Rural Visions and our Civic Mission

Last week saw the official launch of Rural Visions, the University of Lincoln’s new research group focusing on economic and social geography of rural areas. We began with a discussion about Rural Visions’ role in contributing to Lincoln’s mission to be a New Civic University.

Having been established with the backing of major institutions in Lincoln and Lincolnshire, the University has a responsibility to contribute to economic growth and prosperity, cultural enrichment and social wellbeing across the region, alongside enhancing education and skills.

Although “civic” can denote urban areas, we stress the importance of the wider meaning of the term: “relating to the duties or activities of people in relation to their town, city, or local area.”[1]

For our work to provide a platform for informing activities that sustain a civic mission across the largely rural county of Lincolnshire, we must draw on a blend of international research and local engagement, especially with rural businesses and communities.

At Lincoln, we already have established research centres and institutes covering environmental and climatic threats (Lincoln Centre for Water and Planetary Health), public health (Institute For Health) and innovation in the Agri-food sector (LIAT). Rural Visions focuses on social science, economic and community issues to fill a critical void for the wellbeing of people in our region.

Although we aim to collectively assemble beneath three specific research strands, i.e. Economic Visions, Cultural Visions and Policy Visions, in order to encompass and indicate the vast wealth and range of diverse rural subject areas and research activities, we also acknowledge, appreciate and welcome the vast opportunities for further interaction between and across the strands.

The University is rightly proud of its contribution to supporting economic development. Rural Visions aims to strengthen this further through its “Economic Vision” strand of activities. This includes work to investigate the role of new technologies in creating economic opportunities in the region (e.g. CORA), studies of rural innovation (RUN-IN; SalFar), evaluation projects to influence rural funding initiatives (LEADER) and new research to investigate the role of changing population and migration dynamics across the region (CEERA; Boston).

These projects all draw from local and international dimensions. Working with European partners, the team is advancing theory on Social Innovation in rural areas (Bosworth et al., 2016) and projects from other parts of the UK as well as China are exploring how best to capitalise on rural tourism potential within the limits of sustainability (FeiFei Xu, 2018). Although not always considered “rural”, the significant impact of military land uses in the county, and new uses for redundant sites is another specialist area where the University must continue to play a leading advocacy role (Kipley, 2016).

A common themes across much of this work is the role of the Community – whether as research participants or as enactors of change themselves. As Rural Visions develops, we recognise the importance of building multi-actor networks to ground our activities in the real challenges and needs of local populations.  We also aim to showcase our innovative and broad-ranging methods tailored to rural research as these can set us apart from other research teams. This will attract the best postgraduate students and ensure that we can apply the most effective tools and techniques to carry out the research that can make a real difference to rural communities, wherever in the world that research takes place.

Rural Visions next event, on 4th April will bring together some short presentations of these innovative rural methods as the starting point from which to build a Rural Research Methods handbook. A full list of our upcoming events is here: https://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/geography/research/ruralvisions/events/

[1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/

Rural Visions

 This month sees the launch of Rural Visions, the University of Lincoln’s interdisciplinary research group drawing together academics working on a range of rural issues.

In our first event we will explore the contribution of rural research to the University’s civic mission.  Details of this and future events can be downloaded in our poster which can be downloaded here:        Rural Visions Poster

Designing policies to support rural innovation

Together with Prof. David Charles (Northumbria University), I am starting work on a new project to reconceptualise the support needs of rural businesses engaging in innovation. Currently, there appear to be two very distinct areas of support open to rural business; for those that are integral to rural communities, socially focused organisations such as Big Lottery the Plunkett Foundation are key actors.  For firms with wider markets who may have few connections to their local rural community, innovation support focuses on investment for technology, training and infrastructure (e.g. ERDF and Innovate UK).

Having previously argued (Bosworth and Turner, 2018) that rural businesses who are not embedded in local markets recognise different advantages and challenges associated with their location, it could be argued that this schism is appropriate.  However, the aim of our project is to better understand common opportunities and challenges for all types of rural innovation and to identify policy approaches that can reconnect these different agendas.  Rural areas depend on all types of firms for employment and prosperity, not just those traditional enterprises embedded in the fabric of rural communities.  Similarly, those traditional rural businesses that are in decline can benefit from innovations that connect them into more dynamic rural networks that are enriched by in-migrant enterprises and a diverse range of new business sectors that are flourishing across parts of rural Britain.  As we have the opportunity to rethink the allocation of funds that have previously been dictated by EU rules, this is a call to action for rural areas to become centres of innovation – whether technologically-driven, eco-innovation or social innovation.

Releasing the Potential of your Rural Economy

Releasing the potential cover imageThe University of Lincoln Schools of Geography and Business have teamed up with Roger Turner of Rural Enterprise UK to launch a guide for economic policy-makers to ensure that rural areas are properly recognised within new Local Industrial Strategies.  A PDF version of the guide can be downloaded here:

Releasing the Potential

Capturing the diversity of rural economies within strategic policy thinking is not straightforward but we believe that devolving Local Industrial Strategies to LEPs allows local areas to think more imaginatively about the potential of rural economies to be drivers of new forms of growth and innovation.

 

 

Regional Studies Conference – Lugano 2018

This years RSA conference is in Lugano from 3rd-6th June.  I will be presenting a paper on the links between counterurbanisation and entrepreneurial emergence.  Our findings identify that the sources of new businesses in rural areas often arise from outside of the local area with incomers well placed to spot new business opportunities and capitalise on a range of rural assets.  Bringing combinations of external networks and linking these to local resources, they are effectively fulfilling the traditional arbitrage role of entrepreneurs. Therefore, when considering how to promote rural economies, policy-makers need to ensure that they are creating the right opportunities for people in the locality AND presenting the right outward representation to attract “would-be” entrepreneurs to the region.

The paper can be downloaded here: Identifying entrepreneurial counterurbanisers RSA Lugano 2018

This is a collaboration with Leanne Townsend, James Hutton Institute, Bob Newbery, Newcastle Business School and Zografia Bika, Norwich Business School and we are planning new research to deepen our understanding of alternative rural entrepreneurship trajectories in rural Britain.