Nadezhda Stoyanova
CHALLENGES FOR LOCAL ACTION GROUPS IN BULGARIA
Summary:
Local Action Groups (LAGs) in Bulgaria are one of the most promising forms of public-private partnership which carry out public benefit activities and contribute to solving many problems in rural areas - economic, social, environmental, cultural, health, educational, etc. Challenges for the LAG exist in all EU Member States, but their nature and scale vary from country to country. The aim of the study is to analyze and evaluate the opportunities and challenges of local action groups in Bulgaria as the most recognizable and powerful tool for rural development, ensuring long-term institutional sustainability at the local level. Directly related to the objective are the tasks: Research of secondary and primary sources of information to describe the key problems of LAGs; Analysis of the LAGs' relationships and dependencies with their stakeholders; Defining proposals for improving the environment for the functioning of the LAG in the country.
The study scopes the 64 local initiative groups in Bulgaria which apply the community-led local development (CLLD) approach in the programming period 2014-2020. The study seeks to determine the problems, difficulties, and challenges that the LAGs have encountered in creating and their functioning in Bulgaria and which they continue to face at the present time.
The thesis of the study is that in order to fully and comprehensively use the potential of LAGs as a universal tool for local development and for strategies to have a significant and broad territorial impact in rural areas to address their huge number of problems (economic, social, environmental, educational, technical, cultural, health, etc.), it is necessary to improve the management environment.
Qualitative and quantitative research of the LAG has been conducted in two stages. During the first stage (March-April 2021), individual interviews were conducted among persons working in the local initiative groups in the country. The aim is to study the factors that led to the emergence of difficulties in the work of the LAG, and to expand the ideas about the subject under study. During the second stage (May 2021), a survey was conducted, through which quantitative information was collected on individual aspects of the subject of analysis. The questionnaire is structured on the basis of the results of the qualitative analysis in the first stage, as well as on the basis of the experience of the author, working in a LAG in recent years. Key problems were presented to the LAG during the programming period 2014-2020, the reasons for their occurrence and development in dynamics compared to the previous programming period - 2007-2013. Among the most important recommendations is the improvement of the administrative capacity of the governing bodies and of the regulatory framework, the frequent change of which contributes to a severe difficulty in the work of the LAG.
