Join Euromontana at the 2019 European Rural Parliament for vibrant rural mountainous areas!

Euromontana will participate in the 2019 edition of the European Rural Parliament, organised in the mountainous region of Asturias, Spain, from November 6 to 9. The event will be the opportunity to reflect on the common challenges faced by Europe’s rural areas but also to discuss possible solutions. Since 2013, the European Rural Parliament is above all a crucial gathering to raise awareness on the opportunities and the high-quality of life offered by rural, remote and mountainous areas while also claiming that “all Europe shall live!”

The European Rural Parliament will feature various good practices for the development of rural areas, their attractivity and sustainability, during different study visits, plenary sessions and workshops. Euromontana will contribute to the reflexions by leading the workshop “how to govern smart in mountain areas?“. Through the introduction of examples of innovation governance in mountain areas and collective discussions, the workshop will aim at identifying governance models answering mountains’ specific needs. The workshop will be led by Laura Gascón Herrero, European project officer in Provincial Government of Teruel and member of Euromontana Board of Directors, and Blandine Camus, Communication & Policy Officer at Euromontana.

The Horizon 2020 project SIMRA – of which Euromontana is a partner – will also participate to the European Rural Parliament by highlighting the potential of social innovation in a workshop on how to connect with the “hard-to-reach” in rural areas. The objective will be to discuss how to reach out to various rural population groups who are not well-represented at the European level or who feel left behind by policymakers, such as youth, refugees, remote communities, Roma, women, etc. The good practices collected by SIMRA will serve as a basis to think of solutions to adapt EU policymaking to the diversity of communities and their needs in rural areas as well as show the benefits of connecting with/engaging such groups for the society as a whole. Bill Slee, researcher at the James Hutton Institute, and Lauren Mosdale, Project Officer at Euromontana, both involved in the SIMRA project, will run the workshop.

If you are interested in joining us at the European Rural Parliament 2019, please consult the full programme and read the travel and accommodation information. Please note registrations are closing on September 30. If you are interested in joining, please pre-register first, taking into account there is a limited number of places, and wait for confirmation.