Research article - Peer-reviewed, 2015
What is Smart Rural Development?
Naldi, Lucia; Nilsson, Pia; Westlund, Hans; Wixe, SofiaAbstract
In 2010, the European Union adopted the notion 'smart' in its new ten-year growth strategy Europe 2020 stating that Europe should become a smart, sustainable, and inclusive economy. The broad and policy-oriented concepts of smart growth and smart development are part of the strategy introduced as a response to the observed low growth rates of innovation and productivity across European regions. In all its essence, the growth strategy states that smart growth supports sustainable development, which is achieved by promoting research, innovation, and knowledge in order to attain regional economic growth. What is made less clear is how the concept of smart growth can be translated to fit a diverse set of rural regions. Other outstanding issues discussed in this paper relate to the possibility to measure and empirically address the outcome of policies for smart rural development. Hence, in this paper we conceptually analyse and bring together the ideas that underlie the logic behind policies for smart growth by focusing on smart growth from the perspective of rural regions. The paper also presents indicators of smart rural development and analyses their relevance in future empirical studies. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Keywords
Smart growth; Smart specialization; Europe 2020; Urban-rural classificationPublished in
Journal of Rural Studies2015, volume: 40, pages: 90-101
Authors' information
Naldi, Lucia
Jönköping University
Jönköping University
Westlund, Hans
Royal Institute of Technology
Wixe, Sofia
Jönköping University
UKÄ Subject classification
Economic Geography
Publication Identifiers
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2015.06.006
URI (permanent link to this page)
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/114088