Blog

Can the EU's Long Term Vision and the Rural Pact become a reality in the post-2027 Rural Development Policy?

Food for thought in response to the questions set by the LTVRA Report

Eskola: The village that doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer

The end of summer is here, a new school year is starting and Covid-19 is not yet over. Schools might need to switch to online teaching mode again. While many schools have found it hard to live up to this new challenge last year, digital education has not been a new practice in the small Finnish village of Eskola. There is a lot to learn from Eskola's journey that often has led through bumpy roads.

It's high time to be smart

How to make 'smart villages' happen?

In this blog article we argue that smart villages offer a new "policy window of opportunity" to support rural areas and communities in an integrated way. The key to its success is a genuine multi-funded approach where single smart village strategies are supported by multiple funds, and the demarcation of funds and different rules are not the concerns of individual villages. 'Smart villages' will not just happen. Managing authorities of various funds and programmes should get together now to start designing the smart village policy framework of the next programming period in close collaboration with each other. Villages and village groups need to be closely involved already at the design stage.

We need a definition that allows all villages to be(come) smart

Any village can become ‘smart’. By defining the exact nature of ‘smartness’ (e.g. linked to a certain level of digital, economic or environmental development), there is a risk that a number of villages - that otherwise have innovative and relevant solutions to modern rural challenges - are getting excluded from the 'smart village' concept. Therefore, we think that an operational definition of 'smart villages' is required that is focused on the process of becoming a smart village rather than on the specific village characteristics.

Villages need to have a say in what smart villages are

‘Living next door to Alice’ first hit the charts in 1977 and then in 1995 in a parody version. The latter version of the song includes a profane phrase in the chorus (that some of us would remember singing at parties at the end of the '90s) questioning who that Alice actually was.