Résumé
We look at a LEADER organizations as storytelling organizations that unfold around the understanding and praxis of participation. European Union LEADER programme is defined as a territorially based and participative approach to development. Since its mainstreaming into the European Union Programmes it has been progressively bureaucratized and is being perceived as a tool of Europeanization. A tool framed on the level of European Union by its seven features: bottom-up approach, area-based approach, the local partnership, an integrated and multi-sectoral strategy, networking, innovation and cooperation. The implementation of these features is left to each Member State. The understanding and praxis of these features is everyday work of LAG managers. We ask how is participation built in everyday life of such organizations? We employ an antenarrative research design that directs our analytic attention to the flow of lived experience (Boje, 2001) so as to investigate the sensemaking process between the organizational actors that frame the understanding and praxis of participation. Embedded in the experience of the author as a LAG manager we hypothesize that the understanding of participation, one that is underlining seven features of LEADER, lies in the sensemaking practices of all the actors involved in the management of these organizations. In order to prove our hypothesis and therefore answer to our question we build an antenarrative out of an array of data such as: memos, promemorias, reports, diaries, anecdotes, emails and social media communication and personal autoethnography. Antenarrative as an experience of the storytelling life with abbreviated and interrupted story performances that yield plurivocality) allows us to demonstrate the micro actions that are non-linear, ambiguous and show lived experiences of actors (Boje, 1995). We present our results in a form of a non-linear narrative that delineates recurring types of practices that embody the understanding and praxis of participation within one LEADER organization from 2013-2019.