HVTK - giving local relevance to European - wide rural development expertise

In the current EU programming period, rural areas in the North Great Plain region of Hungary will benefit from investment through the New Hungary Rural Development Programme (NHRDP) and the North Great Plain Regional Operational Programme (NGPOP). Using keywords from Section 3.1 of Annex II to Community Regulation (EC) No 1974/2006, we quantified the priority placed in each Programme on topics relating to the horizontal objectives and Axes 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the Rural Development Regulation (RDR). In the NHRDP the emphasis is on Axis 1 whilst in the NGPOP the emphasis is on topics related to the horizontal objectives of the RDR. A similar analysis was carried out on 200 EU Framework Programme (FP) and Interreg projects, which can provide expertise to support rural development in the region. Information about these projects is available on the website www.hvtk.org. The priorities of the FP projects were found to be closely correlated to the priorities of the NHRDP but amongst Interreg projects there was a strong emphasis on topics related to Axis 3. A workshop attended by rural development practitioners from the region demonstrated that the distinctions between regional, rural and agricultural development are far from simple.