The Leader process as a European policy for local development: A comparison of the implementation in three European member states

European public policies in field of regional and rural development and territorial cohesion have a large role in Europe. Regional and rural development policies are designed taking into account the principles of subsidiarity, partnership and additionality. According to these principles, the European Union defines general guidelines and the member states or their sub-regional levels develop their specific strategy and way of implementation in their RD program within this frame. In this logic, Leader program, established by the European Union in 1991, aims to support the development of strategies at a sub-regional level that meet specific challenges of the territory; therefore, a bottom-up approach is implemented that involves public and private stakeholders. The presentation will show results of the comparative analysis of the implementation modalities of the Leader program at the national, regional and local level in Germany, France and Italy. These three countries show significant national level differences in terms of political and administrative organization and the decentralization of power. The analysis is based on a literature review, the examination of program and guidance documents, and on first results of case studies. Our main approach is based on the theory of multi-level governance (Bache & Flinders 2004; Pollermann et al. 2014) - understood as a mode of coordination - involving different spheres of actors and forms of regulation of various kinds (Jessop 2002). According to the expectations of some of the proponents of a new governance, the state in the multi-level governance setting has given up some of its control functions in favor of a more co-ordination role (Bache and Flinders, 2004 ; Buller, 2000 ; Mantino, 2009) or 'gouvernance à distance' (Epstein, 2005). Our findings highlight the diversity of LEADER implementations in the three countries under study and the central role of the decentralization of the member states structure for the performance of LEADER.