everyday culture. These processes can contradict the goals of LEADER. Central questions of the project are how inhabitants participate in the local implementation of LEADER projects, how they translate development measures into their everyday life worlds and which effects these translations can have on forms of everyday life-style, points of views, perceptions as well as cultural objectivations. Two ethnographic and discourse analytical comparative studies form the empirical basis of the project. They analyze local projects in two central fields of EU rural development: ecological sustainability on the one and demographic change on the other hand. The studies are carried out in the neighboring LEADER regions Eifel, Zülpicher Börde and Rheinisches Revier an Inde und Rur in the administrative district of Cologne. The aim is to strengthen a perspective which includes the everyday implementation and negotiation of development programs such as LEADER in the analysis of policy. Further, the project aims to contribute to socio-political debates on rural areas and on the democratic potentials of participatory forms of governance in processes of Europeanization.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants