Converging Goals, Diverging Methods? LEADER and the Village Fund as Examples of Bottom-Up Governance in Rural Poland
Converging Goals, Diverging Methods? LEADER and the Village Fund as Examples of Bottom-Up Governance in Rural Poland

Summary/Abstract: This article presents a comprehensive theoretical analysis of two competing philosophies of local governance operating simultaneously in rural Poland: the Village Fund (VF), representing direct participatory democracy, and the LEADER/CLLD approach, embodying deliberative partnership-based governance. Despite both mechanisms’ declarative pursuit of bottom-up development and local empowerment, this study demonstrates their fundamental philosophical divergence. The study uses a Weberian ideal-type methodology for comparison. It shows that although both models pursue local activation, they do so through profoundly different methods rooted in conflicting democratic traditions. The VF puts into practice Barber’s “strong democracy” through its majoritarian village assemblies, while LEADER/CLLD can be seen as the institutional expression of Habermasian deliberative democracy through tri-sectoral partnerships. This divergence extends beyond technical differences to represent competing answers to fundamental questions about legitimate decision-making, the nature of the demos, and the role of citizens in public governance. The article contributes to democratic theory by analyzing how these competing paradigms perform in practice, revealing both their theoretical limitations and potential complementarity within a pluralistic approach to local development.

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