Abstract
By now a preferred EU instrument aimed at stirring rural development, LEADER initially constituted an alleged departure from the top-down productivist agenda of the CAP towards locally-led development. The exogenous-endogenous explanatory model legitimized the adoption of economistic assumptions into EU rural development policy. As the CAP policy genealogy conveys, agricultural policies occurred at the intersection of internal and external factors, whereas the endogenous framework evicts structural explanations for territorial marginalization. A case study from North-western Romania provides details on the implementation of the endogenous agenda from the perspective of public actors. Rather than inducing an alleged alternative development model, LEADER acts as adjuvant to other policies and, overall, as a pedagogical exercise in uneven development.