Rural resilience and policy labs in Kiruna

2025 January 06

PREMIUM once again participated in the Nordic Conference for Rural Research, this year hosted in Kiruna in the most Northern part of Sweden, with the title “Nordic Ruralities – New paths to sustainable transitions”. The theme was centered around development strategies in remote regions and thus highly relevant to our project. Why was PREMIUM there? To host a working group, share region-specific results, network and test our policy lab concept on academics working closely with local policymakers and regional development.



“Transition often means turbulent change”, was a keynote quote from the main stage that set the scene for the following days’ programme, signalling the serious challenges rural regions are facing.

The conference was a great opportunity for PREMIUM to disseminate our specific findings and how migration can help us better understand rural resilience, as well as gather more case study leads and insights from similar projects.



Collaborative inter-disciplinary approach

Regions are not powerless to shrinking population trends and migration research does not happen in a vacuum. Learning about how different rural regions approach attractiveness-strategies in the face of population decline is important for two reasons: first because PREMIUM is centered around both understanding what causes brain drain and what can be done to prevent it, and second, we are a highly collaborative project always looking for new networks and knowledge partners to learn new perspectives from.



Leading a working group “The benefits of migration in Nordic rural areas” was senior researcher at Nordregio and PREMIUM policy research manager Tim Heleniak. Tim presented PREMIUM in a Nordic context  and went into details with migration within and to the Nordics, specifically in remote areas zooming in on Norbotten Region. It was an ambitious presentation that both had to encapsulate the PREMIUM project and the Nordregio Nordic results about labour market mobility, remote work and how that affects migration patterns.



The European “war for talent”, emigration expos in the Netherlands, focused on both retaining Dutch citizens and attracting migrants.

From a complaint choir to a capitalizing on depopulation

A unique example was presented by an Austrian-Finnish researcher Ria-Maria Adams about the case of Poulanka, Finland. This small municipality struggling with depopulation decided on a strange opposite approach to tackle the problem. Instead of traditional attractiveness strategies, this small town doubled down on the pessimism. “We have nothing”, was written on advertisements and social media posts. As an alternative social media strategy, Poulanka challenged the regional attractiveness norms, like the need for innovation hubs or romanticized nature adjacent living. With the odds stacked against them: 40% of the population over 64, three high school graduates per year, 15.5% unemployment and 1.5% yearly population decline, one might think the any prospect of change were near impossible.



Poulanka would go on to prove the traditionalists wrong. With initiatives like the “The Worst Circus in the World” - a pessimism theater group, a viral social media accounts lavishing in the mundane and deteriorating local architecture, founding a community café and more, the small Finnish municipality proves that joy is possible in decline and challenges the neoliberal conventions about people in declining geographies. This was how Adams concluded.

This and many other interesting presentations broadened the scope of PREMIUM’s policy perspectives, particularly when moving forward with the policy part of the project.



Kick-starting Policy Labs

“Upgrade the broad theme of migration into local policy”. As we were getting feedback from migration researchers on our policy lab concept, many comments helped us sharpen our workshop-toolbox.

A small group of researchers used to working with rural policymakers helped us map out the questions and issues we might hear from policy lab participants. For example, if international migrants do want to move to remote regions but they can’t because of national governments blocking a rural region’s strategies, then what? Another dilemma came from a researchers personal work experience, having interviewed migrants and finding out very few moved for work opportunities more than for green spaces, nature and more space. Nature marketing, lifestyle migration and community motivation were all items put on the list for us to consider working into our policy lab format.



The Nordic Ruralities conference gave us not only the opportunity to meet like-minded researchers looking, and opened our networks to make PREMIUM more expansive, but also helped us develop our policy research methodology.

 

By Anne Katrine Ebbesen