Social learning in LEADER: Exogenous, endogenous and hybrid evaluation in rural development

This paper considers the relationship between the centralised exogenous, institutions and the embedded, endogenous institutions of rural governance in Europe through an examination the evaluation procedures of the European LEADER programme. LEADER is presented in the literature as progressive in terms of innovation and stakeholder engagement. Yet while the planning and management of LEADER embraces heterogeneity and participation, programmatic evaluation is centralised and held at arms length from delivery organisations. The paper reviews previous efforts to improve evaluation in LEADER and considers alternative strategies for evaluation, contrasting LEADER practice with participatory evaluation methodologies in the wider international context. Can evaluation in itself be valuable as a mode of social learning and hence a driver for endogenous development in rural communities in Europe? The paper concludes by examining the challenges in producing a hybrid form of evaluation which accommodates endogenous and exogenous values

Lotus international : rivista di architettura

It is a peculiar fact that while the natural environment is one of geography\u27s key research and teaching foci, it is difficult to specify what the discipline\u27s distinctive contributions to environmental understanding are. In part, this is because geographical research on the environment remains theoretically and empirically diverse, indeed fragmented. In turn, this is a function of the fact that the precision of this putative focus is deceptive since the term environment is enormously. On the one side, physical geographers study the environment in their own subdisciplinary languages. On the other side, human geographers apply the tools of everything from Marxism to post-structuralism to make sense of environmental discourses and transformations