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Empowering rural communities to act for change

Second RURACTIVE Forum examines alignment with the EU’s new Multiannual Financial Framework

After the successful kick-off of the RURACTIVE Forum earlier this year, a second Forum session took place on 17 November 2025. This coincided with an important milestone in the policy field: the release of the 2028–2034 Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) and its first legislative and budgetary drafts.

This edition of the Forum took the form of a Policy Hackathon, where participants examined how RURACTIVE can connect with the EU’s new funding landscape and help accelerate smart and sustainable rural solutions across Europe. Our contribution to the European Commission’s MFF feedback process outlined several key points:

  • A call for clearer planning and fewer overlapping programmes, while still recognising that rural policy is, by nature, complex.
  • A push for a results-focused performance framework, assessing concrete progress in areas such as connectivity, services, culture, mobility and energy.
  • Concerns about over-centralisation in the National and Regional Partnership Plans, and the weakening of tools supporting non-agricultural rural development. The proposed 10% Rural Earmark should be firmly oriented toward community-led, smart rural initiatives.
  • A need to embed territory-sensitive indicators in domains like mobility, local services, tourism, energy and agri-food systems.
  • The importance of safeguarding territorial approaches, especially the LEADER programme, whose effectiveness may suffer without solid governance and long-term funding.
  • The essential role of multilevel governance, ensuring regions and rural actors are meaningfully involved in shaping and delivering the new plans.

The discussion enriched the Forum and further positioned RURACTIVE as a hub for strengthening coherence, cooperation and real impact in rural policy.

Following the participant’s insights, the work will continue in fine-tuning proposals and we look forward to working with both current and incoming Forum members in the new year.

If you wish to join the Forum, please send us an email: ruractiveforum@aeidl.eu