Dear participant,
Project “Rural Proofing. Cooperation for better sparsely populated rural, coastal and mountain focused governance” (Coop4RURALGov) is an inter-regional collaboration project carried out by 7 organisations in Spain, Estonia, Ireland and Bulgaria, and funded by the INTERREG EUROPE program. The aims of the project are to improve the capacity to create and assess the impacts of policies, programs, and initiatives on rural, coastal, and mountain areas and how to integrate rural proofing into government decision and policy-making processes.
Rural proofing refers to the policy development and implementation process in which policymakers systematically evaluate whether the policy (or program, strategy, initiative, etc.) will have significantly different impacts on the rural areas and how to adjust the policies to better meet the needs of rural areas.
The target groups of the present survey are stakeholders in Spain, Estonia, Ireland, and Bulgaria, who are involved in developing and implementing rural and regional policies, programmes, and initiatives; assessing their impacts; and/or who have been asked to participate in stakeholder consultations in the policy-making process. This refers to ministries, regional and local authorities, local government associations, non-profits, industry and business associations, and similar organisations. Stakeholders are defined as individuals, groups, and organisations that are directly or indirectly involved and impacted by the rural proofing of policies.
The aims of the present survey are to collect information on what is the present experience of stakeholders with assessing the rural impacts and how to better integrate the consideration of needs of rural areas into the policy planning and implementation process. The project partners will use the results to understand the current rural proofing practices in the four countries, to develop recommendations on rural proofing, and for scientific purposes. The study will reflect the historical, cultural, nature-related, and other contextual differences and similarities of European ruralities which are important for finding well-working policy design instruments.
Participation in the survey is entirely voluntary, and you have the right to refuse to participate at any time. The survey is anonymous, and it does not collect any information that can identify you personally. The data will be summarised and reported in aggregated format in which individual responses are not identified.
The survey is organized by Estonian University of Life Sciences (www.emu.ee) on behalf of the Coop4RURALGov project partners. The survey data collected will be stored securely in its server.
Answering the questionnaire takes about 25 minutes.
We look forward to your survey responses.
Contacts
If you have any questions, issues, need for information, then contact
Dr. Anne Põder, Estonian University of Life Sciences, anne.poder@emu.ee
Bernie Donnellan, Galway Council, bdonnell@GalwayCoCo.ie
Project web site: https://www.interregeurope.eu/coop4ruralgov#:~:text=Rural%20Proofing%2C%20Cooperation%20for%20better,the%20regional%20impact%20assessment%2C%20Rural