Giving Rural Actors Novel Data and Re-Usable Tools to Lead Public Action in Rural Areas (GRANULAR)

Background and Objective

Rural areas account for 83% of the European Union's surface area and provide a home for 31% of its citizens. Some of them are particularly affected by demographic and social change, digitalisation, economic structural change, the transition to a greenhouse gas-neutral economy and way of life or the loss of biodiversity.

Policymakers and scientists face numerous problems when trying to grasp this diversity, develop recommendations for action and implement policies. For example, there is no consensus on the conceptualisation and demarcation of "rural", and there is a lack of relevant smallscale data for rural areas. There is also a need for more instruments to support actors on the ground in achieving the goals set, for example, improving the quality of life of the rural population.

The EU project GRANULAR ("Giving Rural Actors Novel Data and Re-Usable Tools to Lead Public Action in Rural Areas") will help to close this gap. The aim is to create a "Compass for Rural Areas" to help rural actors understand their areas' specificities and diversity, identify the main challenges and develop tailor-made place-based strategies to address them. The Thünen contribution will deepen our understanding of subjective wellbeing in rural areas.

GRANULAR is a four-year collaborative project funded by the Horizon Europe programme, coordinated by the French Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Montpellier, involving 24 institutions.

Approach

GRANULAR will use innovative methods to extract novel data sets from primary data such as remote sensing, crowdsourced data, mobile phone data and data compiled via web scraping, which will be combined with existing, already standardised data. The aim is to derive indicators relevant for rural communities to implement the long-term vision for rural areas formulated by the European Commission in 2021 to measure resilience, wellbeing, quality of life and attractiveness.

Data and Methods

At the heart of the GRANULAR approach are co-creation and multi-stakeholder engagement. GRANULAR will operate seven Living Labs in different regions of Europe (France, Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom), bringing together actors from science, politics and civil society to jointly design, test and validate the work of GRANULAR. In addition, nine replication labs will assess how the project's tools and methodologies can be replicated in other countries (Albania, Finland, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania and Serbia).

GRANULAR will also apply a combination of descriptive and multivariate statistics, time series analysis, machine learning, shift-share analysis and spatial analysis techniques to investigate territorial dynamics within and between different rural areas in the EU. The empirical results on trends and influencing factors will be used to develop innovative indicators on the subjective wellbeing of the population in rural areas in the EU.

The contribution of the Thünen Institute includes quantitative analyses of representative individual and household data enriched with smallscale data from longitudinal studies such as the Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP, Germany) and Understanding Society (UKHLS, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) as well as individual data from the comparative study European Social Survey (ESS, Europe-wide), which will make it possible to compare the many facets of subjective wellbeing.

Our Research Questions

• Which characteristics of the residential environment (e.g. proximity to green or water areas, accessibility of various services of general interest, biodiversity, etc.) contribute to the subjective wellbeing of people in rural areas, and how does this differ for different groups of people such as young people, seniors, people with disabilities?
• To what extent do our conclusions on the influence of different factors depend on the underlying delimitation of rural areas?
• How much does the subjective wellbeing of rural populations vary across Europe? Does everyone have similarly high personal mental resources such as prosocial behaviour, resilience, mindfulness and optimism? And are these facets of subjective wellbeing influenced by similar contextual factors as life satisfaction?