The context: Technological advances, reconfigurations of supply chains and other market pressures
have seen manufacturing processes change drastically and show no signs of stopping. Rural regions
are also set to change due to their complex relationships with urban regions, other rural places, regional
networks, national policy regimes and multilateral systems. As such, potential developments of rural
manufacturing and rural regions must be considered together to produce effective and transformative
policy.
The challenge: How can policy makers formulate policy that effectively takes into consideration the
transformations happening at multiple spatial and temporal scales? The challenge of considering the
potential of rural manufacturing in the context of transforming rural areas requires engaging on the topic
of foresight and rural futures. It can help assess the future readiness of current policies with regard to
potential changes in the future and build proactive rather than reactive policy.
The chapter: This report takes a future perspective to assess the potential development of rural
manufacturing. It reports back from a strategic foresight workshop held in January 2022 with rural policy
experts, which mapped rural developments against five megatrends and produced a vision of how rural
regions could change. This workshop was complemented by a Futures Literacy Lab that was organised
on 11 July 2022, involving rural development experts to explore the development needs of a wide variety
of rural communities and the manufacturing therein.
The Futures Literacy Lab: The exercise enabled participants to reflect on how they approach the
future, identify their own values, reframe assumptions, question priorities, arrive at new insights and
identify new kinds of challenging areas to address. Several new realisations and insights were made via
the lab.
The conclusions: The participants noted that the challenge of advancing rural manufacturing is
becoming less about distributing high-technology processes to every place in the same way and more
about being open to how rural manufacturing can support rural communities in achieving their
multi-faceted goals, including social relationships, well-being and care for the natural ecosystems in
which they are located.
The recommendations: Based on the exploration of this opportunity, policy makers should engage in
policy experimentation in five directions:
• Redefining the purpose of production as a means to benefit rural communities and thus choosing
value-creation economic activities accordingly.
• Exploring the convergence and interdependence of global and local manufacturing as a source
of ambition and inspiration.
• Using rurality as an asset to revitalise human relationships with nature.
• Advancing a “capabilities approach”, i.e. empowering and improving local capacity to think
broadly first, then to consider outcomes, rather than the other way round.
• Activating futures conversations and futures literacy development processes in rural
communities.
Elaborations of how these policy directions might play out in specific regions are being developed to
illustrate how these can be applied to different kinds of rural communities, with case study examples.