Tackling poverty and social isolation using a smart rural development initiative

Abstract

A common policy challenge across many countries is how to accommodate an increasingly ageing and vulnerable rural population. Everyday challenges include proximity to services, transport, and fuel poverty. Policies aimed to tackle rural poverty have learned to look beyond agri-food productivity and that the ‘top-down’ approach must be met with local knowledge. We use random effects binary logit models to investigate how people's health and social isolation are affected by socio-economic characteristics, as well as by the different rural policies. Thus, this paper extends the evaluation of rural policies contributing to tackling rural poverty and social isolation by measuring the impact of a nationally funded rural development initiative. Our case study investigates the Maximizing Access in Rural Areas initiative (2012–2014), a ‘smart’ rural development programme within Northern Ireland that married local knowledge with government objectives to mitigate poverty and isolation. Results indicate that, although men's health deteriorated from 2012 to 2014, the MARA programme countered levels of deprivation. The most successful intervention was improving access to local services. However, this result is strongly dependent on a robust rural transport support network. Moreover, when considering rural poverty, health and isolation are two primary metrics, both dovetail to create what is truly rural poverty, and rural development is only effective when it tackles both.