GSS EU Science Funding Gateway

Proposals are expected to:

• Perform international benchmarking of rural policies within the EU and third countries who appear as best practice examples of science-society-policy exchange activities, global dialogue on rural policies and capacity building for policymakers working at different levels (e.g., international, national, regional, and local);
• Analyse delivery mechanisms (decentralised vs centralised, quality of multi-level governance, role of politics, etc.) and ways to measure impact combining both quantitative and qualitative methods;
• Focus on multi-dimensional policies (e.g. coordination among different policies and different policy level, from local to international) that address several needs and challenges in an integrated manner;
• Analyse also rural and territorial policies that were developed with and for rural communities and identify effective citizen engagement methods;
• Identify and analyse also successful policy measures aimed at creating opportunities for young people in rural areas;
• Enhance peer-to-peer learning among international, national, regional and local policy makers by experimenting different mechanisms and tools for effective knowledge exchange, even among different levels, on best practices and lessons learnt about rural and territorial policies and delivery mechanisms;
• Provide recommendations to policy makers at different levels (e.g. international, national, regional and local) on how to best address rural needs and challenges and foster sustainable balanced, equitable and inclusive development of rural areas.
• Provide recommendations to policy makers at different levels, in particular regional and local, on how to best access and make use of existing funds.
• Projects should provide relevant results, in particular develop a framework to measure communities’ well-being beyond economic indicators (including social, health-related, environmental) to measure policy impacts in rural areas that can be linked with the work of the upcoming EU Rural Observatory.