POLIRURAL Future Oriented Collaborative Policy Development for Rural Areas and People

Depopulation, land abandonment and the loss of biodiversity are changes that may proceed very slowly yet are often irreversible.

In order for policymakers to solve these challenges, they need to know if current policy instruments are effective, who is benefiting from them and in what measure, what driving forces will be most influential and how they will affect the people, and the planet.

PoliRural will provide a set of knowledge resources including an inclusive learning environment where rural populations, researchers and policymakers come together to address common problems; an evaluation exercise that uses text mining to assess the perceived effectiveness of past or planned policy interventions; and a foresight study that will collect the development trajectory of  agriculture and its allied sectors until 2040 using several scenarios in which the evolution of rural populations occupies a central place.

As a result of these activities, PoliRural will leave decision makers at different levels of government better equipped to tackle existing and emerging rural challenges, rural populations more empowered and rural areas more resilient.