Description (EN): Depopulation in rural areas is not a recent phenomenon but it is also a growing problem -in 2025 about 90 European regions are expected to fall under demographic decline. The problem is more outstanding in mountainous areas where living conditions are extreme and geography and remoteness propitiates isolation. The PADIMA project main aim is to contribute to the improvement of the Regional Policies against depopulation in mountain areas (PADIMAs) through the exchange of good practices for maintaining and increasing population in mountain areas. A partnership covering a diversity of areas facing depopulation will facilitate the exchange of innovation as some of the policies implemented in the far Northern region of Buskerud in Norway are fully innovative in the Southern Spanish region of Teruel and vice versa.
Members of PADIMA partnership face depopulation in mountains with different degrees of development. Some participating regions are at the peak of demographic decline and have already implemented successful practices for prevention and reaction whereas other partners are at the first stages of depopulation and urgently need to benefit from the experience and policies previously implemented in similar European areas. A partnership seminar held in December 2008 in Spain set forth the potentialities in sharing and exchanging policy initiatives that the partners could contribute with and benefit from. A first appraisal of the partner’s good practices was made, showing that these practices could all be classified into three main action lines all coherent with the project sub-theme: Employment, Human Capital and Education.
The project approaches depopulation in mountain areas from three key pillar Policies distributed into three thematic WP led by the partners depending on their experience and know-how: Education and training, Economical diversification and Territorial Marketing. Each of these WPs has 4 main outputs:
- a collection of case studies and good practices
- an inter-regional thematic seminar on the Policy tackled aiming at discussing the information collected and its relevance to each partner's policy
- a study visit
- a good practice guide with recommendations for integration of these practices in regional policies
A 4th WP on integrated approach is meant to compile the 3 themes into recommendations for integrated policy against depopulation and enhance integration at regional level.
The expected result is an improvment of the Regional Policies against depopulation in maintaining and increasing population in European mountain areas.
Read more Achievements (EN): PADIMA is a project of exchange of best practice in fighting depopulation in mountain areas. 8 partners from 5 European countries are engaged in a 3-year collaboration and will produce policy guidelines on successful methods to attract new inhabitants to mountain areas. We do believe that in order to be able to satisfy inhabitants’ needs and to attract new population, mountain regions need to be able to provide them with good living conditions.The population needs to find diverse employment opportunities,to be offered public services, education and training facilities of good quality. Regions must also be able to communicate about themselves in order to be known by people who could be interested in moving there. Thus we are concentrating successively on 3 themes: education and training, territorial marketing and economic diversification. PADIMA achievements since the beginning of the project are satisfactory:
we had 9 partnership meetings, we organised 14 dissemination events
(press conferences, interregional training sessions for partner's staff but also a meeting held on 17th June 2011 in Zaragoza with stakeholders at local/regional level where we communicated project findings and outputs). We presented the project in 17 external events organised around Europe, in Belgium, France, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Spain, Poland. We organised 5 public events: in Teruel on February 2010; in Torino on 24-25 November 2010, in Trysil, Norway on 24-25 May 2011, in Le Puy en Velay, FR in November 2011 and in Brussels in June 2012. Some 300 participants, from project regions but also from other regions and countries (Romania, Macedonia, Switzerland, Poland, etc) joined us in our public events bringing the confirmation that there is a need for improvement of regional policies in mountain areas in all European Countries.
We gathered 99 good practices on education, training and territorial marketing & economic diversification in study areas (available all on Padima website). In addition to the collection of good practices made on the 3 themes of our project, we did collect quantitative information about the study areas, SWOT analyses and we make interviews with key local stakeholders in order to have a better view of each area's challenges.
We developed and updated the implementation strategie of WP4: integrated approach to the improvement of policies against depopulation. We have a website for the project www.padima.org and explanatory brochures presenting the project, its activity, events and partners in 5 languages: English, French, Italian, Spanish and Norwegian. All partners integrated project's key questions in their general communication strategy and we all communicate about the project on project partners website, newsletters and social medias.
We produced 3 newsletters "Education and training in mountain areas", "Territorial Marketing" and " Economic diversification in mountain areas", summarising project's key findings, available in English, French, Swedish, Spanish and Italian, except for the last one, not translated yet into Swedish, but it is next on the agenda)
The education and training policy recommendations guide, as well as the territorial marketing guide the economic diversification guide and the final guide of the project presenting extensively the work conducted in these three working packages are available on-line in English, and for some documents (WP1 guide and final guide) in French as well.
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