development that has taken place in our locality
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In the second half of the twentieth century European rural areas have undergone a drastic
change in both the market and planned economies. Agriculture, the former backbone of rural
economy, lost its dominant role in employment and its ability to sustain local population has
been drastically reduced. Many rural localities are not attractive for the new, post-fordist
industries and suffer from high long-term unemployment. With no barriers before it,
globalisation can also freely form the countryside. Some of its processes threaten the local
values and traditions, while others can lead to the renewal of the countryside. The growing
global interest for sustainable living, fair-trade or locally produced food, local specialities angenerally local heritage can open the door for new approaches with an emphasis on local
characteristics.
Local developments have always been considered an important instrument in the renewal
of the rural economy, society and settlements. However, recent changes of rural areas
necessitated the conceptual expansion of the term and further increased its significance.
Nowadays developments are not only local in the sense that an investment, project or program
carried out in a certain locality, but locality-based with a deeper connection to the local level.
For example, the idea for the project or program can originate from the local community, the
investment or project may take the geographical characteristics of the localities into account,
the investors and project-makers seek for the agreement and support of the local community
and try to involve them in the decision-making process. But most importantly, the overall
impact of the development to the selected (rural) locality has to be positive with measurable
outputs which can be assessed through complex evaluation methods, and it has to be in
accordance with the long-term development concepts of the locality. Locality-based
developments have to meet with many requirements: to stimulate the local economy, to
emphasize sustainability, to provide new workplaces and to help the integration into the
regional economy. Fulfilling these needs resulted in locally applicable rural planning and
development methods, some of which later integrated into the LEADER type development
models, in accordance with the increasing role of rural development within the EU in the last
two decades.
In the new millennia, these main goals best represented in the complex strategic planning
document Agenda 2020. The authors of the Agenda 2020, besides acknowledging the
significance of locality-based development, also emphasized the importance of place-based
development (Csatári, 2011; Zaucha – Swiatek – Stanczuk-Olejnik, 2013). The main concept
behind the place-based approach is that the renewal, development and closing up of rural
regions will not be successful, if the planning and development process in other sectors (e.g.
social) do not take the local characteristics, the differences in needs, possibilities and
innovative capacities into account. The experiences of the earlier Leader programmes, which
have already proved to be effective, can help to integrate the place-based approach into the
projects. The place-based approach institutionalised with the introduction Community-led
Local Development (CLLD) groups.
The aim of this study is to introduce the concepts of locality-based and place-based
development and to overview their applicability in the present and future framework of the
Hungarian rural development. The empirical data of this study collected during a surveyinvolving the experts in the registry of the Hungarian National Rural Network in the spring of
2014 (Kovách – Czibere, 2014; Csatári – Farkas – Lennert, 2014