The General Assembly of LDnet will take place online on 14 February 2023, 17:00-18:30 CET. As in previous years, it will take place online and will be open to LDnet members, friends and contributors. Its main theme and will be devoted to capacity building for local development. Capacity building for Community Led Local Development […]
Fostering rural resilience: first results and newsletter of the REBOUND project
Grasping rural community resilience and well-being After kicking off in February 2022 the REBOUND partnership, including LDnet/AEIDL, focused during the past year on compiling state-of-the-art knowledge in the field of rural community resilience and well-being. The main instrument to achieve this was a questionnaire distributed to a broad range of stakeholders to gain community, practitioner, […]
Michael Dower (1933 – 2022)
We are very saddened at the news of the death of Michael Dower, a great champion of rural communities, leading light in rural development, long-standing friend and member of LDnet. Michael passed away on 7 November 2022. He had a long and fruitful life. He trained as a chartered surveyor and town planner followed by […]
Resilient coastal communities: a guide for FLAGs
“Resilient rural communities” is a topic we have addressed on several occasions, including research publications on rural proofing, articles on the core principles of resilience and resilient villages and LDnet’s participation in the Erasmus+ project REBOUND. We are now highlighting a practical guide on “resilient coastal communities” which was published at the final stage of […]
Smart Rural 21 Final Conference in Sopot/Gdańsk (PL): Encouraging encounters
Under the autumnal sky of the vintage sea resort of Sopot adjacent to the Polish coastal metropole of Gdańsk a noteworthy event took place on October 17th and 18th 2022: The final conference of the European pilot project on Smart Villages, Smart Rural 21, having been organised in the premises of the Grand Hotel, where […]
European Rural Parliament 2022 – Resilience to Crises, Security and Solidarity
Report, Joint Declaration & Workshop (Does anyone listen?) The fifth meeting of the European Rural Parliament took place in Kielce, Poland, from 12 to 15 September 2022. The European Rural Parliament is a process aimed to strengthen the voice of rural communities in Europe, to promote self-help, solidarity, exchange and cooperation between rural communities and […]
InDaLE project – Innovative public service provision in rural areas: Closing event 13 December 2022
Innovative public service provision in rural areas: Mutual learning between Germany, Sweden, Austria and Scotland The InDaLE research project In many structurally weak and sparsely populated rural regions of Europe, demographic change coupled with unstable local finances are pushing public services to the brink of their feasibility. With this, the quality of life in such […]
Rural Pact: European and local leaders join forces to make local communities stronger
The Rural Pact conference, 15-16 June 2022, brought together EU, national, and regional politicians along with local authorities, social and economic stakeholders in a participatory event that reflected the rural vision’s ambition and bottom-up character. It sought to engage participants in designing the governance of the Rural Pact and gather commitments for the achievement of […]
Rural proofing – a foresight framework for resilient rural communities
This report for the European Committee of the Regions aims at identifying the mainstreaming potentials of existing rural proofing methodologies and territorial impact assessment methodologies in the EU policy process.It was written by Roland Gaugitsch, Isabella Messinger, Wolfgang Neugebauer, Bernd Schuh (ÖIR); Maria Toptsidou, Kai Böhme (Spatial Foresight). Its executive summary is reproduced below. The […]
Rural Europe – European Parliament event
Book Launch on the future of Rural Europe with Special Guests. This hybrid event on 7 June 2022, 16:30-18:30 CEST live from the European Parliament, with physical participation in room WEISS N3.5, with interpretation available in English and French. It marked the launch of the new book Rural Europe Takes Action – No more business […]
Rural Europe Takes Action
This new book by ARC2020 and Forum Synergies – Rural Europe Takes Action – offers incisive and inclusive proposals for political and practical rural action to address the ongoing challenges of the transition towards a more resilient agriculture, a circular economy, a more inclusive rural infrastructure and so on, and new challenges arising from the […]
Evaluation study on the ENRD and NRNs’ contribution to the implementation of the EU Rural Development policy
DG AGRI has commissioned consultants to carry out an evaluation study aimed to assess how and to what extent the ENRD and the NRNs contributed to the implementation of the EU Rural Development policy in the 2014-2020 programming period. As part of this study, four surveys were designed to obtain inputs into the networks’ results […]