CLLD needs indicators of social capital

At the excellent LDNet AGM yesterday I learnt that the EU establishment is sceptical of the value of the community-led approach to local development. Last July, the Court of Auditors published a report <https://www.eca.europa.eu/en/Pages/DocItem.aspx?did=61355&gt; which concludes that “there is little evidence to suggest that the benefits of the LEADER approach outweigh the costs and risks involved … many of the projects we looked at could have been financed at a lower cost by other EU funds.”

The report criticises the slowness and administrative complexity of LEADER:

“LEADER’s participative approach incurs high administrative and running costs. These include activities to engage the local community and support applicants, and entail extra administrative requirements compared with mainstream spending programmes. According to the European Commission, these costs reached a total of over €1 billion (i.e. a quarter of total spending) by the end of 2020.”

“The LEADER approach involves higher administrative and running costs, slow approval processes and did not result in projects with demonstrable additional benefits.”

It’s good to see the auditors don’t only look at money: they also remark that the LAGs fail to represent women and young people. It is also good to see that the auditors drew on LDNet’s own website for the best figures on how many CLLD project there actually are, namely Stefan Kah’s report <https://ldnet.eu/implementing-cohesion-policy-funds-through-multi-fund-clld/ >. LDNet gives some criticism of the report here: <https://ldnet.eu/a-review-of-the-eca-report-on-leader-and-clld/ >

I think the auditors have dumbed the whole thing down. Of course public money has to be spent accountably, so we have to evaluate the results. But if you are trying to do something long-term involving human capacity, the results are slow to materialise.

CLLD projects have major effects on the individuals who comprise local communities, and do much to improve the quality of their lives. Once they are connected up, participative communities can do so much to drive progress for themselves. But this is all so intangible, and measuring well-being is an inexact science. By contrast one-off capital projects are so much quicker and easier to pay for – and you can easily prove the results (although the Turkish-Syrian earthquake shows you need to have competent and upright building inspectors.) That’s why depressed towns like Naples and Charleroi are surrounded by luxurious motorway networks. Golf courses are thought to be good for attracting foreign investors. And, it was suggested, capital projects offer more opportunities to cream off excess profits and backhanders.

You get what you measure

The sad fact is that no one is trying very hard to measure the social impact of community-led development. For rural areas, the EAFRD uses 3 result indicators: % of population covered by LD strategies, % of population benefiting from improved services/infrastructures, and jobs created. For coastal areas, the EMFF just uses employment created and employment maintained. The ERDF and ESF have no CLLD-specific indicators at all. There is no attempt to evaluate the qualitative effects, for instance on retaining rural populations or on long-term development potential. Without these, our rural areas will become deserts.

But the range of possible indicators available goes much deeper: the ESI funds are currently evaluated using a bank of hundreds of indicators, including several hundred for social inclusion <https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=738&langId=en&pubId=8513&gt;. For instance they report on the number of people at risk of poverty (AROPE) and on material and social deprivation (MSD). But there are as yet no agreed indicators for ‘softer’ or community components of development like education and associative capacity. A number of researchers have investigated how to measure social capital, but this has got nowhere. One  big problem is that of tautology: if you define social capital as the benefits that we derive from cooperating with others, then whenever you evaluate a project you will always find that it played a positive role. It seems that the least we can do is measure changes in perception.

The LDNet meeting concluded that we had to “tell the story” of the value of community-led development better. But how to create auditable, concrete evidence? One activity for the next year is to investigate this.

Click to access Shared-Ingredients-for-a-Wellbeing-Economy-Paper_Publication-Copy.pdf

This paper gives a set of Wellbeing indicators