Government Support to Community-Led Innovation in Rural and Peripheral Europe

Rural and peripheral areas suffer from multiple inter-connected crisis, going from social to demographic, climate, environmental, economic etc, and influenced by multi-level dynamics. Local government has a crucial role into boosting community-led innovations which can address existing challenges and turn them into opportunity for place-based development. Community-led innovations emerged as ore holistic, fit to local needs and grounded on solid community ownership. In our research, we investigated policy strategies, programmes and instruments as well as governance frameworks across 6 EU countries and their contribution to trigger and strengthen community-led innovation. An in-depth analysis of the results allows to identify the role of governmental bodies at different levels (EU, national) and their contribution to supporting community-led innovation in rural and peripheral Europe. Based on this research, we drew our conclusions on the role of government in supporting community-led innovation in rural and peripheral Europe and its implications for the post-2027 EU policies on regional development, innovation and competitiveness.