Casper: Citizen Activation in Shrinking rural areas for Place-based policies to Enhance Resilience

In CASPER, five regions partner up to improve their policies to respond to this shared challenge: South Savo (FI), Somogy County (HU), Basilicata (IT), Nouvelle-Aquitaine (FR) and Podlaskie (PL). The consortia’s common starting point is that even with dwindling populations, our regions may actually thrive on indicators of quality of life, making them attractive for people to stay or even (re)settle in – to an extent that our regions’ vitality, special know-how and cultural heritage can be preserved.The cooperation helps us to work out and implement effective practices for more directly engaging citizens in finding responses to the challenges of depopulation. If informed, consulted and included by decision makers, local citizens may understand and easier accept, or even find creative alternatives to, the right-sizing of services. Policy instruments are improved so that they respect and respond better to the ‘well-being’ needs of current local populations. Eventually, through mobilising citizens, we can approach the problem of ‘shrinking’ in a more cross-sectoral and place-based way and see better what ‘well-being’ should mean to retain and nurture our most important resource — people in our rural areas.

Policy objective:Europe closer to citizens (PO5)

Partners:

University of Eastern Finland Advisory, Lead Partner, Finland , https://www.uef.fi/en/unit/karelian-institute

South Savo Regional Council, Finland https://www.esavo.fi/en

Somogy County, Hungary http://www.som-onkorm.hu

CROST Nonprofit Ltd. ,Hungary 

East Sviluppo Basilicata SPA, Italy https://www.sviluppobasilicata.it/

 South France Active Nouvelle- Aquitaine, France https://franceactive-aquitaine.org/

Podlaskie Voivodeship, Poland https://www.wrotapodlasia.pl/

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