This paper discusses the challenges that the next EU programming period has given to rural policy. In the case of Finland the most important level of implementing regional and rural policies so far has been provinces (NUTS 3) but in 2007—2013 both the EU Commission and our national rural policy highlight the role of sub-regions (NUTS 4). The schedule of preparation of regional rural programmes has been very tight in Finland, which was due to both too late and inappropriate instructions from the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and to some changes in the organizations, which were responsible for the preparation. Our case study area, Raahe sub--region, is especially interesting since there were two rural development actors with almost the same aims but with quite different backgrounds. The problems in the creation of cooperation between them were connected e.g. to inadequate social capital and to the operation areas. The empirical part of the paper describes what kind of challenges and tensions different actors faced when preparing a rural development programme on the sub-regional level.