Topological Governance of Rural Public Procurement in the European Union: A Conceptual Legal-Economic Network Framework with a Digital-Platform Extension

Abstract

This article develops a conceptual and methodological framework for analysing rural public procurement in the European Union through legal-economic network analysis. It treats contracting authorities, suppliers, regulators, and, where relevant, digital intermediaries as nodes connected by legally meaningful edges, including awards, contractual obligations, information flows, review proceedings, and data-processing relations. The article responds to the need for a clearer bridge between network theory and procurement doctrine. It explains how legal thresholds, procedure types, publication duties, and electronic procurement infrastructures may be translated into measurable variables such as density, centrality, modularity, component structure, and supplier turnover. The contribution is methodological rather than empirical: it does not present completed findings on the Czech Republic or Slovakia. Instead, it formulates a reproducible research design for a future Czech-Slovak comparison and identifies the legal variables that would have to be coded before any causal claim could be made. Digital agricultural platforms are addressed as a secondary extension of the same topology, especially where platform centrality creates dependency, gatekeeping, and data-asymmetry risks. The framework shows how network diagnostics may support CAP monitoring, audit prioritisation, and legally informed regulatory design, while remaining subordinate to doctrinal analysis and case-specific evidence.