Intervention and resistance: institutional environment and local level autonomy in LEADER. A comparative study

In 2010, when hope emerged that the new conservative government would improve the governance of the LEADER Programme, the Naturama Alliance, a network of seven Hungarian Local Action Groups (LAGs), issued a Declaration that summarized procedural issues to be addressed by a revision.' After introducing the alliance, the first chapter was entitled "Decentralization and Autonomy", indicating the direction of the desired shift towards a more autonomous operation. The LEADER Programme is scrutinized in this article from the point of view of autonomy and local democracy, exploring to what extent these are linked with or distinct from higher level governance transformations towards decentralization or recentralization. Theoretical approaches derived from rural and government studies are interpreted in the first sections of the paper, exploring the debate regarding the correlation of autonomy and local democracy and the way it is manifested in LEADER. Most authors regard LEADER as a promoter of local democracy and identify a positive correlation between democracy and an enhanced local autonomy. However, a consensus among scholars also seems to be unfolding from these studies suggesting that the scope of 'LEADER democracy' is mostly narrow, restricting participation to more resourceful social groups due both to the 'thematic filters' of the Local Development Strategy arid to 'procedural filters', such as capacities allocated to the staff for animation and assistance to overcome difficulties of application. The empirical research background of this article is provided by two case studies, which were conducted in 2018-2019, one in England (Northumberland Uplands) and one in Hungary (Balaton Uplands), two states with complex recent histories and trajectories in terms of devolution of governance to lower levels and local autonomy. The secondary interpretation of these case studies focuses on the degree of participation and autonomy of LAGs. The analysis reveals that the degree of autonomy (and to some extent of participation) declined in both countries in the last iteration compared to the 2007-2013 programming cycle. It has also been uncovered that rather than the 'post transition', recentralized Hungarian context, it was the British institutional system arid governance tradition that permitted more top -down intervention and less autonomy for the LAGS.