Tackling rural challenges by unravelling the regional policy mix

Rural regions are facing specific challenges, such as demographic ones. For example, younger people often move towards more urban regions, which results in an older and dwindling population, which could lead to less facilities and broad prosperity.

These challenges ask for specific sets of policies focused on various aspects at different governmental levels. This idea, recently called the ‘policy mix’ originated in monetary policies, but has also been applied to social innovations, such as community led initiatives (Rogge & Stadler, 2023). However, defining the policy mix ex ante has proven to be really difficult, due to lack of data and methodological hurdles in for instance understanding potential impact of combinations of policies (Sewerin, 2020).

Our research is opening the black box of this so called policy mix by automatically downloading and analysing all policies from different levels in a given region by our own developed digital application. In our presentation we will use the insights from this analysis and compare this with data on broad regional development, based on economical, social and living environment indicators that have been collected in the PREMIUM_EU project and is publicly available in an online dashboard.

First preliminary results show that (rural) regions that score high on broad regional development, often have more policies that focus on the above mentioned community led initiatives or citizen participation. This finding suggests that if regions are already highly developed, citizen participation is an important factor in improving wellbeing in the region. On the other hand it could also suggest that less developed regions need to reach a certain ’facilities’ or ‘policies’ threshold before citizen participation is of sufficient added value for regional development. We will present the findings from our meta-analysis and provide input for regions that are redeveloping their specific multi-level policy
mix.