Supporting the inclusion, wellbeing, and growth of rural areas through multi-actor Smart Villages labs for enhanced governance frameworks

INSPIRE project supports sustainable and inclusive development of European rural areas by promoting social wellbeing and inclusion of rural dwellers and vulnerable groups.

In particular, the project contributes to advancing in a multi-dimensional way the concept of social inclusion in rural areas, and supports the access to high-quality social services by rural citizens through a series of awareness-raising, capacity-building, and pilot deployment activities that focus on social entrepreneurship in a set of 7 different pilot territories (e.g., coastal, rural, peri-urban, mountainous).

To realise its objectives, the project provides a novel territorial typology of rural areas, sets up and operationalises ""Smart Village labs"", and enhances governance frameworks and informed policy making through E-Democracy and user-innovation techniques, to eventually deliver a dedicated Rural Social Inclusion Policy Dashboard.