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In OECD countries, rural areas account for three-quarters of the land and are home to a quarter of the population. Rapid changes in the international economy clearly have a different effect on these regions than on cities and towns, offering different challenges but also different opportunities.
Improved communications and the Internet make it possible for many people to work just as effectively from a cottage in a village as in a city office, for example, while cheaper transport and increased leisure time make it easier for farms to expand into non-farming activities. As a result, governments have moved away from a defensive attitude to rural policy, essentially focussed on trying to halt a decline, to concentrate more on seizing new opportunities. Some of these opportunities are linked to agriculture, but most will be in non-agricultural activities.
The question is how to adapt current rural strategies, which are often sector-based, to take into account the different development needs of rural regions, many of which are based on exploiting specific local resources – policies to encourage water-based activities such as fishing and sailing are clearly not suitable to all areas, for example.
However, these new approaches to rural development have not yet been accompanied by a substantial reallocation of resources to integrated rural policy. Designing such policies for different communities or territories requires seeking more coherence among sectoral policies and the pooling of knowledge held by a wide variety of public and private actors. Traditional hierarchical administrative structures are likely to be inadequate to administer these policies effectively. This Policy Brief looks at the experience and insights coming from numerous initiatives that are being implemented across OECD countries and offer possible solutions to these policy challenges.
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