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<< Objectives >>The European Project for Local Democracy in Serbia, France and Estonia is a transnational project which aims to promote citizen participation at local level throughout Europe and beyond, through a community-led approach to local development and support local democracy and the empowerment of local communities through citizen participation.<< Implementation >>The project aims to exchange good practices between French, Estonian and Serbian partners in terms of mobilizing European local actors by relying on three national networks, particularly in rural areas, where this notion makes all the more sense, in order to be able to better support the actors of the national networks concerned in their learning processes necessary for the implementation of this approach.<< Results >>The European Project for Local Democracy in Serbia, France and Estonia wants to enable the three networks involved to develop inter-knowledge and to enable the networks to support new methodologies in terms of local development led by local actors which will be disseminated to the all the local players involved in the networks.

As globalization continues to interact with the economic and social balances of the territories, many actors are looking for tools and innovative ways to improve the dialogue between education and training systems and skills requirements in the territories. The challenge is to enable VET decision-makers and other actors to reinforce their posture and affirm strong territorial positioning within the European space, integrating global challenges especially human migration and the SDGS.The project aims to find the tools and methods that enable the active listening of the territories and lead to the development of the most strategic competences for the decision makers. Action learning and research methods will be used by partners to identify and enhance fairly quickly their stratégy with the territorial, European and global challenges.by understanding the approach of a territorialised political project, policymakers will be able to prepare to assume responsibility in a territory as an elected or member of a coordination or animation team. Awareness of the European framework and global challenges should facilitate action by expanding the strategy. In the eyes of the partners, this step is the prerequisite for vocational training systems in line with skills needs in the regions, able to respond quickly and qualitatively.

"The ESPRIT project studies the good practices in the field of services to the public in rural areas, in order to better support the stakeholders concerned by this theme in their learning processes necessary for the implementation of their projects. This issue is at the heart of the questioning of rural populations in Europe knowing that the progressive disappearance of public services has the effect of reinforcing the partitioning of the populations living in these territories.The main objective of the project is to enable partner organisations from several European countries to learn about the practices and methods used by each of them to carry out projects in this field, but also to increase the participation of stakeholders in this type of project and, more broadly, to contribute to the implementation of the rural development policy. It is therefore a matter of developing collective intelligence through a real coworking on a European scale that will bring shared answers to a situation well known in several member countries. The ESPRIT project aims to contribute to the decompartmentalization of rural populations by setting up new services through training and developing the skills of the different actors working on this issue.This project joins the priorities of the European Union's rural development policy, promoting social inclusion, poverty reduction and economic development in rural areas. As such, it follows the Cork 2.0 statement ""For a better life in rural areas"", which mentions the different issues related to the access to services and describes the EU ambitions to ensure the future of agriculture and rural areas, by seeking to develop rural capacities and promote their values and access. This statement also highlights the need to invest in skills, public services, infrastructure and capacity building to generate a vibrant rural fabric. In this sense, ESPRIT follows the Europe 2020 strategy to support the development of rural territories and their attractiveness for a ""smart, sustainable and inclusive"" growth through the promotion of employment, education, research and innovation.With a diversified partnership having a national and European dimension (Leader France Association, Spanish Network for Rural Development, Estonian Leader National Network, Hungarian National Rural Network, Romanian GAL Tecuci Association), ESPRIT will contribute to bring new approaches and innovative solutions in the field of services to the population in rural areas, through a better transmission of the information on this subject in the territories, thanks to:- Exchange workshops to support the appropriation of knowledge and encourage local actors to propose innovative multi-stakeholder projects and spread the methodology ;- Communication actions to inform identified collective initiatives and innovations ;- Technical visits of innovative achievements.The deliverables foreseen by the ESPRIT project will contribute to the common knowledge of the studied subject. The collective work, as well as the various field visits planned will provide the opportunity to share and compare ideas, practices and methods, but also to decompartmentalize the current vision limited by the lack of this common knowledge. The actions envisaged will be a real added value to the approaches of innovative solutions through networking, sharing of experiences and joint research of the most appropriate methodologies.In addition, the ESPRIT project offers a potential for sustainability beyond the ERASMUS + funding, through the intellectual and practical achievements that will be made available to rural stakeholders and public institutions, especially online. This sustainability will be recorded by a facilitated collaboration between project leaders and public representatives on the theme of services to the public. Hence, the target group will be able to better respond to the demographic challanges related to the desertification of rural areas by proposing innovative and concrete solutions. It will educate and motivate the main actors in rural areas to research and implement sustainable solutions. This will lead to economic development and better social inclusion of rural inhabitants."