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In 2020, the SHERPA project contributed to the debate on the Long-Term Vision for Rural Areas by presentingthe key issues identified by the 20 regional and national SHERPA Multi-Actor Platforms (MAPs), and by theEU-level MAP. The MAPs identified their desired visions for 2040, the enabling factors to achieve thosevisions, the challenges to overcome and the opportunities to be seized. MAPs implemented a Delphi method,which was comprised of desk research and the use of quantitative data (e.g., development indicators,demography etc.), interviews with key informants, and the design, implementation and analysis of online surveys. The outputs of MAP cycle 1are MAP Position Papersand one SHERPA Position Paper.This Discussion Paper provides a methodological guidance for the second MAP cycle on how to implement aforesight exercise, which is the second stage of the work on the vision. The objective of the foresight exercise is threefold: (i) testing a methodology for prompting more ambitiousreflections on the future of their rural area/community and guiding strategic thinking among stakeholdersinvolved, (ii) developing pathways of change which provide inspiration and a basis for decision-making and(iii) producing a MAP Position Paper that enables further analysis and aggregated policy recommendationsby the SHERPA consortium. Results will inform SHERPA’s contribution to the EU LTVRA initiative and will bedocumented into MAP Position Papers as well as analysed in one single document, the SHERPA Position Paper. It will also continue feeding the debate on the long-term vision for rural areas initiated in September2019, which will result in a Communication of the European Commission aimed to be published in summer2021. The document presents the SHERPA approach, and logic of, the foresight exercise. The majority of thedocument provides the main information needed to prepare for and virtually run the workshops, brokendown into five main steps. &nbsp

In the past decade, there has been a paradigm shift in promoting a more sustainable economy and society on a global scale. However, those policies are often designed for large cities like Tokyo and do not consider the context of rural areas. This paper describes the collaborative spearheading of a circular design lab, RE:STORE. The space was formerly a traditional rice shop that had been abandoned for the last decade in Satsumasendai City - a rural site in Kyushu. The renovation project was led by Re:public, a social innovation design firm based in the region that soured bottom-up interventions and most importantly, placed local reisdents and its natural environment in the center of the transition towards circular society. Satsumasendai’s industry is currently dependent on its nuclear power plants, but due to a new government- mandated rule, the power plant may close down in the next 20years. With such an emergent future of potentially losing one of its main sources of the city's industry, RE:STORE was born as a hub for the residents to learn, prototype, and explore new local economies and lifestyles by re-learning the relationship between humans and the natural environment. This paper describes how local residents were involved in the co-designing process of RE:STORE on both conceptual and practical levels. The project also adds to a greater discourse on how grassroots, bottom-up initiatives that prototype a lifestyle that is rooted in the harmonious coexistence of nature and humans.

We present our qualitative research results based on twenty-nine semi-structured interviews with micro entrepreneurs in organic production of fruits and vegetables from all of the Croatian twenty counties and the City of Zagreb. The focus is on the theme of future expectations of study participants: How do they see their future? Which plans do they have? What do they expect? The main sources of information on future expectations were participants’ answers to a direct question about their future plans. Participants’ expectations of future have also been revealed when participants spoke about sustainability of their businesses, financial issues, marketing and distribution strategies, accommodation of their pressing needs, and other related topics. We identified the main tenor of future expectations and classified the participants into three groups, labelled “optimists”, “neutrals” and “pessimists”. Assuming, as often in scenario planning, that the most probable scenario is the one deduced by extrapolating current trends, we may say that the neutrals tend to see future in terms of the most probable scenario, while the optimists tend to lean toward the best-case, and the pessimists toward the worst-case scenario. Participants’ expectations exhibited four patterns in our analysis. First, expectations can be regarded as self-fulfilling prophecies: positive expectations both make positive outcomes more likely and are strengthened by positive outcomes, and the same holds for negative expectations and outcomes as well. Second, expectations may serve as coordination devices – when many people share similar expectations, collective action becomes more likely. Indeed, optimists seem to be more likely to initiate or join an association of eco-producers. Third, proximal and distal bias in expectations may be discerned among optimists vs. pessimists. Optimists tend to attribute positive emotions, and positive expectations which accompany positive emotions, to self and a close circle of family, friends, and colleagues, whereas pessimists are prone to attribute negative emotions, and concomitant negative expectations, to the more distant meso- and macro-level structures, such as “the capitalist system”. Fourth, optimists are more inclined to implement various strategies of deepening, broadening and regrounding, which have been considered in literature as contributing to rural development at the farm level. Our findings generally support sociological understanding of expectations as closely related to action. The optimists, neutrals, and pessimists alike spoke of numerous issues, related to the Croatian regulatory framework, subsidy system, control mechanisms, education of producers and consumers, and many others, that can only be resolved with the help of local and regional self-government and the national government. We hope to contribute by our research toward better understanding of conditions necessary to advance Croatian micro entrepreneurship in organic food production, and of obstacles that need to be surmounted en route to a more sustainable future in the village.

Both growth-based accounts of urban modernisation and critical assessments of an allegedly planetary process of capitalist urbanisation afford the rural no place in the future. This paper responds to the marginalization of the rural. Conceptually based on insights from the diverse economies agenda and post-colonial and feminist urban theory, it studies how the rural is an agent in the performance of the future, and, in fact, in the construction of more just and desirable futures. It introduces ‘rural futurism’ as a lens to capture these rural performances. Thenotion of ‘rural futurism’ is chosen to not reproduce a spatiotemporal externalisation of the rural, too easily done in the term ‘rural utopia’. To illustrate the power of this perspective, the paper studies the "Ferme de la Mhotte", a collective in the French countryside. The collective's performance of rural futurism is both based on a transformation of the rural towards being heterogeneous and horizontally connected; and on a re-discovery of the rural as diverse and vertically connected (to, among others, the territory)—providing valuable tools for the construction of more desirable futures. The paper ends on an exploration of the disruptions within the performance of rural futurisms, also interrogating the tension between political engagement towards change and a retreat into the rural off-world.

This study presents four possible images of rural futures in Finland: decentralized bio-economy, colonial countryside, museum countryside and rural business islets. They are distilled through literature reviews, futures workshops and futures tables. Alternative specifications of structures, contents and agencies result in highly divergent states of key dimensions and, consequently, divergent rural futures. This diversity challenges the conventional public wisdom or intellectual monoculture that considers decay as the only future for rural areas. Key challenges in crafting plausible but divergent futures images are finding an appropriate level of abstraction or “flight altitude”, establishing a credible logic or model for the system of futures, defining roles for the agency and applying a proper balance between imagination and discipline. This study provides one example for tackling these challenges. It can be utilized to stimulate ideas of using futures images as a social technology or tool for social learning about alternative rural futures. This intellectual perch is an antidote for intellectual monocultures tending to dismiss the diversity of the rural areas.

The ongoing biennial environmental perceptions survey has been used to consider issues when setting future directions for rural New Zealand in the 21st Century. The overall state of the environment is very good, although freshwater rates the lowest of all resources considered. At a more local level there is considerable concern about lowland streams, rivers and lakes. Farming is increasingly blamed for damaging freshwater and a range of other resources. There are important demographic differences. Those employed in resource based industries are much more positive about specific water resources than are others – anglers are more pessimistic. New Zealanders want an improved future for the rural environment and are willing to contribute. Achieving sustainability would have multiple benefits and would arguably come at only one cost, a higher cost of living.

The last decades have seen a rapidly growing interest in foresight methodology. Methods have been developed in corporate and governmental communication exercises often labelled technology foresight. In reality, these foresights have often drifted into processes of social change, since technological change is hard to foresee beyond what is already in the pipe-line. Forecasting of social change, however, must be based on solid knowledge about the mechanisms of continuity and change. Virtually nothing can be said about the future without relating to the past; foresights and futures studies are about revealing the hidden pulse of history. Hence, the answer to forecasting the future is empirical research within the social sciences. Demographic change has been recognised as a key determinant for explaining social change. Population changes are fairly predictable and the age transition can explain a wide range of socio-economic changes. For rural futures, demographic change is a key issue, since age structure in rural areas is often uneven and also unstable due to migration patterns. A number of policy related questions as well as research challenges are raised as a consequence.