## The Rural Attractiveness Explorer

The Rural Attractiveness Explorer is designed to help assess the impacts of different policy choices on the rural attractiveness of the PoliRural pilot regions. It builds on the outputs of the Policy Options Explorer and transforms them into an Index of Rural Attractiveness (IRA) which is also visualized in various ways. Thus, it is supposed to allow users to get insights into how rural attractiveness in a region is affected by different policy strategies.

Rural attractiveness is a rather complex concept - which renders its measurement anything but trivial. For instance, in PoliRural, we observed that concepts of rural attractiveness differ significantly from region to region, and are conditioned by developmental priorities such as the desire to attract investors, entrepreneurs, or tourists. Thus, what is understood as rural attractiveness may depend on where, when, and by whom attractiveness is determined Additionally, the attractiveness of a region is never absolute and can only be determined in comparison to other regions. This means that a region that is rather attractive compared to one set of regions can be rather unattractive compared to another set of regions.

Nevertheless, there is some common understanding of and agreement on the general issues that matter for rural attractiveness. This minimum agreement provides the basis for the Index of Rural Attractiveness. The IRA is made up of 6 sub-indices, each of which corresponds to the areas generally considered relevant for rural attractiveness:

- social,
- natural environment,
- human-made environment,
- economic,
- institutional,
- cultural.

Each of these 6 sub-indices in turn includes a number of sub-sub indices, e.g. the social sub-index can include sub-sub indices measuring the age composition or unemployment rate of the population in a region.

The IRA reflects the characteristics of the concept of rural attractiveness: The values of the Index do not represent absolute estimates of the attractiveness of a region but reflect how attractive the assessed regions are in comparison to each other. To account for the context dependency of rural attractiveness, the concrete choice of sub-sub indices needs to be determined in each individual situation in which rural attractiveness is supposed to be evaluated.

With the Rural Attractiveness Explorer, we want to enable users to explore the effects of different policy choices on the rural attractiveness of the PoliRural pilot regions. Thus, we transform the outputs of the Policy Explorer into a value of the IRA and visualise the results of that in different ways.

Notably, the Policy Explorer was initially not designed to have its outputs fit with the concept and Index of Rural Attractiveness. Thus, we use a version of the IRA here that represents a lowest common denominator between the outputs of the Policy Explorer and the requirements of the Index of Rural Attractiveness. For this reason, the adapted IRA we are currently using in the Rural Attractiveness Explorer consists of only 4 instead of 6 sub-indices. In future versions, the aim is to identify and include more areas of overlap between the outputs of the Policy Options Explorer and the IRA. For instance, future versions of this IRA will also consider total employment among the economic sub-sub indices, which is not included in the current version of the IRA.

Composition of the preliminary Index of Rural Attractiveness Index used in the Rural Attractiveness Explorer

To find out more about rural attractiveness, consult these resources:

- D1.1 PoliRural Vision For Attractive Rural Places & Professions
- D1.4 Rural Attractiveness: Post-Needs Gathering Update
- D1.7. Deliverable Rural Attractiveness: ThePost-Evaluation Update
- Newsletter No. 5 article “PoliRural consortium publishes 2 Scientific Publications”

Or skip directly to the different tools of the Rural Attractiveness Explorer:

- Comparing Rural Attractiveness across the regions of Europe” (tbd.)
- Exploring the Dynamics of Rural Attractiveness (tbd.)
- Exploring the Impact of Policy Options on Rural Attractiveness (tbd.)