Employment and Job Creation in the LEADER Approach

Are Rural Stakeholder Needs Compliant with the Targets of the Europe 2020 Strategy? Text Mining Analysis of Local Action Group Strategies from Two Polish Regions

“…The outcomes of the analysis serve to demonstrate that the most common issue addressed within the investigated partnerships and found to be compatible with the Europe 2020 strategy was the creation of workplaces, often associated with support for entrepreneurship. Other published research results show that such goals are indeed considered high priority by LAGs both in Poland (Furmankiewicz & Campbell, 2019;Hoffmann & Hoffmann, 2018) and in other countries (Camacho et al, 2020).…”

“…The subject of renewable energy sources was barely present in the studied material. The relatively low interest in matters related to climate change and the development of renewable energy sources had already been observed for rural LAGs in Poland (Furmankiewicz, Hewitt et al, 2020) and in other countries, like in Spain (Camacho et al, 2020;Servillo & De Bruijn, 2018), however, regarding the latter issue, rural areas in Poland have yet to make use of their significant potential (Szewranski et al, 2019). This would require deliberate support due to the "energy poverty" observed within Polish local communities (Piwowar, 2020).…”

“…Educational activities are perceived as an essential element required to increase human capital, which is in turn viewed as crucial with regard to the functioning of citizens on the labour market, i.e. finding a job or starting a business (Camacho et al, 2020). All this points to the solving of social issues as being among the most important goals pursued through LAG activity (Zajda, 2014).…”

Rural development programmes: Lessons learnt, and knowledge advancement. A case study in Castilla-La Mancha (Spain)

“…The LAGs serve to link public and private sectors, accumulating experience in their respective territories and each generating their own strategy for endogenous, local development rooted in the rural environment (Bosworth et al 2015;Gargano 2021). The LAGs have become well-established and are recognised as agents for change in their territories (Esparcia et al 2015), although how they act on tangible reality needs to be evaluated, especially for the purpose of drafting the new strategy for rural development 2023-2027 (Camacho et al 2020). In essence, the LAGs can be useful for contributing to rural resilience and overcoming social disintegration and low participation by the local population.…”

“…But the results of the LEADER method have differed: some were as expected (Buller 2002;Nieto and Cárdenas 2017), while others were not. This suggests that the LEADER programmes were insufficient for dealing with the challenges that threaten the viability and even the existence of rural areas (Navarro et al 2015;Camacho et al 2020). This is a topic that has received little attention among researchers in Castilla-La Mancha and not much more in other Spanish regions.…”