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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.
Highlights
The ultimate goal of the PoliRural framework is to increase the attractiveness of rural areas for living, investment, job creation, employment, recreation, cultural heritage (Figure 2)
Inspired by the Framework Foresight method (Hines and Bishop, 2013), we propose the participatory foresight for rural policy making as follows: (1) baseline development from the current situation analysis which culminates in the evaluation of existing policy measures and recommendations for alternative policy options; (2) exploration of future trends and the impact of proposed policy options across space and time, in multiple scenarios and using qualitative and quantitative techniques and tools; (3) implementation by regional stakeholders of selected policy options from the long-list provided using a mission-oriented approach (Figure 3)
We analysed the limits of rural policy development and evaluation methods and proposed a new approach based on text mining
Summary
Over the past twenty-five years, rural regions have experienced a rapidly shrinking population as people, especially young adults, have migrated to cities (Westhoek, van den Berg and Bakkes, 2006; Wiebe et al, 2018). The impact of this demographic shift is profound. European Commission reports that only 5.6% of all European farms are run by people younger than 35 while more than 31% of all farmers are older than 65 (DG Agri, 2017) This imbalance creates difficulties for generational renewal and raises concerns about the loss of valuable skills and knowledge as older, more experienced workers leave the sector.
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