European Union policy on rural development and EU research programmes aim to help rural areas of the EU meet the wide range of economic, environmental and social challenges of the 21st Century. However, the challenges facing rural areas of Europe, and their people, remain significant and highly affected by the crises of our current era. This contributed volume comprises 12 research studies, exploring the intersection of research, policy and innovation strategy across the diverse rural regions of the Europe Union.

Conducted in different countries, these studies point to the challenges that lie at the heart of strategic planning in public policy. The book ultimately supports an EU vision for future rural development, digitalisation, sustainability planning and innovation strategy. It is not only a source of data on the problems faced by local communities in different European countries, but offers suggestions for practical use of bottom-up and multiactor perspective for policy-making, business development and community engagement at local, regional and national level. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of rural development, innovation strategy, the agricultural sector and EU policy.

Dominique Barjolle is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Her research themes are agriculture and food, within the concept of the food system, including agri-food supply chains, the food system and health and innovation.

Paweł Chmieliński is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of European Integration at the Institute of Rural and Agricultural Development of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His research interests focus on political economy, rural development & food systems, European integration.

David Miller is the Knowledge Exchange Coordinator at the James Hutton Institute, UK. He has worked on techniques for handling and analysing geographic information and applying them to mapping, monitoring and modelling changes in peatlands, land cover, urban and rural land use, landscape and seascape, and the development of Geographic Information Systems for use by government and its agencies.