Across the OECD, rural regions make up approximately 80% of all territory and are home to approximately 30% of the population. These lands, and the people that live on them, are the source of almost all the food, fresh water, energy, lumber, metals, minerals and other resources that make our way of life possible. They are also where we find unspoilt natural beauty, wildlife and Indigenous cultures whose intrinsic value is increasingly recognised, as is the duty to protect them. Rural places are, in short, vital to the prosperity and well-being of all people.
Yet, for many of the people, firms and communities in rural places, prosperity has felt distant. Over the past decades, OECD countries and regions have faced structural transformations affecting their development trajectories and whose benefits have disproportionately flowed to metropolitan regions. Globalisation, digitalisation, demographic and climate change, and the shocks of the global financial crisis and the current COVID-19 crisis are deeply shaping the economic landscape of rural communities. Today, more than ever, the distance between winners and losers feels ever widening and, in 24 out of 28 OECD countries (for which data are available), regional inequality in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita has increased since the 2008 financial crisis, with rural regions falling behind, particularly those far away from large cities.
Tackling the particular challenges and leveraging opportunities that are present in rural places requires a change in rural development policy. First developed over 40 years ago, the OECD’s framework for rural development has helped guide member countries’ efforts to increase prosperity and improve the well-being of rural people. It has continued to evolve throughout that period, keeping pace with changing times and reflecting the organisation’s latest thinking.
Rural Well-being: Geography of Opportunities is the latest iteration of the OECD’s framework for rural development, leveraging improved data and evidence-based analysis and, for the first time, broadening the scope of analysis from a purely economic one to encompass the environmental and social dimensions of well-being. The new approach places the well-being of citizens at the forefront of its objective and recognises the diversity of rural places thanks to a deeper understanding of their diverse and complex socio-economic systems and their connection to cities. The new framework’s subtitle, Geography of Opportunities, reflects its central finding that while rural places are not without their challenges, they are also unquestionably places of opportunity, particularly with accelerated digitalisation. With well-designed rural policies to leverage local assets and executed in co‑ordination across levels of government and between the government, the private sector and civil society, the Rural Well-being Policy Framework shows how rural development policy can deliver rural places that are more prosperous, connected and inclusive, and that offer greater well-being than ever before.