There are many challenges facing Rural Wales. We have an economy that underperforms on many measures, with lower productivity than the national average. The labour market has too many low paid jobs and limited opportunities for progression, but at the same time, employers struggle to fill vacancies. There is a preponderance of small and micro enterprises and a ‘missing middle’ of medium sized businesses. While some rural communities attract in-migrants, there are also trends of out-migration, especially among young people, leaving behind an ageing population. There are patterns of persistent poverty, which is often less visible that the poverty we associate with urban areas. There are problems of housing accessibility and affordability. Public services have been rationalised and not just public services, commercial services such as banks have been lost in many towns and villages. We have inadequate infrastructure – the broadband blackspots and mobile not-spots, and roads and railways that don’t go where we’d like them to, and not as fast as we’d like them to.
Family farms, which some see as essential features of the Welsh countryside, are yet again facing uncertainties over their future. And despite progress in restoring and reviving the Welsh language, there are concerns about falling numbers of Welsh-speakers in the majority Welsh-speaking communities of the rural heartland.
As we look to the future, we can see that climate change will have major impact on life and work in Rural Wales, but we can also recognise that the region has an important part to play in tackling the climate crisis – using our natural resources for renewable energy and for carbon sequestration. Yet there are difficult decisions to be made about land use and the landscape in the Net Zero transition.
The capacity of public authorities and agencies to respond to these challenges also faces constraints. Conventional models for economic growth don’t easily translate to a region without a single dominant urban centre and with limited endogenous capital. Furthermore, there are large gaps in the evidence we need for effective policy making and delivery, and the data that does exist is often not at the right scale or is out of date. After years of austerity, the analytical capacities of public authorities are diminished.
Cymru Wledig LPIP Rural Wales – the Rural Wales Local Policy and Innovation Partnership – aims to fill some of these gaps and strengthen capacity to address the challenges that I’ve mentioned by connecting knowledge, policy and practice to work towards achieving a wellbeing economy in Rural Wales.
Our approach is underpinned by seven key principles.
First, partnership. We are proud to be a genuine partnership. It is important that this isn’t just a project by one university. We have brought together world class experts in rural research from Aberystwyth, Bangor and Cardiff universities, and from the Countryside and Community Research Institute at the University of Gloucestershire, and we’ve reached outside universities to involve experts in businesses, social enterprises and the third sector, involving the Centre for Alternative Technology, Together for Change, Antur Cymru, Datblygiadau Egni Gwledig, Rural Health and Care Wales, Represent Us Rural, and Sgema as a core partners.
We extend further through the Thematic Groups established for each of our four Themes – Building the Regenerative Economy, Empowering Communities for Cultural Recovery, Enhancing Wellbeing in Place, and Supporting the Net Zero Transition – including researchers from beyond our core team, policy-makers and practitioners. The Thematic Groups will be forums for knowledge exchange in themselves, but will also play feed into our work programme by identifying evidence gaps and proposing topics for research.
Second, co-production. When we started developing the idea for Cymru Wledig LPIP Rural Wales we were fortunate to receive funding from the Wales Innovation Network for a scoping study and to hold a workshop with researchers and stakeholders, which set our Themes and shaped our approach. The spirit of coproduction continues, especially through the input of the Thematic Groups.
Third, our research will be responsive to emerging issues. We have created an architecture, a vessel that is yet to be filled with research topic. That will be done in response to the emerging issues and evidence needs proposed by the Thematic Groups. Our work will include short, targeted, research projects addressing specific issues and problems.
Fourth, our work will be solution-oriented. We are NOT doing research for the sake of doing research, but research in order to make a difference. An important aspect of this will be the Innovation Labs, modelled on CAT’s Zero Carbon Britain Innovation Lab. In these we will bring together stakeholders in a series of workshops to discuss obstacles to achieving change in an area, to identify potential interventions and actions to overcome these barriers, and to implement and test one intervention with a partner.
We also plan to hold ‘dialogues’ in our third year, involving diverse groups of participants. These will seek to find solutions to some of the most tricky issues facing Rural Wales, informed by the evidence that we’ve collected through Cymru Wledig LPIP Rural Wales.
Fifth, our work will be empowering. We don’t want to simply extract research from communities, we want to work with them and to leave something for them. Central to this is our Communtity-led Action Research, coordinated by Together for Change, in which we will support and mentor communities to identity their own research topics, plan a research strategy, collect and analyse data, and decide what to do with the findings. We’re starting working with five pilot communities – Corwen, Trawsfynnydd, the Dovey valley, north Pembrokeshire and Newtown.
Sixth, we want our work to be inclusive. We don’t just want to talk to the usual suspects. Equalities mainstreaming runs through our programme helping us to think about how our work tackles inequalities. We will run workshops with groups that are frequently excluded to make sure that we capture their concerns and needs, and we will mentor individuals from these backgrounds to participate in our Thematic Groups and Innovation Labs and on placements with us to do research on topics that matter to them.
Finally, our work will be accessible to the public. This is not research commissioned by a single body to sit on a dusty shelf. We want the data and results from our research to be useful and used by all. That will partly be done through the Online Integrated Evidence Hub for Rural Wales that the WISERD data team are building, which will integrate existing data from various sources and be a repository for data and evidence from our work programme. We will also engage the public through online seminars and events at the Royal Welsh Show and the National Eisteddfod. And today we have launched our Twitter/X account, @LPIPCymruWledig.
There’s a lot for us to do and we’re grateful for the enthusiasm and interest that we have received. We’re looking forward to working with you.
