Designing Rural Policies for Sustainable Innovations through a Participatory Approach

The added value coming from involvement of stakeholders in changing attitudes and cultures towards a more sustainable-oriented society has been repeatedly emphasized in documents of the European Union. Those documents emphasize the advisability of creating a more inclusive system from the early planning stages and for the whole process with regard to the development of EU policies, involving the stakeholder as a referring partnership both at the national and regional levels. This paper focuses on a case study related to an Italian region where the local partnership has been involved during the setting up of the Rural Development Program 2014–2020 and where a participatory approach has been applied. In order to create an effective output coming from these open consultations, a participatory approach has been carried out using a dynamized Strengths and Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats analysis (SWOT Analysis). The results presented here come from a specific thematic table where experts and stakeholders discussed a specific priority focused on innovation, training and advisory in rural areas. As expected, sustainable innovations and services as well as training courses need to be improved, while financial resources addressing those issues need to be increased.