Rural Resilience is ARC2020’s strategic initiative to strengthen civil society’s role in shaping the future of rural Europe. In a moment of democratic fragility, land inequality, and ecological breakdown, we’re working with partners across the continent who fill the gaps left by failing policies — to imagine, together, what rural transformation can look like from the ground up. Coordinator Ashley Parsons presents the project.

Rural Europe is at a crossroads. As democratic institutions wobble and agricultural livelihoods teeter, rural territories are being politically overlooked, economically undermined, and ideologically instrumentalised. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), whose Pillar Two has long been the main source of rural funding in Europe, is at an unprecedented risk. Proposals to merge it into an umbrella fund risk turning rural development into one of many competing priorities. What happens when support for agroecological farmers or access to land must compete with motorways or maritime projects for the same pot of funds?

It’s all connected

In this shifting landscape, ARC2020 champions rural resilience as a political act. 

The Rural Resilience project brings together a small but highly committed team working to connect the dots – between farmers and funders, researchers and regional leaders. In the face of centralised decision-making and extractive business models, our work aims to ensure local realities inform European decisions. 

The Rural Resilience project took root in 2020 with a research-action phase on the ground in France, and grew through a caravan of partnerships across Europe that traced a rural Weimar triangle with Germany and Poland.

Now in the third phase of the project, our focus is strategic. In 2025 we are working across three interwoven themes that are vital to the future of our food and countrysides:

• • • CAP Reform and the Future of the EU’s Rural BudgetThe next CAP and EU budget cycle will define the direction of rural development in Europe. It’s about deciding whether funding supports ecological transition and rural wellbeing or continues to entrench industrial agriculture and rural decline.
    • Access to LandWithout secure and equitable access to land, agroecological farming and rural renewal remain impossible; land concentration and speculation are pushing young people and smallholders out of farming across Europe.
    • Generational RenewalA just and sustainable future for Europe’s countryside depends on enabling a new generation of farmers and rural actors to practice farming and contribute to a living countryside. This requires structural support and entry points into farming and community life.

We remain adaptable, ready to scale or pivot depending on emerging political windows in 2025/26. Among them, water resilience in the face of climate change, livestock system reform amid lobbying pressures and public health concerns, trade justice issues such as MERCOSUR, and the broader push for real food sovereignty through short supply chains and public procurement. 

Anchoring rural policy in place-based realities

Our policy strategy isn’t about lobbying from afar, instead we work to amplify grounded perspectives, support allied advocacy efforts, and help ensure that rural priorities are visible and coherent across policy spaces. 

We aim to bring grounded examples into EU-level discussions on issues like large carnivore policy or public procurement, and anticipate the effect of policy directions on rural communities.

In our policy work we find cross-pollination with other ARC2020 projects: bringing rural perspectives into our CAP policy analysis, and linking policy insights back into community-rooted projects like Seeds4All. 

Building trust and collaboration with pan-European partners

As we work to help bridge the gap between lived rural realities and the political decisions that shape them, we cooperate with partners and movements around Europe that are generating the critical mass needed for transformation.

Transformation starts with the everyday choices people make to care for land, produce food, and build community. We publish the Letters from the Farm series to bring readers onto the land, into the lives, struggles, and dreams of farmers and land workers across Europe. Following agroecological journeys in France, Ireland, Romania, Italy, Hungary, Portugal and beyond, and documenting real experiences and policy impacts, these letters offer a window into what resilience and advocacy look like in practice. 

Beyond these stories from the ground, we seek to amplify the voices of a growing ecosystem of rural-led change across Europe. The Université Paysanne, led by our partners in Plessé (more below), grew out of the 2024 Rural Resilience gathering and will be a central focus of this year’s gathering. In Germany, the Agroecological Practice Alliance was co-founded this summer by our partners AbL and the Free Bakers. We were in Poland this spring for the inauguration of the Polish Rural Forum – a boon for the rural movement there that echoes the participatory spirit of the European Rural Parliament in Scotland this October, which we will support in our role as media partner.

At a time when national and EU governments fail to safeguard rural priorities, these projects are reweaving supply chains, rebuilding infrastructure, and reclaiming democratic agency from the ground up. Through collaborative events, working groups, shared networks and opportunities we’re also supporting and being supported by partners across Europe, including Access to Land, Forum Synergies, Heinrich Böll Foundation Paris, the Ecological Folk High School in Poland, Institut de Tramayes in France.

Gathering to imagine together

For this year’s Rural Resilience Gathering, the caravan of partners returns to Plessé, home of our inaugural Gathering in 2022. Here, we pick up one of many threads from last year’s annual gathering: a commitment by our partner the municipality of Plessé to create a Université Paysanne, a space for rooted learning, political imagination and rural experimentation. 

Over three days, farmers, cooks, artists, policymakers, rural actors, activists and researchers will gather to learn from each other and forge a resilient path forward. Together, we will imagine the ingredients needed for a Université Paysanne to take root in Plessé.

We’ll work on real problems and expect to leave with grounded examples and practical answers: How do we secure fair prices for farmers? What kind of infrastructure do our bioregions need? How do young people gain access to land? How do we resist ecosystem collapse while producing healthy food to feed ourselves?

These are not just discussion points; they form the core curriculum of the Université Paysanne: a living, place-based school where rural actors co-create knowledge rooted in daily struggle and shared vision.

Want to get involved?

Rural Resilience from ARC2020 is not just a project, it’s an invitation.  Whether you’re working the land, shaping policy, organising in your region, or simply curious about the future of rural Europe, there’s a place for you in this ecosystem.

• Get more info to join us in Plessé (Nov 27–30) for the launch of the Université Paysanne 
• Subscribe to the ARC2020 newsletter to follow new articles, briefings, and event updates 
• Share your story through our Letters from the Farm series 
• Collaborate with us — whether you’re running a local project or influencing policy, we’re keen to connect

 
The Rural Resilience gathering 2025 is taking place in cooperation with the Paris office of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.
The Rural Resilience project is supported by Porticus.

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