Nine strategic priorities for locally-based LEADER development – Our Common Future

The LEADER Transnational Cooperation Project ‘Our Common Future’ involved 12 partner Local Action Groups (LAGs) from ten countries - Austria, Luxembourg, Portugal, and Bulgaria, as well as associated LAGs from Sweden, Finland, France, Spain, Latvia, and Italy - under the coordination of the Austrian LEADER Forum.

Based on a survey of more than 440 LAGs across the EU, carried out over 24 months between 2023 and 2025, the project reflected on the key needs for the future of LEADER.

The project aimed to explain why the LEADER approach, with its more than 30 years of history, remains highly relevant today for Local Action Groups across Europe, including rural, coastal, and urban LAGs, as well as for the many professionals and volunteers who work within them. It also sought to develop new perspectives for the future of community-led local development.

Beyond multiple crises and long-term, dramatic changes, the project recognises that rural areas are particularly affected by communication deficits in conveying the EU’s objectives, making clear information and trustworthy communication even more essential. Here too LEADER has a key role to play, for example by providing skills training for the local population in the use of digital media and AI.

The final report of ‘Our Common Future’ highlights a set of nine strategic priorities for strengthening the LEADER approach and securing its role as Europe’s leading model for participatory, place‑based rural development.  Overall, the findings suggest that LEADER should not be reduced to a local funding mechanism. Its future viability depends on recognising and strengthening its broader role as a European approach to participatory rural development. This means preserving LEADER’s capacity to connect local actors with European policy objectives, enabling innovation at local level, and ensuring that the approach remains a strong and visible instrument within the EU’s future rural and regional policy framework.

Nine strategic needs for LEADER’s future

A key condition for strengthening LEADER is to preserve and support the role of Local Action Groups as regional intermediary organisations. This does not imply that LAGs currently lack the capacity to fulfil this role. Rather, it recognises that their ability to connect public authorities, private actors, civil society, and underrepresented rural groups depends on stable framework conditions. The report identifies a persistent dilemma: ‘administration vs. innovation’. LAGs are keenly aware of the obligation to comply with increasing administrative requirements, often with very limited staff (the average across all Member States is two people or full-time equivalents per LAG) – which can create a tension that threatens their capacity to fulfil LEADER’s core development role. Simplification, stable financing and increased staffing are seen to be essential to maintain both compliance and innovation capability, including social innovation.

The project reaffirms the need to safeguard LEADER’s identity as a rural innovation laboratory and LAGs’ capacity to support the three phases of the social innovation process: invention, testing, and dissemination (see image below).

LAGs need clear organisational structures enabling them to run their own strategic or umbrella projects. Setting up LAGs as independent legal structures (such as associations, companies, or cooperatives) is seen to be crucial to enable LAGs to fulfil their role as innovation agents – otherwise the risk is that LAGs become purely administrative funding advisors and lose their developmental impact.

In addition, preserving LAGs’ autonomy and space for action is an essential condition to sustain creativity and bottom‑up development. LAGs need protection from excessive administrative burden, insufficient capacities (e.g. financial or human resources), and excessive external influence (e.g. from political or administrative bodies).

LAGs are well-placed to mitigate three critical challenges: the social gap (inequalities and exclusion), the cultural lag (slow societal adaptation to technological change), and the regional development trap (economic and demographic stagnation leading people living in these regions to feel left behind by a distant political elite ). Targeted participation, awareness, and training initiatives can reduce these divides at the regional level.

However, traditional output metrics risk failing to capture the added value of LEADER. New qualitative and mixed indicators are needed for this, and should reflect LEADER’s three pillars: democratic participation, the European perspective, and innovation orientation. This is seen to be essential for policy legitimacy and funding security. Recent work by the EU CAP Network can help capture LEADER’s multiple values even better.

To maintain their role as intermediary organisations, LAGs will need to pursue a dual strategy at national level. This should revolve around innovation management based on a multi‑actor approach (i.e. reinforcing LAG's capacity to promote and coordinate group work involving different types of actors and stakeholders) and on network management, supporting municipalities, agriculture, and businesses with practical capacity to implement LEADER/CLLD projects, thus promoting transformative innovations within a network of regions.

The final report of ‘Our Common Future’ also notes that strategic coherence with the Long-term vision for rural areas and stronger integration within the Rural Pact framework ensure that LEADER remains relevant and influential in the evolving EU policy landscape. LEADER has proved its contribution to everyday safety and resilience and democratic resilience in rural areas, and can help with new security needs due to emerging risk scenarios: it can help with crisis preparedness and social resilience, and with building competencies against disinformation and promoting media literacy.

Principles for the present and the future

From the outset, LEADER was designed to be community-based, and therefore fosters public acceptance of necessary innovations. The added value of LEADER thus lies in promoting local democracy and shared European perspectives. According to the Austrian LEADER Forum, "Our Common Future’ demonstrates that LEADER is currently the best method for developing rural areas in the EU".