Towards Future Oriented Collaborative Policy Development for Rural Areas and People

• Published in: AGRIS on-line Papers in Economics and Informatics 2020-03, Vol.12 (1), p.111-124
• Main Authors: Miloš Ulman, Pavel Šimek, Jan Masner, Pavel Kogut, Tuula Löytty, Patrick Crehan, Karel Charvát, Antoni Oliva, Stein Runar Bergheim, Milan Kalaš, Denis Kolokol, Tommaso Sabbatini
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Agribusiness; Agricultural and Food Policy; Agricultural Finance; Community/Rural/Urban Development; European Union; foresight; policy; Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies; Rural areas; system dynamics modelling; text mining
• ISSN: 1804-1930; 1804-1930
• DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.303939

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.