Towards Future Oriented Collaborative Policy Development for Rural Areas and People

Abstract

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.

INSPIRE Hackathons and SmartAfriHub – Roadmap for Addressing the Agriculture Data Challenges in Africa

“…The SmartAgriHub is developed in cooperation with 3 European companies -Plan4All, Wirelessinfo, Club of Ossiach -with the intention of supporting and furthering smart and sustainable agriculture in Africa. We reused the concept, which was already validated in some European projects (Ulman et al, 2020).…”

Hub4Everybody - New Collaborative Environment for Sharing

“…It needs to support specialization of the regions, in line with their regional Smart Specialization Strategies as a set of priority areas for public investment, corresponding to regional competitive advantages(Miörner et al, 2019;Jarolimek et al, 2009;Kánská et al, 2021). To support regional policies and regional businesses is one of the key priorities on PoliRural projects, where an important part was to develop and test utilization of DIHs in regional context(Ulman et al, 2020).Various web map platforms, with potential to support DIHs are available on the scene with a wide range of features, target user groups and maturity level.Provision of web GIS functionality and content can be provided by the large set of open sourced or open license-based solutions like examples mentioned in Table 1.…”