André Torre, Tongjing Wang (p), Maryline Filippi

Erna Kaaber

Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) hold significant yet underutilized potential for development in rural and non-urban areas. Beyond contributing to economic growth, they also strengthen social cohesion, drive technological innovation, and support youth retention. However, even though the European Union has backed numerous bottom-up initiatives in this sector, synthesizing these experiences into structured, evidence-based policies remains a complex endeavor. An important reason is that these initiatives are inherently localized and small-scale nature, which it difficult to transfer successful practices across regions, thereby complicating efforts to establish coherent policy frameworks.
To address this challenge, this paper aims to identify transferrable principles that accommodate diverse regional contexts while respecting local specificities. We propose a mixed-method approach that combines the semantic understanding capabilities of large language models (exemplified by ChatGPT) with network analysis. This method is applied to 1,159 local initiatives supported by the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Network. These projects are nominated by Member States and collected by the CAP Implementation Contact Point into a “Good Practices” database, which represent successful rural development efforts across a wide range of contexts. Project selection follows the IN SITU project’s definition of CCIs, which underscores the importance of cultural expression.
Our approach involves extracting each project’s core elements as keywords, then analyzing their co-occurrences to uncover both cross-project commonalities and unique contextual features. This process preserves critical local nuances while enabling system-wide comparisons and highlighting potentially transferable insights. This study underscore the importance of tailored strategies for rural development and align with existing theoretical frameworks. Moreover, it demonstrates the potential of the proposed method for systematically comparing text data across diverse contexts.

Erna Kaaber (p)

Toshiaki Takita

This paper examines the evolution of regional policy in Iceland, with a growing emphasis on regional development perspectives and their impact on public support for culture and the creative industries. Regional policy and regional development are intricately connected, and amidst the backdrop of increasing decentralization of neoliberal ideologies, the focus has progressively shifted from traditional regional policy to a regional development approach that prioritizes sustainable solutions, innovation, and the competitiveness of individual territories. Regional development policy emphasizes strengthening specific areas and fostering specialization and growth in innovation and business, rather than equalizing the distribution of employment, residence, and services as with traditional regional policy. Although international organizations have highlighted the importance of culture for local and regional development, encouraging governments to leverage culture and the creative industries for regional progress and understand the geographic context of innovation within these sectors (OECD, 2018), politicians and officials often view culture primarily as a cost and cultural projects less in the context of innovation and progress. This may stem from how technological focus is still placed on innovation in policy but also how the convergence of public policies from different domains plays out differently at the regional level compared to the national level. At the regional level, a convergence of policies integrating CCI policy, industrial and innovation policy, and regional policy has been observed, as noted in research by Katja Lindqvist on the case of Sweden and a similar trend in Iceland in recent years. The government's support for cultural initiatives has demonstrated regional variations across Iceland, resulting in divergent emphasis on culture between national cultural policies and regional-level policies. While the national policy focuses on professional practices and product quality, the support in rural areas has been influenced by competitive factors in project funding, which aim to foster the development of individual regions in alignment with their respective regional plans of action (Kaaber og Guðmundsdóttir, 2025). The incorporation of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals across different governance levels of policy can also provide insights, as although they have a strong social economy factor, none of the goals specifically address the role of culture.

Toshiaki Takita (p)

Julius Heinicke

This research deals with a spatial economic model of international trade of national brand goods and services (from branded agricultural products to world-famous animated films). It analyzes the impact of reductions in transaction costs (transportation, traffic communication, and commodity transaction costs) and the formation of quality and brand value on the industrial location of regional brand goods and services in large and small countries. This will clarify the mechanisms behind the home market effect and reverse home market effect caused by the formation of global brands in mountainous and hilly regions of developed countries and in the development of developing countries.

Julius Heinicke (p)

Anna Hildur Hildibrandsdottir

The comparative analysis of cultural policy in rural areas in Europe has revealed the following challenges: In the various regions, different cultural policy actors are responsible for cultural policy decision-making processes. These are often not known in the cultural scenes or cooperate little with each other. As a result, there is often neither a transparent governance structure nor are the objectives and strategies clearly communicated, which is a disadvantage for the development of CCIs structures in rural areas. Furthermore, with regard to European CCI strategies, it is challenging that concepts such as diversity, gender, innovation and culture are defined very differently in the various rural regions and that there are often misunderstandings between the top-down processes and the actors on the ground.
The paper will present the results of the study, as well as needs and practices to address these. In addition to forms of cultural mapping, bottom-up strategies that involve the various stakeholders, but also provide space for the areas of tension between different definitions and concepts of diversity, gender and culture. In addition, formats such as ‘Zukunftswertkstatt’ and ‘Design Thinking’ will be further developed for regional cultural policy processes in order to design development plans for the governance of CCIS in non-urban areas.

Anna Hildur Hildibrandsdottir (p)

Tongjing Wang

This paper examines the Dalir district in West Iceland, a sparsely populated settlement of 642 residents with a rich cultural heritage rooted in Icelandic sagas, poetry, and visual arts, set against a striking natural landscape. As part of the Horizon Europe-supported IN SITU research project (IN SITU, n.d.), Dalir has received policy support from the Icelandic Regional Development Institute through a citizen-led visioning initiative aimed at fostering entrepreneurial activities since 2022. This research explores how intangible cultural heritage (ICH) serves as both a resource and a driver for sustainable rural development, particularly in regions facing socio-economic and demographic challenges.
Building on insights from the IN SITU project, this study advances the methodology of cultural mapping (Duxbury, Garrett-Petts & MacLennan, 2015) to assess the role of ICH in shaping local identity, fostering community engagement, and making cultural assets more accessible to visitors. The paper also examines the relationship between creative entrepreneurship and the rural context, contributing to the ongoing discourse on the interplay between geographic peripherality, cultural production, and economic sustainability (Gibson, 2021; Comunian & England, 2020).
Furthermore, the study investigates the interconnection between place-based entrepreneurial activity and the socio-spatial dimensions of rural environments, expanding on research that links geographic constraints with innovative business practices (Korsgaard, Ferguson & Gaddefors, 2015; Eimermann, Lundmark & Larsson, 2022). By applying cultural mapping methodologies, the research explores innovative approaches such as podcasting with local storytellers, leveraging AI-driven translation technologies to preserve their voices across multiple languages while ensuring authenticity and accessibility.
It aims to offer new insights into how creative rural entrepreneurs navigate geographic and economic challenges, emphasizing the need for place-sensitive policies to support cultural and creative industries in peripheral regions (Collins & Murtagh, 2024; Marques & Richards, 2022). By demonstrating the potential of cultural engagement through rural entrepreneurship, this study contributes to the broader conversation on rural innovation, cultural sustainability, and economic diversification in remote areas.