6. Conclusions

Not all conditions in rural areas are the same, even within the existing EU-15 and even more so when the CEECs are considered. However, most of them share a need to diversify rural employment and income earning opportunities in ways which cause least harm to the environment, and indeed which build upon synergies between the environment, quality of life, and new sources of income and work.

Critical issues for Rural Development therefore concern:

• Institutional frameworks, especially the respective roles and responsibilities of the EU, existing and applicant member states, regions, and localities. These need effective and democratic governance; flexibility to deal with diversity; integration and co-ordination of sectoral policies; participation of local people; and support for local initiatives, as well as policy efficiency and effectiveness at all levels.
• New ways of retaining and enhancing rural competitiveness in an increasingly globalised economy. Public support should focus more on non-mobile assets - environment, social and economic capital, including capacity building and improving institutional effectiveness. Rural development policies should allow enough flexibility to cope with growing diversity and should encourage multi-sectoral and bottom-up participation. A climate of innovation and entrepreneurship should be broadly supported. Diversity of rural areas should be encouraged in a sustainable manner.
• Tackling inequalities of opportunity and access, at CEEC-EU, national, regional, local, rural-urban, and interpersonal levels. This clearly includes the cohesion agenda, but goes beyond it.

Whilst Agenda 2000 takes us some way towards the right kind of framework, weaknesses remain. The rural policy framework remains fragmented and incomplete, as well as underfunded compared with the agricultural policy. The shift to a spatial and integrated rural policy will now depend heavily on the individual member states, since it very largely hinges on their decisions about implementation of the options for a 'single rural plan' for all structural type measures in the rural development proposals, and the ways in which they will integrate national measures with these. For most member States this raises fundamental institutional and structural issues which are likely to remain un-resolved in the medium term if only because there will be insufficient time to address them in the time between approval of the regulations and the need to implement them, which is now likely to be less than one year. This issue is even more critical with respect to the CEECs, where EU measures are often implemented separately from national structures.