EDORA: European Development Opportunities for Rural Areas

1. EDORA:European Development Opportunitiesfor Rural Areas How does Cohesion Policy Support Rural Development? DG Regio Seminar Brussels, 1st October 2009

2. The Overall Objectives (Specification) …to describe the main processes of change which are resulting in the increasing differentiation of rural areas. …to identify development opportunities and constraints for different kinds of rural areas… …to consider how such knowledge can be translated into guiding principles to support the development of appropriate cohesion policy.

3. The EDORA Approach • A very wide-ranging task… • Rural data availability is strongly influenced by the agrarian rural development tradition. • Being driven by the data availability risks “slipping into well-trodden paths…” • A hybrid “deductive/inductive” approach – first establish territorial concepts and theory, then empirical analysis and assessing policy implications. • Work so far has been mainly conceptual and empirical… have not yet considered policy implications in any detail.

4. Why a typology of Intermediateand Predominantly Rural Regions? • Wished to review explanatory potential of the Dijkstra-Poelman version of the OECD typology. • Explore potential to elaborate it; add structure and performance aspects to U-R dimension. • Elaborated typology might then serve as a framework for analysis of recent trends, consideration of future perspectives, and policy implications. N.B. It cannot be a typology of Rural Areas – two reasons: • Rural areas do not function separately from adjacent urban areas – they are connected by a dense web of interactions. • Smallest practicable data units are NUTS 3(2), most of these contain sizable towns/cities. It is a typology of Intermediate and Predominantly Rural Regions.

5. The art of the possible… • Typology should help us to understand the process of regional differentiation. • Methodology and structure of the typology should not be driven by data availability or agrarian RD traditions. • Nevertheless, need to work within the limits set by data availability. • “Meta-Narratives” identified by EDORA highlighted various dimensions of change, only some of them can be “mapped” with existing data, e.g.: • commodification – “consumption countryside” • economic diversification – “restructuring”

6. The EDORA “Typology” • …more of a three-dimensional framework for analysis, rather than a one-dimensional classification. • The three dimensions are: • Urban-Rural (remote/accessible) • Accumulation – Depletion (performance). • Economic structure (diversification).

12. Some Summary Statistics… “Agrarian” and “Consumption Countryside” regions cover about 45% of the total area of the EU27, but only 19% of the population and 12% of the GDP. By contrast the diversified regions cover almost 50% of the area, 37% of the population and 32% of GDP.

13. Some Observations which may be relevant to the policy discussion… • Given the great diversity of Intermediate and Predominantly Rural regions in the EU27, some form of “targeting”, or regional sensitivity seems appropriate. • The EDORA typology seems to suggest that there are some dimensions of (macro scale) systematic variation in performance and structure across the EU27 area. • The EDORA typology shows that “Agrarian” and “Consumption Countryside” regions cover less than half the land area of the EU27, whilst the Diversified regions of account for about half the area, have a substantially greater share of the total population, and account for about one-third of the economic activity of the EU. • BUT…regional targeting is a crude tool: • More appropriate for some forms of intervention than others • Need to beware the MAUP and the “ecological fallacy”.

14. Thank you for your attention….