Driving Rural Innovation: The Vision Behind NEXRUR

Written interview with the project coordination team: Juliane Corredor Jimenez, Philipp Grundmann, and Chen Gao from the Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Engineering and Bioeconomy (ATB) in Germany.

1. What are the key rural challenges that the NEXRUR project addresses?

While NEXRUR addresses quite a myriad of challenges faced by rural areas, we believe that the most important ones may be the continuation of agricultural rural businesses in light of increasing pressure from climate change, water scarcity and biodiversity loss; growing disparities between rural and urban living conditions and, with this, the impoverishment of rural areas; and a feeling of lack of involvement of communities in their own development.

2. How do you plan to tackle these challenges through the project activities?

We decided to look at community-led businesses as a possible counterweight to the above-mentioned challenges, due to their potential to organise and motivate rural communities to actively create economic opportunities that not only generate jobs and income, but also aim to improve the environmental and social conditions of local communities.

3. What are Community-led business models (CLBM) and what makes them special in regards to traditional business models?

Defining a ‘community-led business’ is actually an ongoing task within the NEXRUR project, so please bear with us if we cannot give a definitive answer at this stage. Nonetheless, we can already specify that CLBs do have certain attributes: (i) a form of participatory governance structure, i.e. the community is actively involved in the decision-making of the business; (ii) a degree of reinvestment of profits into local community structures; and (iii) (a degree of) ownership of the business by the community.

What makes them special compared to traditional businesses may be this structure, in which decisions are made more collectively and, thus, there is a more direct link between those who make business decisions and those who live with the consequences of these decisions, often leading to common goals. Another characteristic is that communities typically share common interests that lead them to develop new institutions together, such as rules, norms and social capital.

4. How do these CLBM contribute to challenges in rural development and the future of agriculture?

This is an aspect that we are investigating, and we hope to have more concrete answers as NEXRUR progresses. We believe that our CLBMs have strong potential to be more resilient and sustainable over time, as they incorporate the knowledge and opinions of local communities into their business decisions. Moreover, as they are typically driven by local actors themselves, they naturally increase self-sufficiency and capacity building, something that is hardly achievable for businesses that simply establish their facilities in a rural area, for example.

5. Collaboration: What added value does the EU–China collaboration bring to NEXRUR in terms of impact?

We already see great added value in the EU–China collaboration through the exchange of different political, social and economic contexts, as well as through the comparison of the diverse technological and business solutions presented in the case studies. We are looking forward to deepening our collaboration in order to increase the impact and develop even more robust research results.