Social Space for Smart Regions

PoliRural project is a Horizon2020 funded project that researches, innovates, and delivers novel solutions to future-oriented collaborative policy development for rural areas. PoliRural aims to intervene in the policy value chain.  

What is then the policy value chain?

This is my subjective interpretation of the policy value chain. It is shaped based on my experiences and learnings at PoliRural. It is rather ideal and optimistic. I trust that in real life the value chain is far more complicated and fuzzy. I have also doubts about policymakers' interest and ability to include into the process the diverse change factors (drivers, mega-trends, trends, weak signals), and multiple voices of the customers i.e. citizens and civil society.

However, this image includes the following components of PoliRural Pre-Foresight studies:

• PoliRural partners have identified and described 64 Change Factors that are grouped in STEEPV-groups, that are Social-, Technological-, Economic-, Environmental-, Political-, and Value weighted change factors.
• PoliRural 12 pilots have listened to rural inhabitants and rural development professionals on needs that echo diverse rural realities.
• PoliRural 12 pilots have mapped policies that aim to impact on rural future and compared the policies to needs.
• PoliRural has investigated, through local stakeholder panels, the SWOT situation in pilot areas. What are Häme region's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats from the stakeholders' perspective?
• PoliRural pilots have explored rural-related Key Performance Indicators (KPI) through System Dynamics Modelling and later we will define a locally adapted set of KPIs that are addressed to direct the rural policy value chain transformation. Imagine, we will monitor and assess policymakers' performance and impact on rural areas.

There are though a bunch of parameters and components that I have brought into the image but which are excluded from the PoliRural research e.g. the values and principles of politicians. They are out of the box, in this research.

As a result of Pre-Foresight studies, the HÄME pilot, just like the 11 other pilots, has acquired a better understanding of rural reality from the policy value chain and policy-making performance point of view. The Pre-Foresight phase purpose is to make observations and seek evidence on the environment. To understand what is the situation today, in order to be able to define a future vision for 2040.

The next phases of PoliRural research are firstly the actual Foresight phase and then to define the Post-Foresight.

The blog-writer, Tuula Löytty, is an HÄME-pilot team member, but this blog is a result of individual thinking.