Rural areas in Europe are at risk due to depopulation, failing generation renewal, and a multitude of influences ranging from market-based, regulatory, to societal and climate changes. As a result, current rural policy is no longer keeping pace with these changes. We propose an advanced rural policy development framework in order to deliver more accurate foresight for rural regions, contributing to new and enhanced policy interventions. The proposed framework combines new quantitative and qualitative epistemological approaches, previously unused unstructured data with traditional research information, grassroot perspective with expert knowledge, current situation analysis with forward looking activities. We argue that by using the proposed methods, policy teams will be able to enhance the effectiveness of their policy making processes, while rural stakeholders will be given the opportunity to become valuable policy influencers and solution co-creators. The ability to quickly experiment and understand the impact of a variety of policy solutions will result in saved time and costs. The framework is part of an ongoing experimental verification and testing in twelve pilot regions across Europe and Israel.
There has been a growing interest in assessing the attractiveness of territories, especially rural ones, from the perspective of stakeholders, such existing exiting rural populations, potential newcomers and new entrants. As part of the PoliRural project, the aim of the presented research was determined-to create the initial vision (i.e. definition) of rural attractiveness by considering factors that influence people's desire to live and work in rural areas. To that end, a mixed method approach combining qualitative and quantitative techniques was used. The overall research framework was executed in several sequential steps: brainstorming, literature review, survey questionnaire, data analysis, and evaluation. In defining rural attractiveness, two different but interrelated perspectives were considered, one focusing on people, the other on the entire rural ecosystem. During internal survey of project participants-respondents prioritized definitions by assigning points or scores on their preferred definition. Accordingly, an initial vision's definition of rural attractiveness was created based on the highest assessment score.
Rural areas in Europe are at risk due to depopulation, failing generation renewal, and a multitude of influences ranging from market-based, regulatory, to societal and climate changes. As a result, current rural policy is no longer keeping pace with these changes. We propose an advanced rural policy development framework in order to deliver more accurate foresight for rural regions, contributing to new and enhanced policy interventions. The proposed framework combines new quantitative and qualitative epistemological approaches, previously unused unstructured data with traditional research information, grassroot perspective with expert knowledge, current situation analysis with forward looking activities. We argue that by using the proposed methods, policy teams will be able to enhance the effectiveness of their policy making processes, while rural stakeholders will be given the opportunity to become valuable policy influencers and solution co-creators. The ability to quickly experiment and understand the impact of a variety of policy solutions will result in saved time and costs. The framework is part of an ongoing experimental verification and testing in twelve pilot regions across Europe and Israel.
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