Here you can find research from young or professional researchers related to rural development from a local perspective. Any ERP partner is invited to send studies to be published or read on the ERP website. Please send the core messageof the study and link to the full study.

Patrik Hämäläinen – The Finnish way of community-led local development Master´s thesis - University of Eastern Finland, the Department of Geographical and Historical Studies November 2019

”Resulting from the new funding opportunities and the adoption of a new, more systemic approach to local development, the tool has had many positive effects on the functioning of the third sector where it has been deployed”

”It can be concluded that in Finland the greatest added value from the use of CLLD lies in the increased organisational, institutional and financial capacity of the civil society”

”The potential exemplified by CLLD could be explored for further developing practices of more flexible, inclusive and collaborative forms of governance and local development”

See full Thesis: http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:uef-20200120

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Callum Wilkie 2019 - Innovating in less developed regions: What drives patenting in the lagging regions of Europe and North America

”Lagging regions—be they in North America, Europe, or possibly elsewhere—that are characterized by larger endowments of skilled human capital and feature the operation of economic actors in close physical proximity are more capable of generating new knowledge and are decidedly more innovative than those that lag behind in terms of their human capital development and within which economic actors and activity are more dispersed and thus less likely to interact. The analysis also offers evidence to suggest that economically disadvantaged regions on either side of the Atlantic have at least some facility for the absorption and exploitation of extra‐local knowledge and that this type of knowledge can catalyze innovative activity. It would therefore be reasonable to assert that the innovation policies for lagging areas, irrespective of location, should prioritize labor up‐skilling and human capital development more broadly and should incorporate the development of interregional connections and relationships—so‐called “pipelines” (Bathelt et al., 2004)—as a means to import new knowledge to supplement local innovative activities, or perhaps more accurately, to compensate for a lack of them”

”Policy‐makers must, however, be aware that there will inevitably be certain policy “levers” available in some economically disadvantaged contexts—or for that matter, more economically advanced ones as well—that are not available in others. There is, for example, considerable cross‐regional variation in the capacity to transform and capitalize upon different types of R&D. Similarly, not all interregional knowledge flows and nonlocal connections operate in the same way or offer the same benefit for different lagging regions in different geographic contexts. Policy‐makers need to recognize this latter phenomenon and should attempt, through the engagement of, and consultations and dialog with, local actors—a cornerstone, in fact, of bottom‐up, territorial specific policy‐making (Rodríguez‐Pose and Wilkie, 2018) —to identify the types of extra‐local connections, partnerships, and relationships—be they with actors in academia or the private, public, or third sectors—from which local innovators garner the greatest benefit and should channel resources accordingly”

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/grow.12280

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose: The revenge of the places that don’t matter (and what to do about it) 2018

Persistent poverty, economic decay and lack of opportunities are at the root of considerable discontent in declining and lagging-behind areas the world over. Poor development prospects and an increasing belief that these places have “no future”—as economic dynamism has been posited to be increasingly dependent on agglomeration economies—have led many of these so-called “places that don’t matter” to revolt against the status quo. The revolt has come via an unexpected source: the ballot-box, in a wave of political populism with strong territorial, rather than social foundations. I will argue that the populist wave is challenging the sources of existing well-being in both the less-dynamic and the more prosperous areas and that better, rather than more, place-sensitive territorial development policies are needed in order to find a solution to the problem. Place-sensitive development policies need, however, to stay clear of the welfare, income support and big investment projects of past development strategies if they are to be successful and focus on tapping into untapped potential and on providing opportunities to those people living in the places that “don’t matter”.