30^th January 2019, 14h30 - ELARD Members meeting

Portuguese Permanent Representation to the European Union - Avenue de Cortenbergh,12, Brussels

On the 30^th of January an ELARD Members meeting with representatives of Local Action Groups Networks was held in Brussels and part of the agenda was the ROAD thematic project “LEADER/CLLD for citizens and for the European Union”.

23 participants representing LAGs from 16 Member States had a long discussion on the future of LEADER and CLLD, in the framework post 2020 legislative proposals, both for the Common Agriculture Policy and for the Cohesion Policy.

The participants were of the opinion that the legislative proposals (for the Common Provisions, the Cohesion Policy and the CAP) should ensure that, in each Member State, a real multi-funded CLLD is possible, which has to include reinforced funding from Rural Development Fund and ring-fencing of funding in the other Funds (Regional, Social and Fisheries), they also stressed the importance of Rural Development to be part of the Common Provisions Regulation and multi-funded CLLD to be part of the Partnership Agreement of each Member State.

The achievements of LEADER/CLLD have shown that Local Action Groups (LAGs) are able to defend the European values, if recognised as local drivers for change and development and enabled to innovate in their areas, materializing the “Europe closer to citizens” objective, proposed by European Commission.
In the framework of ROAD project, ELARD will focus on presenting the added value of European Social Fund (ESF) and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) usage via LEADER approach and will conduct a survey and collect and document case studies to show this impact. Results of this work will be presented and discussed at the 4^th ERP in November, in Asturias.