Report on the Rural Proofing of Selected Rural Policies

The European Commission Communication on the Long-term Vision for Rural Areas (LTVRA) (European Commission, 2024) and its new Vision for Agriculture and Food (European Commission, 2025) identify rural proofing, alongside territorial impact assessments, as means of tailoring rural policies to avoid unintended adverse impacts on rural areas, and between different types and places within rural areas. The objective of this document (Deliverable D5.2) is to provide an overview of the rural proofing assessments undertaken by the GRANULAR Multi-Actor Labs (GRANULAR project) of self-selected policies or initiatives relevant to their territories. The deliverable includes annexes of a set of narratives of the rural proofing of selected policies and initiatives by the Multi-Actor Labs, and a set of fiches comprising one page per rural proofing assessment. It is supported by the knowledge accounts of the compiled assessments in MS Excel from the Labs. The rural proofing approach uses the framework developed in GRANULAR, linking rural proofing and the GRANULAR rural compass (Oostindie et al., 2024), guidelines to which are provided in Martino et al. (2024). It adopts a participatory strategy which has been adapted in the context of operation of each territory. A total of eight Multi-Actor Labs (3 Living Labs, 5 Replication Labs) from seven countries, (i.e. Finland, Greece, Italy (2x), Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom (Scotland)) undertook the exercise. The assessments of each of the policies provide bottom-up reviews of the potential impacts of policies and initiatives on their rural areas, negative or positive, and evidence of characteristics required of policies such that they create positive effects on rural areas. The deliverable sets out the GRANULAR approach to rural proofing in Section 2. The rural proofing assessments are analysed and described in Section 3 following the four steps of the GRANULAR framework. The assessments are articulated under the four action areas (or Pillars) of the European LTVRA (European Commission, 2024a), summarised in Annex I (Multi-Actor Labs Fiches) and Annex II (Results of the rural proofing exercise). Findings are discussed (Section 4) and summarised with next steps (Section 5).