Scottish Rural Communities Policy Review: stage 2 - Finland case study

3. The evolution of Finnish Rural Policy

Finnish rural policy has developed since the 1970s into a distinct field of governance, situated between agricultural and regional policy, and involving a wide range of organisations and stakeholders. Following Hyyryläinen (2025), the evolution of Finnish rural policy can be divided into three main stages:

1. Pre-rhetorical Rural Policy (Post-war era to the 1970s): The term “pre-rhetorical” refers to a period before rural policy was explicitly discussed as a distinct political issue. During this time, rural needs were addressed mainly within the broader welfare state and agricultural policy framework. The decentralised Nordic welfare model extended services equally across the country, including even the smallest municipalities. At the same time, post-war industrial and agricultural policies, and particularly support for small-scale family farming, remained influential.

However, many rural villages, particularly in remote areas, began to experience outmigration by the 1970s, as young people moved to towns in search of employment and better living conditions. This cycle of decline prompted the adoption of the early village action initiatives.

2. Emerging Rural Policy (1980s–early 1990s):

This period marks the early formation of an explicit rural policy in Finland. The country launched its first National Rural Development Programme in 1991. In 1993, a cross-sectoral Rural Policy Advisory Board was established (which later became the Rural Policy Committee, and then the Rural Policy Council, MANE). Although funding during this stage was limited, these initiatives laid the institutional groundwork for the development of future rural policy.

3. Europeanised Rural Policy (1995 onwards): Following Finland’s joining to the EU in 1995, national rural policy began to interact with EU-level rural policy frameworks and programmes. This Europeanisation did not replace national approaches, but it did lead to the increasing integration of EU and domestic tools and objectives.

A major milestone after Finland joined the EU was the launch of the first LEADER programmes in 1996 – one for Objective 5b areas and one for Objective 1 areas – which ran until 1999. LEADER was enthusiastically received, particularly by rural civil society actors, and quickly proved successful. Unlike many other aspects of EU membership, the LEADER approach sparked genuine interest in rural communities, and project ideas were actively submitted from the very beginning.

Driven by this momentum, a group of visionary civil servants at the Ministry of Agriculture with responsibility for LEADER in Finland began to explore the idea of extending the LEADER approach. Just one year later, a nationally funded replication of LEADER – called POMO – was launched. This was warmly welcomed, as EU LEADER funds could initially support only 22 Local Action Groups, which was less than half of the number of groups that had expressed an interest in getting involved.

By 2000, nearly all of rural Finland was covered by Local Action Groups operating either under the EU’s LEADER+ programme (2000–2006) or through parallel national or EU funded development schemes applying the LEADER approach. The rapid incorporation of LEADER into the National Rural Policy Programme, with explicit reference to its national extension, was a crucial top-down counterpart to the bottom-up enthusiasm, ultimately enabling the scaling up of the approach (Pylkkänen and Hyyryläinen 2004).