News

Social innovation project in mountain areas

08.12.2016

A new four-year project founded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovative programme and coordinated by the James Hutton Institute was launched in April 2016. “Social Innovation 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. Its focus is on marginalized rural areas, including in mountain regions, across Europe and beyond, with a focus on the Mediterranean region where there is limited evidence of outcomes and supporting conditions.

SIMRA’s objective is to fill the knowledge gap in understanding and enhancing social innovation in marginalized rural areas by advancing the state-of-the-art in social innovation and connected governance mechanisms in agriculture and forestry sectors and in rural development in general. The specific objectives of SIMRA include:
• A systematic theoretical framework and a systematic operational framework developed for categorizing, understanding and operationalizing social innovation in different settings and across scales;
• A categorization and classification (‘catalogue of diversity’) of the social innovations observable in rural areas considering the varying specificities in terms of social needs, priorities and social relationships/collaboration types, etc.;
• An integrated set of methods developed for the evaluation of social innovation and its impacts in rural areas across the target region;
• A co-constructed evaluation will be carried out (by academic and practice community) of success factors for social innovations across selected case studies;
• New and improved knowledge of social innovations and novel governance mechanisms coming from the analysis (primarily case studies); and
• Collaborative learning and networking opportunities created and innovative actions launched by integrating, consulting and engaging stakeholders at different and multiple scales.

The first SIMRA stakeholder workshop was held in October 2016 in Bratislava, Slovakia. Because marginalized rural areas include also mountain areas in many cases, in particular in the Carpathian Mountains, the actions of the workshop focused on developing territorial capital and enhancing social innovation in these areas.

Learn more about SIMRA on the website, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook 

Photo: SIMRA