Tag Archives: learning

The island of Vinön

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Part of the study the ENDLT network did (see blog 26 -1) was to visit a project on outdoor education on the island of Vinön.

The island is the largest island in lake Hjalmaren, approximately 200 km from Stockholm. The island has 100 permanent inhabitants and population decreased over the past twenty years. Many commute to mainland jobs, others have small-scale enterprises, often a combination of fishing, farming, gardening and tourism. The European LEADER funding for rural development has been used to develop a framework for the development of Vinön. Continue reading →

Cross cultural learning in rural development

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Last week, from wednesday 21 to friday 23 of January, I stayed in Basenberga, mid Sweden for a workshop on cross cultural learning in rural development. The workshop was organised by the Swedish team of an informal LEADER-based network which exists since 2005 and which calls itself ‘European Network for Local Development Teams (ENLDT). The ENDLT is a knowledge building and shared learning network involving mixed teams of local practitioners, local politicians/civil servants and academics from the countries Ireland, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands and with some earlier participation from Germany, Hungary and Great Britain. By visiting each other, by the mixed nature of our teams and by developing a method for cross cultural learning, we jointly deepened our understanding of local development in different European settings which benefited our own practice. This time in Sweden a small proportion of the network came together to test and discuss the Manual of our method, written by the Swedish team. The Manual will be published in March and will be available on the web.

Kick-off new EU-research project – DERREG

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derreg_logo2Last week we had a kick-off meeting of the DERREG research project in Brussels. DERREG is the acronym for  ‘Developing Europe’s Rural Regions in the Era of Globalization’.  The project will last for three years and involves 9 partners from 8 EU-countries and 10 case-study-areas.  Aim is to study how, especially disadvantaged regions respond to key-challenges arising from globalization. Focus is on rural business, migration, sustainable development and capacity building.

The Rural Sociology Group, in my person, will coordinate a workpackage called ‘Capacity building, governance and knowlegde systems’. We will study how public policies and knowledge-infrastructure are connected to bottum up initiaves and thus facilitate regional learning. And, in the end, recommend stakeholders how this regional learning can be further improved.

Coming months we will start up research activities and soon a website will be launched with detailed information. And we will keep you posted at our blog.