Reflections on rural proofing, rural health and rural poverty
The Rural Policy Centre’s Jane Atterton
provides some reflections on two very interesting and very international events
she attended in June.
The first event I attended was a virtual expert exchange
session organised by the World
Health Organisation (WHO) focusing on rural health equity and
integrated rural development (9th June). This invitation was based
on recent work that the RPC team has done for the WHO on rural proofing and
wellbeing, and agriculture and health equity. The second event was a Policy
Action Lab organised by the Rural Pact Support Office focusing on rural
proofing at EU, national and regional levels (on 12th
June). I was invited to be the rapporteur for the event, summarising the key
points that emerged during the day and providing some reflections, drawing on
previous work I have done on rural proofing, including for the European
Network for Rural Development.
Both events provided an opportunity for me to share observations
on rural policy developments in Scotland and learning from research in SRUC’s School of Natural &
Social Sciences, and to hear about interesting rural research
and policy developments and health and education-related activities in other
countries across the globe, including Africa, the Middle East, Australia, North
America and Europe. Both events were hugely rich in terms of the breadth and
depth of issues covered. This blog summarises some of the key stand out points
for me.
Rural proofing is the process by which all policies are
checked, from the very beginning of the design phase, for their potential
implications for rural areas. If potentially negative implications are
identified, the policy and/or its delivery mechanism should be adapted to avoid
these negative impacts. To achieve rural proofing effectively, policy-makers across
all government departments – housing, health, economic development, poverty,
etc. – are required to recognise and take responsibility for undertaking it, often
with advice, guidance and toolkits provided by their rural policy colleagues.
Many countries and regions have adopted rural proofing.
Some started several decades ago - such as Ireland, Finland, England and Canada
(the four countries where case study work is being carried out for SRUC’s Scottish
Rural Communities Policy Review project) and others more recently,
such as Castilla-La
Mancha in Spain and New
Zealand. The WHO has
been carrying out interesting work on rural proofing, in particular relating to
health and health equity, as has the OECD. Indeed,
there were many more good examples of researchers effectively doing rural
proofing at the WHO expert roundtable, including through close working with
rural communities, bringing different types of evidence together to make the
case for the different circumstances in rural areas.
At the roundtable, Professor
Bruce Chater from Queensland University said “Rural proofing must
start with communities and their wisdom”, which I think brilliantly sums up
the importance of hearing from communities when rural proofing. Adequate
mechanisms are needed for this to happen, not just for rural communities (and
the ‘harder-to-reach’ individuals and families within them) to engage with
rural policy-makers, but also with the policy-makers in other departments who
are doing the rural proofing, where relationships are likely to be less well
developed and knowledge of rural more limited.
Related to this, is the need to frame rural areas as active
rather than passive recipients of policies developed elsewhere (usually urban
locations to which the policies are often better suited). The narrative and
vision guiding rural proofing need to emphasise the vital contributions of rural
areas when it comes to providing healthy food, clean air, locations for
renewable energy generation, green spaces for wellbeing any many other things,
not their needs and challenges. Rural proofing provides a means through which
their representation in policy debates and decision-making can be increased.
The European Commission committed to work with member
states to undertake rural proofing as part of its Long-Term Vision for Rural
Areas published in 2021. In 2022, I worked with the European
Network for Rural Development (ENRD) Thematic Group on Rural Proofing to
produce a
framework of rural proofing actions to strengthen the process of
rural proofing across all Member States. In Scotland a Rural Assessment Toolkit
and an online training module have been available to all policy teams across
the Scottish Government since April 2025 to ensure that they also rural proof
policies as they are developed. Through a SEFARI
Specialist Advisory Group, SRUC researchers (working with
colleagues elsewhere) were able to provide input to the Toolkit based on their
previous work on rural proofing in different national contexts. Interestingly,
this voluntary approach to rural proofing in Scotland sits alongside the
legislative commitment to undertake Island
Communities Impact Assessments (i.e. island proofing).
A key purpose of the Rural
Pact Policy Lab was to hear how the ENRD framework has
been used in different countries to support the implementation and
strengthening of rural proofing. A few things stood out for me from the
discussion. First, how the framework needs to be interpreted differently in
different countries depending on a whole range of factors, including the
political support given to rural nationally, the strength of rural
stakeholders’ voices, the existence or not of a strong rural movement, and the
general characteristics of the policy and political system. Second, rural
researchers have a crucial role to play in providing the data – and crucially
the associated ‘intelligence’ or interpretation of that data, as explained by
the OECD’s Betty-Ann Bryce who spoke at the event – to support an accurate
rural proofing process. SRUC’s Rural and Islands Insights Report (which is
available here with
a second report due shortly), is a good example of researchers contributing to
the evidence base and its interpretation. RUSTIK and GRANULAR are
other great examples of EU-wide projects doing the same.
One final thing really struck me at both events, and that
was the potential for rurally-located – or at least rurally-present – research
and educational institutions to play an important role in helping people to
understand rural circumstances and opportunities and raising the profile of
rural people and rural issues - and indeed potentially going one step further
and helping to tackle them. A good example is training local health and social
care workers, another is addressing rural poverty, and particularly poverty
amongst children and young people. Viewing education as one route out of poverty
suggests that there is a key role for these institutions to ensure that they
are attractive to local students, provide employment opportunities for people
from their local area, support local (often small) businesses through
appropriate procurement practices, tailor their entry requirements and
curriculum to the local secondary education provision and labour market, and
continue to support their graduates once they leave and begin their careers in
their rural communities. SRUC itself is very well placed to do this through the
depth of knowledge and expertise we have within the School of Natural &
Social Sciences and the School
of Veterinary Medicine.
The WHO event gave me much food for thought in this area,
especially in terms of new ways of assessing the impact of modules and courses,
not by students’ results in tests, but by how far the institution and its
graduates support and are accountable to their local communities. As the Scottish
Government develops its third (and final) Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan
for 2026-2031 these are interesting questions that we will seek
to inform and discuss further.