Decentralised rural proofing as a complementary governance approach: RUSTIK project policy brief
- Rural Pact
- Rural Revitalisation Platform
- Prosperous rural areas
- Connected rural areas
- Resilient rural areas
- Stronger Rural Areas
A policy brief from the Horizon Europe project RUSTIK introduces the concept of decentralised rural proofing (DRP) and highlights its role as a complementary, place-based approach to governance.
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The policy brief argues that conventional rural proofing often struggles to fully capture the diversity of rural territories, differences in local governance contexts and the situated knowledge of rural actors.
Drawing on Living Lab experiments in five diverse rural regions, the policy brief illustrates how decentralised rural proofing can expose governance bottlenecks, highlight spatial justice concerns and support more coherent, participatory policy design.
The project’s pilots translated the general principles of decentralised rural proofing into concrete practices and generated insights into what kinds of DRP arrangements were workable in different territorial and institutional contexts.
To deliver on decentralised rural proofing, the policy brief makes several recommendations. These include:
- Providing resources and capacity to intermediary institutions, which empower local institutions and stakeholders to embed the process in rural realities and existing governance;
- Implementing DRP to coincide with the policy cycle, to ensure the timeline is well integrated with the preparation of legislation;
- Embedding DRP in routine practices to improve policy coherence and avoid creating an additional organisational layer.
Funded by Horizon Europe and UK Research and Innovation, the RUSTIK project aims to help rural actors and policymakers design better strategies, initiatives and policies fostering sustainable transitions of rural areas.