Rural regeneration strategies for declining regions: trade-off between novelty and practicability

Innovation comprises both novelty and practicability. These two dimensions of innovation correlate partly negatively in our analysis of survey data about planning processes in declining rural districts. As argued in the literature, declining regions need innovative concepts beyond traditional counteracting strategies to ‘shrink smart’. Competitions are suggested as feasible-to-initiate innovative local concepts by the state. The German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture invited 39 particularly affected rural districts to participate in such a competition among the best concepts. We address the questions of how the districts dealt with the requirements for novelty and practicability in their concepts and how the rules of competitive bidding procedures influence those concepts. Answering these questions, we conducted a survey and statistically tested hypotheses deduced from governance and innovation theory. Moreover, we analysed the bidding documents. The results show that most districts came up with hardly novel and only partly practicable concepts because the organization of the competition, and local bargaining processes impede innovation. Furthermore, the ministry’s requirements for the competition overburdened local actors with a lack of resources in declining regions. As a policy implication, we propose to integrate external experts in local networks and to accompany declining regions over a longer time instead of short-term competitions and projects.