The EU's performance in rural Georgia: the common agricultural policy's relevance, effectiveness, and impact.

How the EU interacts with its Eastern neighbours has been researched extensively. How it has performed in this region however has been systemically researched on far fewer occasions. This gap is even more glaring when straying away from policy areas such as trade, rule of law, or democratisation. More than 10 years after the Eastern Partnership's inauguration, this paper therefore investigates the performance of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, with a specific focus on its endogenous rural development programme LEADER in Georgia. It finds a mixed picture for the performance attributes relevance, effectiveness, and impact, with differences in performance found between policy instruments and between actors on the local and state level. Therefore, it suggests analysing performance not only across its constituent attributes, but also with a view to specific policy instruments and actors beyond the central government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]