A rural proofing tool to unlock the full potential of rural areas and communities through better rural-centred EU policymaking for a fair and sustainable EU

Practical information

1. Composition of the study group
2. Administrator / Assistant in charge: Nicolas STENGER, Alejandra MOLINA SAAVEDRA / Zahra KADIRI, Isabel ANTUNES 
3. Contact
    

Background

Rural areas play a crucial role in ensuring Europe’s prosperity, competitiveness, resilience, and security. Yet, European rural regions remain underutilised, facing significant structural and environmental challenges. As a result, rural regions often fall behind their urban counterparts in productivity, innovation, and quality of life indicators. These disparities highlight the urgency of taking targeted action to unlock rural regions full potential, to strengthen the implementation of the European long-term rural vision for 2040 (LTVRA), to acknowledge and further promote multifunctionality of rural areas, and to foster stronger linkages between rural and urban territories.

Although several rural proofing mechanisms are currently in place, their application remains limited and fragmented across policy sectors and governance levels. Importantly, there is no globally recognised or EU-level validated rural proofing tool and uncertainty persists to what rural proofing entails in practice. Additionally, rural considerations are often not anticipated or not systematically integrated at an early stage of policy design. As a result, the impacts of EU policies on rural areas vary widely in scale, and effectiveness, contributing to uneven and inconsistent outcomes across rural regions.

In this context, the objectives of this own-initiative opinion will be to:

• Identify gaps, inconsistencies and good practices in current rural proofing approaches across Member States and EU institutions;
• Develop and promote a clear and operational EU-wide definition of rural proofing;
• Provide a comprehensive framework and analytical guidance to operationalise the concept on how rural impacts should be identified, measured, and assessed across EU and national policy processes;
• Ensure that the contributions of rural areas to broader EU policy objectives are systematically identified and considered in policy design and impact assessments;
• Strengthen policy coherence across EU initiatives;
• Promote inclusive governance and meaningful civil society participation.