The EU suggests applying bottom-up, participative learning approaches, such as Action Research, as steering instruments to meet the challenge of multifunctionality and its links with rural development. This paper focuses on the many demanding roles placed on an action researcher when working with rural stakeholders to achieve normatively desirable learning. It is suggested that in order to genuinely qualify the learning process and its outcome for all, the action researcher keeps an adequate balance between being “close to” or “inside” the stakeholder arena and “distanced to” or “outside” this arena. A model for how this balance could be achieved is proposed.