Creating Effective Rural Policies: Rural Lenses and Their Effectiveness

As part of an international trend in regional policy development towards “mainstreaming” rural issues, multiple national and regional governments have created policy lenses designed to ensure that legislation is formed with the needs of rural areas taken into account. Despite a relative lack of academic research on the effectiveness of rural lenses, the idea has been imported to multiple jurisdictions, including several Canadian provinces. This presentation will offer a comparative overview of rural lenses in jurisdictions in Europe and North America in order to achieve a better understanding of their commonalities and divergences in methods, circumstances, and effectiveness. The presentation will make use of a review of the government and academic literature conducted for an upcoming working paper by Louis Helps and Dr. Ryan Gibson. This research is the foundation of a larger project that will seek to understand the feasibility of implementing rural lenses at the provincial level in Canada.