ABSTRACT
The final pages of this book draw together the implications and lessons learned from the previous chapters in terms of guiding principles and rationale for future Rural Policy. As such, the term ‘Epilogue’ is intended to convey a restatement of key messages and is forward-looking rather than, in any sense, a ‘closure’. The authors of this book believe that the history of European rural and regional development (Chapter 3), recent thinking about intervention rationales (Chapter 4), together with many ongoing social and economic changes in rural areas (Chapter 2), all point to the necessity to take stock, and to reformulate the guiding principles for Rural Policy. We have chosen to name this approach Rural Cohesion Policy (RCP). We would argue that RCP is not an academic exercise, but the necessary, logical, next step in an evolutionary process, combining the benefits of past experience with an awareness of new and anticipated challenges. The origins of the ideas that drive RCP have roots anchored in the last century, but, at the same time, the horizon for its aspirations extends beyond the new funding period for EU Structural and Investment Funds.
