Capitalism from Outside?: Economic Cultures in Eastern Europe after 1989

Caring Mother and Demanding Father: Cultural Encounters in a Rural Development Program in Bulgaria

Caring Mother and Demanding Father Cultural Encounters in a Rural Development Program in Bulgaria Haralan Alexandrov and Rafael Chichek Background and Context The European model This case study describes a project that was patterned on a European model and launched as an element of the European Union pre-accession policy for Bulgaria but was managed by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Thus, it provides an opportunity to explore several interfaces of cultural encounters: between the EU and Bulgarian policies and practices; between the administration of a global organization such as UNDP and the Bulgarian bureaucracy; and between each of them and the local rural communities. The specific approach to rural development, known as LEADER, originated in the EU in the 1990s as an attempt to invigorate the local economy of depopulated rural regions by creating incentives for young people to live and work there. The mandate of the program was to encourage sustainable development with a strong focus on partnerships and networks. LEADER represents a “decentralized, integrated and bottom-up approach to territorial development,” and relies greatly on the voluntary involvement of the local community. The Bulgarian version The LEADER approach in Bulgaria was slightly modified to address the major problem facing rural areas in the transition period: a continuous depopulation of the countryside due to underdevelopment and lack of employment opportunities. The project was targeted at the most impoverished rural municipalities and the explicit objective was to foster self-employment and entrepreneurship in agriculture, tourism, forestry, and the service industries. The emphasis was on the “preservation of the cultural and natural heritage; support of the local economic environment and creation of new employment opportunities; improvement of the organizational capacity of the local community.” The program was launched in 2003 by UNDP in cooperation with the Bulgarian Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. The bulk of funding was provided from the national budget via the ministry, which exercised monitoring on behalf of the state, whereas UNDP was responsible for the masterminding and the overall management of the project . Renowned for its proven capacity for good governance, UNDP was delegated the expert role in the work, and charged with establishing Local Action Groups (LAG). It had to provide them with training, consultancy, and opportunities for international exchange, in addition to piloting small-scale projects and utilizing them as learning experiences , exercising ongoing monitoring and evaluation of the results, and reporting back the findings to the local teams. Another partner in the enterprise was the local government, which was mandated to contextualize the project in terms of addressing the specific problems of each municipality and to consult the senior partners on the most relevant allocation of resources. The underpinning idea was to introduce legitimate community leadership in the policy and management of the project, and thus promote authentic “local ownership” of the initiative . The major goal of the project was to build the local capacity for the proper utilization of the forthcoming EU funding for rural development . The assumption was that at the end of the project local expert knowledge would emerge, held by the communities and thus enabling them to successfully grasp and use various opportunities for sustainable development. For this purpose, the establishment and training of LAGs as grass-roots organizations responsible for drafting and implementing strategies for local development, was crucial: The project aims to strengthen the capacity of municipal authorities, local farmers, land and forest owners, small and medium enterprises, non-governmental organizations, extension service providers, professional associations, and cooperatives so as to become leaders in sustainable rural development. The mechanism for achieving those objectives is the establishment of Local Action Groups. LAGs were registered as nongovernmental organizations with the representation of various local stakeholders: businesses, citizens groups, professional associations, and so on. Guided by local coordinators, these groups were actively involved in the process of establishing the 168 Haralan Alexandrov and Rafael Chichek rules and procedures of the work, and developing the strategies, design, and implementation of pilot projects. The overall management of the project was allocated to a central unit in Sofia, staffed with experienced developers. The local context The field research was conducted on two typical project sites and in the project office in Sofia. The municipalities chosen for fieldwork were in a remote mountainous region, populated predominantly by Bulgarian Muslims (Pomaks). Pomaks were converted to Islam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when these territories were part of the Ottoman Empire, yet...