General placement of the features of LEADER and the NRNs as policy instruments

A crucial question is how political processes vary in accordance with different, possibly multi-faceted policy instruments. A basic instrumental property of both LEADER and the NRNs is that they feature a policy instrument complex. Therefore, it is not straightforward to categorise them within the typology of policy instruments introduced in Chapter 2, Table 2.2, which helps to identify instrumental peculiarities and potentials.

To begin with the major categories, like all EAFRD interventions, both instruments neither fall into the category of Legislative and Regulatory Instruments when considering the relation between state and target group. At this point it has to be considered that deriving from agreed areas of EU competences, the range of acceptable actions initiated at the EU level in the field of rural development (similar to social and employment policies) is constrained.

Within EU rural development policies the use of Regulatory Instruments, taxes, levies or charges is not possible, and the range of instruments available is generally confined to investments or regular payments, loans or loan guarantees, and information and advice (UoG 2008).

The background relation - that between Member States and the EU - however, is a regulatory one, as the implementation of both instruments is obligatory and goes along with negative incentives for non-compliance with the common regulatory framework. Furthermore, common to both instrument-complexes is that most of their elements form – to a greater or lesser degree – positive incentives; some of their effects might be neutral, but they do not include any negative incentives. While LEADER covers both categories Economic and Fiscal Instruments, as well as Information and Communication Instruments, the NRNs fall only into the latter. With LEADER, not only can projects of the final beneficiaries, which are funded under Measures 41 and 42, be counted to the Classical Economic Instruments, but Measure 43 also falls into the category of Economic Instruments. This is because not only training or technical assistance, but primarily financial support for running the LAG and animating the territory, etc., is provided. “Capacity-building” as a subject of the intervention definitively suggests that Measure 43 belongs to the sub-category of Enabling Instruments.

Major elements of the NRNs also belong to the Enabling Instruments, as circulating EAFRD-related information should enable rural actors to benefit from and judge EU rural development policies. In this regard, the NRNs function as Meta-Instrument for the EAFRD.

Another feature of the NRNs which also appeals to the rational and intellectual side of the targeted actors are Best Practices, which were taken over from the LEADER programme in the former funding period. By picking up the potential instrumental effect of Best Practices, the NRNs are expected to contribute to enhancing the quality of rural development projects and to increasing the effectiveness of EAFRD funds. Like Best Practices, Symbolic and Hortatory Instruments belong to the group of Consciousness-raising Instruments. From the perspective of LAGs, Best Practices themselves feature a Hortatory Instrument, as they can also be seen as an award for well-performing LAGs and/ or innovative projects. Furthermore, in this regard the wide LEADER logo must be mentioned: in addition to promoting EU-funding, from the perspective of LAGs the logo indicates that values held dear and practices applied in a LEADER-region and their work is labelled with a quality seal, as they have been selected for funding. Thus, the logo is akin to receiving an award (at least to adept experts).

Affixing the LEADER logo on all projects funded under the programme is obligatory.

LEADER and the National Rural Networks 53 Reasons for this, which can be indirectly drawn from legal or other formal documents, are that the EC wants its contribution to rural development to be promoted (EC/2005/1698, Art.

76), its role in ensuring transparency in EAFRD implementation to be spotlighted, enhancing the visibility of the EU at the sub-national level and promoting the objectives of the Union.

Insofar LEADER, but also the NRNs certainly have information and communication functions.

The LEADER Axis as such can be categorised as a Learning Instrument, as not only within inter-territorial or transnational cooperation projects are the effects of knowledge exchange expected, but it is hoped to find (new) solutions to rural problems, which is further underlined by the programme’s emphasis on innovation. However, it still needs to be identified to what extent ideas or innovations emanating from LEADER really inform policy-makers involved in defining new approaches to rural development (similar to Schuh et al. 2006). Despite the tripartism of state, civil society and economic partners, as has been defined by Schneider and Ingram (1990) for Learning Instruments, this aspect has not been explicitly defined for the NRNs. Though, their design generally offers the potential to be used as a Learning Instrument. Seeing the provision of new communication and information channels and other enabling resources in the context of process regulation, it can potentially impact both, the negotiation of constellations at the national level and the societal opinion (Eising and Lenschow 2007). This aims at problem solving at the national level (ibid.) and suggests that also the NRNs contain the notion of a Learning Instrument.

When examining the type of political relations linked to the instrumental categories, promoting LEADER and the NRNs points to the governmental characteristic of a “mobilising state”, expecting an audience of the people and emphasising democratic patterns (Table 2.2).

In terms of legitimacy, both instruments appear as if they seek to make the target group jointly responsible for follow-up interventions and rectify other EAFRD interventions, and to explain governmental decisions, respectively. Their categorisation as Learning Instruments brings about the legitimation of the instruments as seeking the benefit for the community and social and economic efficiency. The beneficiaries might consider the political relation as a double-sided one linking them to actors at both the national and European levels, depending on how the programme is delivered.

Also decisive for operationalizing policy strategies are the rather technical and administrative features of policy instruments (Table 2.3). A crucial element of the LEADER Axis is that the projects funded under the main measure, Measure 41, are/should be primarily delivered by the LAGs to the final beneficiaries, implying that funds are only indirectly delivered by state agencies. Such an extension of the delivery system beyond the public administration forms a typical notion of “new policy instruments” as introduced in Chapter 2. For Measure 43 no general classification to either direct or indirect delivery is possible. Seeing the LAGs as the final beneficiaries of Measure 42, it is delivered directly through state agencies. For the NRNs, Member States could decide on their own if they apply a direct or indirect delivery design, i.e. if the network management is settled within state agencies or if this task is outsourced.⁵⁴ Independent from the type of delivery system, a major part of NRN activities has only an indirect influence on the target group through the transfer of information. Despite participation being voluntary, beneficiaries of LEADER are to some degree the subject of direct influence, as they have to consider the framing regulatory conditions.

54 Advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing the NRN management were the subject of discussion during a preparatory workshops on the future of networking in the 2007-2013 period, which took place during the

“LEADER+ Observatory steering committee seminar“, 31 January – 1 February 2007, in Brussels (available under http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/rur/leaderplus/index_en.htm, accessed 21.12.2011). An advantage of outsourcing was considered to be the fact that the communication to other actors might be easier. On the other hand the risk that the network could be taken under the control of one well-organised stakeholder group was considered. It was pointed out that public procurement will be required if management should be outsourced.

For both instruments it might be questioned whether they only provide direct support to the addressees to achieve certain behaviour or whether supplementing indirect support is by definition strived for with the two instruments. Within indirect support other layers of the administration or other actors provide an institutional framework to promote EAFRD goals.

In fact, Technical Assistance, under which mostly capacity-building within public administration is supported, is the most common example of indirect support (cp. UoG 2008).

However, in the case of the NRNs the categorisation depends primarily on whether the ministries see the network only as an External Instrument addressing rural actors or also as an internal one, i.e. as support to the politico-administrative system like classical Technical Assistance measures. Indirect support could also crop up, for instance, when rural inhabitants benefit from the activities of an organisation that realised issues it had learnt from an NRN. In the case of LEADER, supplementing indirect support is not self-evident; nevertheless, its aspiration is more obvious: if a LAG serves a whole region, people who are not aware of the programme are also likely to benefit from LEADER activities. In the dimension of accessibility, the NRNs should generally be universal, so that everybody can benefit from their products. In this regard, LEADER is contingent as well as universal: It is contingent as regions participating in the programme are selected. Here, contingency should be an incentive for better performance. Then again, despite that within the LEADER regions projects are selected, LEADER should nevertheless feature universal characteristics, as the majority of the regional population should benefit from a LAG’s activities.

The fact that both instruments address a wide range of rural actors might suggest that they are conspicuously drawing on the understanding of visibility held by policy scientists (Table 2.3);

however, LEADER and the NRNs are invisible in most Member States, as they make up only a small share of the EAFRD budget (Figure A.3.1). Vedung (1998) indicates an evaluation paradox that is likely to go along with policy instruments with an almost invisible character, but which are therefore those instruments most in need of intensive evaluation: they are subject to little evaluation because they tend to be cheap. Furthermore, two trends, outlined by Salamon (2002a), are not reflected in the budgets allocated to LEADER and the NRNs: The more visible a tool is, the more likely it is that it will serve redistributive goals; and conversely, the more special subgroups of the population are being targeted for benefits, the more attractive it will be to use less visible tools. This aspect does not allow direct conclusions on the capital or labour intensity of the instruments. Administering LEADER is by trend labour intensive. The main reason is that it is not an automatic tool, but each LAG and each project has to be administered as case-specific, and the processes cannot be generalised like, for instance, area-payments. Thus, in the course of implementation, the performance of the administration becomes an important determinant for the effectiveness and success of the programme. Whether LEADER is less labour intensive for state agencies due to the LAGs’ involvement in the delivery to final beneficiaries cannot be answered globally, and is likely to depend on the specific design of the delivery systems in the Member States.⁵⁵ In terms of policy-related transaction costs, case-dependency also applies to the NRNs, as NRNs’ agendas might include more or less automatic elements. Their network design in terms of the advantages that the organisational structures offer for transferring information suggests that they are in this regard, in comparison to other means, not capital and labour intensive. It was found that complexity in a delivery system, which can be ascribed to both instruments in comparison to other EAFRD tools, does not necessarily imply lower effectiveness (UoG 2008). However, two aspects make the instrumental comparison difficult in terms of effectiveness: First, the common objectives assigned to the instruments at

55 Moreover, taking into account that the judgement on capital and labour intensity is in fact made in comparison to the effort linked to other means, with which the same goal could be achieved, no final statement on this issue is possible. Analyses suggest that targeted interventions, such as LEADER with its focus on local delivery, are generally more efficient, but entail very high transaction costs (UoG 2008).

LEADER and the National Rural Networks 55 the EU level might have been supplemented by national ones. Consequently, an instrument might be assessed as being capital intensive by Brussels, but not by the Member States, or the other way round. This weighing becomes more complex under consideration of differing co-financing rates, not to mention that an instrumental comparison in the context of the NRNs is hampered by a deficit in defining the overall goals to be achieved. Second, assessing labour and capital intensity for these two instruments comparatively, is burdened, because elements inherent to them, such as strengthening human resources and organisational capacity, as well as the initiated governance processes and the production of social capital, are usually undervalued in efficiency and effectiveness analyses of delivery systems (UoG 2008) because they are of a rather intangible nature. The latter also reveals that devoting resources to support human and social capital appears to be more ‘risky’ than, e.g., funding physical capital, particularly with regard to external legitimacy.

Overall, both LEADER and the NRNs not only share the consideration of networking and governance structures in their instrumental design, but are also characterised by further notions typical for “new policy instruments”. These include their general horizontal character, the inclusion of information and communication means, and the more open and flexible relation between instrument and “to be governed”. The notions of new policy instruments also show up in the way the instruments are administered by, for instance, the involvement of third parties, as well as by the avoidance of automatic and command-like elements.

3.5 The implementation of LEADER and the National Rural Network in Romania