H2020 Project SIMRA – Social Innovations in Marginalised Rural Areas

SIMRA seeks to advance understanding of social innovation and innovative governance in agriculture, forestry and rural development, and how to boost them, particularly in marginalised rural areas across Europe, including non-EU, especially Mediterranean countries. It encompasses the complexities and various dimensions, and understanding of how to support enhanced governance and social innovation, addressing specificities and priorities of social needs and new social relationships and collaborations. These objectives will be achieved by:

1. Developing systematic frameworks: a) theoretical - for improved knowledge of the complexity of SIs and its dimensions, and its impact on unfolding territorial capital; b) operational - based on a trans-disciplinary coalition (researchers and practitioners) to advance understanding of preconditions and success factors (e.g. instruments, incentives etc.) for implementing/operationalizing social innovations.

2. Creating a categorisation of social innovations which encompasses the specificities in terms of social priorities, relationships/collaborations etc. and serves as an instrument to explore reasons why regions with similar conditions display diverging paths and to turn diversity into strength.

3. Creating an integrated set of methods to evaluate social innovations and its impacts on economic, social, environmental, institutional and policy dimensions of territorial capital.

4. Co-constructed evaluation of social innovations in case studies across the spatial variation of European rural areas, considering which components of territorial capital foster and, or mainstream rural development.

5. Synthesis and dissemination of new or improved knowledge of social innovations and novel governance mechanisms to promote social capital and institutional capacity building and inform effective options/solutions for shaping sustainable development trajectories.

6. Creating collaborative learning and networking opportunities and launching innovative actions at different/multiple scales, with continuous interactions among researchers, knowledge brokers and stakeholders to foster and mainstream social innovation, leaving a durable legacy.

SIMRA (running from 2016-2020) is a cooperation of 23 partners from all over Europe and Egypt, Tunisia and Lebanon too. It is coordinated by the James Hutton Institute, UK. The Austrian Federal Institute of Agricultural Economics will participate in the development of theoretical concepts and care for an Austrian case study of the agricultural sector, to be selected and evaluated due to the criteria developed in the course of the project.