Month: June 2022

The registration is open to participate in PoliRural third Webinar. It will be dedicated to System Dynamic Modelling for enhanced rural planning.

The first System Dynamic Model (SDM) was invented decades ago when the internet was still in its infancy. We have come a long way since then in terms of a tremendous increase in computing power, the availability of data, and ease of access to sophisticated tools and communication platforms. So, it is time to make SDM tools and the explanatory power of the SDM approach more widely available to those involved in policy and regional development.

This is precisely what PoliRural has been doing for the past three years. Our SDM tool is based on a general rural model that contains 8 interconnected modules with over 300 parameters. This general model has been customised to 11 pilot regions, based on discussions with each pilot leadership team. With this tool, rural stakeholders can examine how trends may play out locally under the influence of different drivers of change. They can correct unwanted trends or achieve desired ones by tweaking policy interventions until an optimal mix is reached. This webinar will explain in more detail how the SDM tool was built, how it works, and how it is being used by stakeholders in PoliRural regions to improve rural planning. The event will feature an interactive session to allow participants to ask questions and/or respond to any of the points mentioned in the presentations.

The Webinar will be on 13 June July, 15:00 CET.

The registration is open to participate in PoliRural second Webinar. This Webinar is the second of a series of 4 Webinars and will be dedicated to Semantic Explorer, a text mining tool for Smart Research.

Semantic Explorer, or Semex, is a powerful text analytics tool that works with structured and unstructured data sources to provide insights to policy makers, researchers, foresight practitioners and others who need to make informed decisions while working with large amounts of information under time constraints. A typical foresight workshop, for example, requires a lot of research to prepare briefing notes, background papers, and lists of different kinds e.g. curated reading lists (CRL) with references.

In PoliRural, Semex was used to improve the quality of this preparatory work and the productivity of those responsible for its execution. For example, Semex users can find out what the article, оr a CRL, is about by looking at the system-generated summary, geo-location, keyword frequencies, and sentiment scores associated with different paragraphs and topics – all without having to read the whole thing end to end. This workshop will explain how Semex was built, how it works, as well as its current and future potential based on the experience of some PoliRural pilot regions. The event will feature an interactive session to allow participants to ask questions and/or respond to any of the points mentioned in the presentations.

The Webinar will be on 22 June 2022, 11:00 CET.          

The registration is open to participate in PoliRural first Webinar. This Webinar is a first of a series of 4 Webinars and will be dedicated to Action Oriented Foresight for Rural Development.

Foresight as a discipline has been around for decades, with applications spanning a wide range of industries, from retail to rural development. Most recently, foresight has been used by the European Commission to develop a long-term vision for rural areas up to 2040. While foresight has been gaining in popularity, a common error is to think that foresight and future studies are synonymous. Future studies have their merit and are appropriate in certain contexts, but they are not the same as foresight, which is more action oriented and participatory, rather than purely research based.

This webinar will present the foresight framework used in the PoliRural project as a tool for managing change in rural regions. Participants will be introduced to key concepts and methods underpinning the framework, before learning about preliminary results of its implementation in the region of Monaghan (IE) and Gevgelija-Strumica (NMK). The event will feature an interactive session to allow participants to ask questions and/or respond to any of the points mentioned in the presentations.

The Webinar will be on 13 June 2022, 11:00 CET.

In the context of the PoliRural project, Regional Action Plans are the main output of the Foresight process carried out by the twelve pilot regions. The main purpose of regional action plans is to define actionable solutions for tackling the identified challenges within the foresight process. At the same time, plans are considered an integral part of other processes and tasks already undertaken by pilot regions and are well integrated within these. Plans are co-designed and developed by pilot teams together with regional stakeholders and citizens in a mission-transformation process.

The report completed by PoliRural partnership (available here) summarises the results of the mission-oriented approach implementation in the pilot regions. It provides an insight on context and needs of pilot regions by outlining the issues of concern and context that create the basis for the regional visions and the purpose of the regional foresight process. The document provides information of policy challenges, intervention measures and KPIs that form the core of the Regional Action Plans. Policy challenges and measures are analysed and clustered by the four main strands of the Long-Term Vision for Rural Areas – STRONGER rural areas, CONNECTED rural areas, RESILIENT rural areas that foster well-being, and PROSPEROUS rural areas.

Some of the conclusions are the following:

• The majority of challenges identified by pilot regions are primarily related to the PROSPERITY of rural areas, particularly to the various reasons currently hindering the diversification of economic activities;
• The absence or low quality of digital infrastructure, limited skills and abilities to use advantages of good broadband, and poorly digitalised traditional sectors of the economy are central issues hindering pilot regions from becoming better CONNECTED rural areas;
• Pilot regions have identified just a few RESILIENCE-oriented challenges related to the ability to adapt to climate change, reducing the carbon footprint and nature protection;
• The pilot regions see improved governance of their regions as one of the most important results of the foresight process;
• The main precondition for digitalisation and modernisation of agriculture, industry and services is the availability and coverage of high-quality broadband and digital infrastructure in rural areas;
• The role of digital connectivity and the transition of the traditional economy is seen as an essential element that may contribute to the diversification of traditional sectors of the rural economy concerning the digitisation of the agricultural industry and digital capacity building in the rural areas.

PoliRural Newsletter Number 10 featured an article entitled “Progress so far in the application of SDM to Regional Foresight”. It provides a quick overview of System Dynamic Modelling (SDM), and a summary of the contribution of the PoliRural project to the November 2021 conference on “Modelling for Policy Support,” organised by the European Commission Competence Centre on Modelling. Much has happened since then, and the twelve regional Foresight teams are currently evaluating the online tools provided via the Innovation Hub for exploring the impact of different policy options on a range of regional performance metrics. These SDM tools were developed by Antoni Oliva of 22Sistema and Runar Bergheim of Avinet. This experiment will soon end, and we are looking forward to the feedback that the regional Foresight teams will provide, as users of this system. We intend to provide a synthesis of the results of this work in a future edition of the Newsletter.

In collaboration with Jan Macura, Sarah Velten and Otakar Čerba of Plan4all, we are now working on a second set of experiments, which will be presented to the regional Foresight teams, from which we hope to obtain feedback to help orient future work in this domain. This time the focus is on the user experience and challenge of working with complex issues such as Rural Attractiveness (RA). For this reason, we are developing another set of tools intended to help users understand the impact of different policy choices on the Rural Attractiveness of their region, and how this might evolve over time, with a view to making optimal policy choices.

Plan4all had already developed a composite rural attractiveness index (RAI) with six sub-indices, and thirty-six sub-sub-indices representing different aspects of rural attractiveness. This RAI was designed based on the principle that regions can only be attractive in comparison with other regions. Another design consideration was that the intended meaning of rural attractiveness may depend on where, when, and by whom attractiveness is determined. All of this is consistent with key findings of the PoliRural project concerning rural attractiveness. The project observed that concepts of rural attractiveness often feature in regional development strategies, that they differ significantly from region to region, conditioned by developmental priorities such as the desire to attract investors, entrepreneurs, or tourists. In this sense, the development of a concept of attractiveness naturally aligns with the creation of a ‘vision’ for the region, as anticipated in the Foresight process. Plan4all demonstrated the use of their index by providing a map-based visualisation of rural attractiveness covering all regions of Europe.

The following diagram describes an adaptation of the RAI. It uses four instead of six sub-indices, and nine sub-sub-indices instead of thirty-six. Most of these sub-sub-indices are new and correspond to outputs of the regional SD models developed by 22SISTEMA.

The team is putting the finishing touches to an online system that allows users to explore the impact of different policy options on this new RAI. We call this system, the Rural Attractiveness Explorer. It takes the outputs of the regionally adapted SDM models and converts them into the SD-adapted RAI, which it presents using four different visualisation strategies. Users can then compare;

• The evolution of RAI over time across regions,
• The evolution of RAI sub-indices over time across regions,
• The impact on RAI of different policy choices for a single region,
• The impact on RAI sub-indices of different policy choices for a single region.

We hope to have it up and running in June 2022, available for the regional Foresight teams, and for anyone else who wants to experiment with it. We are looking forward to seeing how the Foresight teams evaluate these new tools.