Rural COOP

With respect to territorial characterisation, the disparities between regions are widening, leading to new social cleavages, proven by different distribution of wealth. Sustainable integrated territorial development constitutes not only an essential element to boost the development of marginal areas but also a relevant democracy driver, as enabling the realisation of policy agendas, encouraging deliberative and participatory democracy, favouring the convergence in Interreg Europe cooperation area. Rural COOP aims to improve the integrated territorial development policies focused on rural and mountain areas, promoting the integrated, participatory and green community management of natural resources and the related supply chains, with reference to the selected policy instruments.

By virtue to the composition of consortium, the project tackles the tension between the variegated forms of capitalism and the efforts towards reaching the territorial convergence, confronting typical approaches of the southern area (IT), eastern area (PL; BG), northern area (SE; FI), candidate area: (AL) and western area (CH). Rural COOP grounds in two phases. The first one investigates the state of art of relevant policy practices in the Interreg Europe cooperation area, and deploys the preliminary analysis for the organisation of the capacity building, including the training on participatory methodology. The core and follow-up phases are relevant for the concrete promotion especially of cooperation among the policy staff, thanks to the deployment of policy learning events (10), aimed to reach the 48% of organisations with increased capacity due to their participation in interregional cooperation. In parallel local stakeholders are elicited by developing local policy workshops (~40), addressing the reform of the policy instruments (6). The second phase is constituted by the follow-up phase, to monitor the territorial effects and policy improvements.