Improving well-being and quality of life in left-behind rural areas remains one of the core principles, but also one of the main challenges, of territorial cohesion policies. While their importance is well documented, the mechanisms through which these funds improve quality of life and help peripheral areas escape left-behindness remain insufficiently understood. This paper addresses this gap and examines whether local infrastructure improvements, combined with European funding, connectivity and human capital, helped rural areas improve quality of life for inhabitants. Using a conditional change (ANCOVA) framework with progressively differentiated territorial specifications, the analysis assesses average policy effects and their variation across socio-structural and spatial contexts. Results indicate that while gas network expansion is positively associated with development in baseline models, infrastructure effects become statistically insignificant once territorial differentiation and interaction terms are introduced. In contrast, connectivity to higher-order transport networks emerges as a consistent predictor of local development gains across all model specifications. These findings highlight that physical infrastructure alone is insufficient to reduce territorial inequalities in wellbeing without improvements in accessibility and functional integration. The study supports place-based development strategies that prioritize connectivity and integrated territorial interventions over isolated infrastructure expansion in addressing structural disadvantages in left-behind rural regions.
Pavel et al. (Wed,) studied this question.