The Finnish way of CLLD: place-based or half-hearted implementation?

The European Commission proposed the community-led local development (CLLD) approach as a specific tool for place-based local development, offering a unique chance for an integrative use of European Structural and Investment Funds on a sub-regional level. But in Finland, as in most countries of the EU, the adoption of CLLD has so far been limited. Providing an insight into the rationales and the ways of reconfiguring the ‘original’ CLLD concept in Finland, this paper contributes to debates concerning a place-based approach to local development in the context of the European Union’s Cohesion Policy. It particularly addresses the persistent questions of what is gained and what is lost through adjusting a top-down policy instrument to diverse national and local situations? Despite its emphasis on a multi-scalar and cooperative application, the Finnish approach is by design mono-funded, remaining administratively and geographically distinct, and thus cannot serve as a truly integrated local development tool as envisioned by the EU. However, across governance scales and cross-cutting networks, processes of learning and policy negotiation have taken place, which are crucial in the creation of ‘place-based’ variants of the ‘European’ place-based approach.