The Horizon 2020 project SIMRA (Social Innovation in Marginalised Rural Areas) officially started on April 1st, 2016 and will continue for four years. The project wants to categorise and understand social innovation in different settings (thanks to case studies), to develop an integrated set of methods for the evaluation of social innovation and its impact on rural areas, to analyse the success factors for social innovation and to disseminate new knowledge to policy-makers.
One of SIMRA’s aims is to perform a holistic analysis and categorisation of existing examples of Social Innovations in Marginalised Rural Areas. As part of this work, we are identifying examples within the fields of agriculture, forestry and rural development and gathering a comprehensive list at different scales that allow us to explore diversity among social innovations. Part of this catalogue will be used to develop an interactive online database that will be available this spring on the SIMRA website.
Project partners have initially populated the database with examples from academic sources e.g. journal articles, reports and research projects about social innovation. Since the beginning of 2017, we have now collected more than 200 distinct examples from across the project area. We would now like to make a wider call for social innovation examples developed in marginalized rural areas in Europe and the Mediterranean area. In particular, we are seeking further examples from non-EU countries in the Mediterranean as these areas are currently under-represented in the database.
If you are a stakeholder, a practitioner, a person interested in social innovation, or a rural dweller and are aware of an interesting initiative or project which fits within the scope of SIMRA, let us know about it by completing the questionnaire you will find here: https://uhi.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/simra_en
The database of social innovation examples will be available on our website shortly.