Innovative Versorgungslösungen in ländlichen Regionen: Ergebnisse der Begleitforschung zum Modellvorhaben Land(auf)Schwung im Handlungsfeld „Daseinsvorsorge“ : Band 1 der Begleitforschung Land(auf)Schwung

The pilot scheme ‚Land(auf)Schwung‘, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, was designed to test new approaches in the development of rural areas. 13 peripheral rural counties received about 2.5 million euros each in total funding between the years 2015-2019, to develop new approaches in the provision of basic services and to foster regional growth and net value creation. With regard to basic service provision, many disadvantaged regions, especially in view of demographic change, are faced with the challenge of maintaining existing services and securing supplies for the population. To this end, very different approaches were tried out within the framework of Land(auf)Schwung. The accompanying research focused strategies and measures, particularly relevant for the regional concepts as well as for current research debates, in order to analyse these in relation to existing needs for action, spatial context conditions and various innovation processes. We selected five main topics for empirical studies, in the course of which we conducted a total of 105 qualitative individual and small group interviews. The first study on the location decisions of general practitioners shows that family-friendly living conditions, professional opportunities and biographical relations are decisive for settling in a disadvantaged rural region. Our second study analyses the potential of younger retirees’ volunteering to support basic services provision in rural areas. The results show that this potential is limited, since engagement is only one of several personally important activities, if at all, and is accordingly limited to favoured activities that only partially correspond to the most urgent needs for support. A third study examines the roles of sports clubs in the local integration of migrants, refugees and internal mi-grants, as well as the importance of these newcomers for the clubs’ membership development and youth strategies. Our interviews show, among other things, that the latter strategies are strongly geared towards winning over the children and, through them, their parents as well as the potential of target group-oriented offers that go beyond the usual training and team activities. The fourth study analyses the conditions under which disadvantaged rural regions can benefit from digital basic services solutions. In particular, capacity building on the user side as well getting support of the action field’s central key institutions and core providers prove to be decisive. With our fifth and last study, we shed light on the extent to which and under what conditions flexible offers (“People to Services” and “Services to People”) can contribute to maintaining rural basic services. An essential finding is that these services, in view of the limited usage potential but also low costs, can be easily usable supplements to existing offers. A central conclusion across the five studies is that in order to secure rural basic service provision, combinations of different forms of innovation are often necessary, so that technical, social, organizational and product innovations have to be coordinated with one another.