EU's rural development policy at the regional level-Are expenditures for natural capital linked with territorial needs?

Building upon the hypothesis that priority setting in regional RDP programming and expenditures depends on the regional context, this study aimed to improve the understanding of priority setting in NC support in relationship to other RD objectives by taking a closer look at the conditions of regions and their communalities. By analysing the variances and spatial dependencies of regional socio-economic, environmental and agricultural framework conditions and applying statistical logit models, this study found that the probability to adopt specific NC-oriented expenditure patterns in a region can only be partly explained by these factors. While environmental variables, such as designated areas and High Nature Value (HNV) farmland, do not drive high NC expenditures, factors representing agricultural structures and conditions seem to have a larger influence. Regional RDP expenditure pattern showed an additional strong dependency from spatial association factors.