Conference Agenda

China's rural society and landscape have undergone fundamental transformations over the past few decades, such as the massive rural-urban migration, the ageing of the remaining rural population, but also the substantial improvement of rural welfare. While the country has made remarkable progress, notably in poverty alleviation - extreme poverty was officiallz eradicated by 2021 - rural areas still face many issues. The main challenges are income disparity, inadequate infrastructure, deficiency in rural healthcare, chronic rural-urban divide, and environmental degradation. The Chinese government has implemented a slew of policies to address these challenges, with the Rural Revitalization Strategy being one of the most prominent. Launched in 2018, this comprehensive strategy aims to modernize agriculture, improve rural infrastructure, and enhance the quality of life for rural residents. The latest Rural Comprehensive Revitalization Plan (2024-2027) continues these efforts, focusing on sustainable farming, food security, and closing the urban-rural gap in income and access to services. In detail, this new plan particularly emphasizes technological innovation, green transformation, infrastructure upgrades, and agricultural and rural digitalization. Meanwhile, how far new policies and development plans will bring about the desired changes, remains to be tested along with empirical evidence. The rapid and massive rural transformation in China has drawn significant attention from researchers. While the development in the past decades has been well-researched, future challenges will be even more diverse and require a multi-dimensional assessment. This proposed session aims to engage its participants in the complex assessment of China's current and future rural development. The centre of our attention will be synergies and potential tradeoffs in the areas of rural revitalization, rural-urban migration, rural livelihood, social inequality, and a sustainable countryside. By bringing together experts from various research fields, the session will provide a glimpse into China’s rural transformation and help us understand the current state and future prospects of China's rural areas. The session will consist of expert presentations, panel discussions, and interactive Q&A sessions to encourage meaningful dialogue and the exchange of ideas. We plan to have short presentations to leave more time for open discussions in panel form.

The Western Balkans, comprising Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia, has witnessed continuous rural depopulation, largely due to the lack of economic opportunities, poor infrastructure, and limited access to quality education. Many rural households rely on subsistence farming, which is increasingly unsustainable due to fragmented land ownership, limited access to modern technology, and climate change-induced environmental challenges. As a result, rural youth and working-age adults often migrate to urban centres or abroad in search of better employment opportunities and improved living conditions. Rural activities in different agricultural and rural tourism sectors are currently facing serious challenges also due to a continuously drained labour force that until some years ago provided a competitive advantage to produce with low costs. Without using innovation and other technological solutions to compensate for the labour force, many of the rural economic activities will be facing a question of survival. The innovations and technological solutions need to be adopted in all elements of agricultural value chain, be it long or small, but most importantly innovations and technical solutions must be very much linked to research and education of future generations. Without investing in skilled and knowledgeable future caretakers, the prospect of rural areas will be rather bleak. The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ GmbH) is working with public and private partners in specific countries but also at the regional level to tackle some of the challenges and work together towards finding suitable and sustainable solutions. For instance, in Albania, GIZ is implementing a programme called “Sustainable Rural Development”, which focuses on agriculture and rural tourism. In the agricultural component, SRD is focused on introducing biological control in greenhouse production, fertigation and smart decision-making in apple orchards, just to name a few. The adoption of these technologies provides multiple benefits, ranging from economic ones for farmers and value chain actors, environmental and biodiversity protection to addressing climate change and European Green Deal. This element is very important for accessing higher value markets and meet product safety requirements. Agritourism is another element that could contribute positively to rural economies as well as serving as stewards of the nature. A similar targeted approach has been taken also at the regional level for the Western Balkans. The regional project “Support to economic diversification of rural areas in Southeast Europe (SEDRA II)” implemented by GIZ and SWG RRD, aims to improve the employment and income perspectives in the six Western Balkan countries (WB-6) in accordance with the EU pre- accession process. The project aims to strengthen the capacities of regional, national and local actors and to create adequate framework conditions for economic diversification against the background of the structural challenges in rural areas. It strengthens local entrepreneurial competitiveness and regional added value in the Western Balkans by promoting employment generating and income-generating value chains in tourism and agriculture. Considering the current dynamics in terms of climate change but as well as global economic connections, it becomes even more important to continuously invest in research and preparing skilled labour force that would be able to address these challenges and take the rural areas ahead. Offering the freedom to drive innovation in an economy is crucial to tackle these challenges. The project “EU4Innovation” drives these factors, by enabling start-ups, SMEs and academia to engage and explore opportunities and solutions for real life challenges. Driven by ambition of the EU to increase and deepen its partnerships with the Western Balkans, the Commission increasingly opens access for non-member-countries to the European Framework Programs. EU4Innovation is mandated to create tangible and long-lasting partnerships between Quadruple Helix actors from EU member states and the Western Balkans. Enabling academia and private sector to discover, understand and engage in suitable EU framework programs, offers tremendous opportunities to discover solutions and mutually benefitting fields of cooperation. Next to the scientific benefits, this agnostic approach offers direct economic benefits to solution builders and users as well as creating positive effects fostering a liveable rural environment and the transformation towards a knowledge-based economy. The session will be organized by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ GmbH) and will serve as a dialogue platform aiming at: • Sharing experiences with regards to the addressing challenges, and needs of the countries in relation to improvement of quality of life in rural areas in the Western Balkans, as well as to improve their resilience and enhance their economic development. • Sharing experiences related to approaches, tools and functional mechanisms used to address climate related risks, improve quality of life, employability and address the migration of Western Balkans rural areas. Different speakers will focus on the innovative approaches, best practices used by GIZ and lessons learned in the implementation of the various projects, and their contribution to improvement of rural resilience, economic development and access to knowledge networks. The discussions aim at triggering exchange between development cooperation and science community, create an open space for the identification of opportunities and inspire follow-up cooperation ideas.

Rural regions in Western Balkans, like much of Southeast Europe, face persistent challenges, including high depopulation rates and comparatively low quality of life indicators (Copus et al., 2020; Burger et al., 2020). This organized session will explore rural outmigration as a critical threat to rural resilience, examining its drivers, multidimensional impacts, and implications for local development. Migration in the Western Balkans is primarily fueled by limited economic opportunities, inadequate public services, and aspirations for a better quality of life. While remittances are widely recognized as a as a key economic lifeline - helping to alleviate poverty and mitigate income risks - their broader effects on household well-being and rural sustainability remain underexplored. While remittances provide critical financial support, migration also brings social and emotional trade-offs. The prolonged absence of family members, particularly parents, can negatively affect child development, mental well-being, and social cohesion. Furthermore, migration poses a serious challenge to the agricultural sector, exacerbating labor shortages and farm succession difficulties, ultimately threatening the long-term competitiveness of rural economies. This session will provide a platform for discussing these complex dynamics, bringing together perspectives on how rural outmigration reshapes livelihoods, local economies, and social structures across the Western Balkans. It aims to: • Analyze the implications of outmigration on rural labor markets and the link between migration, farm succession challenges, and the risk of land abandonment. A special focus will be put on the rural youth. • Identify key drivers of migration intentions and assess their policy implications for rural development initiatives. Migration and Farm Succession: Migration (especially among the youth) is a predominantly leading factor contributing to a shrinking rural workforce and jeopardizing the sustainability of local labor markets. Migration also has profound implications for agriculture, particularly in terms of farm succession. When younger family members migrate, farms are left without successors, leading to land abandonment and a decline in agricultural productivity. This trend threatens food security, rural landscapes, and local economies. This contribution will examine solutions and incentives for young farmers, focusing on how to sustain the long-term viability of rural farming systems. Migration intentions: Understanding the motivations and intentions behind migration is critical for designing effective policies to mitigate rural outmigration. Limited access to education, healthcare, and employment opportunities, couples with aspirations for better living standards, are key drivers of migration. This contribution will explore both push and pull factors driving migration decisions and consider policy interventions that address the root causes of rural outmigration.

Although decentralization reforms have swept across the world granting more rights and freedoms to local communities, it is not clear what the role of decentralization can be in a crisis situation of a military conflict. Enhancing local decision-making freedoms under certain conditions has been widely promoted as a welfare enhancing policy (e.g., Faguet, 2014; Weingast, 2009, 2014). Rights to retain fiscal resources in rural municipalities has been shown to enhance the incentives to foster favorable business climate and provide better public goods (Smith & Revell, 2016; Wang, 2013). However, it is not clear how local governance autonomy on the municipality level performs in a conflict situation. Do communities use their powers to flexibly address crisis-related challenges or is it a destabilizing factor contributing to disorganization This organized session will address these questions from different perspectives. The session will focus on the interplay between the decentralization of governance in Ukraine and economic resilience of rural communities that face the hardships of the Russian war against Ukraine. First, we will discuss how local communities’ governance can be measured and what are the challenges within a conflict setting. Second, we will focus on the development interventions that can help improve local growth-inducing policies and help local business face the crisis. Furthermore, these interventions will be evaluated on a specific example from a three-year intervention implemented by the German-Ukrainian Agricultural Policy Dialogue (APD). Finally, we will present new approaches to estimating fiscal potential of rural municipalities which will be essential during the rebuilding and reconstruction phase once the ceasefire agreement is reached. This organized session stipulates three presentations and a brief reaction from a discussant from the Ukrainian Ministry of Agriculture who will draw some conclusions and derive practical policy implications from the policy-oriented research. Apart from Q&A after each presenter, we will allocate some time for a general Q&A with all the participants present at the podium.

Session motivation: In recent years, there has been a growing effort to collect micro-level data on farms and rural households in Central Asia. These datasets offer valuable insights into agricultural practices, rural livelihoods, and socio-economic dynamics in the region. However, their use by academic researchers, policymakers, and other analysts remains limited. Several challenges contribute to this underutilization, including institutional or technical barriers to data access, the complexity of raw datasets requiring advanced analytical skills, and a lack of awareness regarding the types of research questions these datasets can help address. This session aims to take stock of recent and ongoing data collection initiatives in the region, fostering discussions on how to improve data accessibility and usability. By bringing together researchers, data providers, and potential users, we seek to highlight best practices for making data publicly available while ensuring ethical and legal compliance. Additionally, we will showcase three specific data collection initiatives, providing insights into their scope, methodologies, and potential applications. A key objective of this session is to facilitate an interactive exchange with the audience. Participants will have the opportunity to voice their needs and requirements regarding access, usability, and formats of socio-economic farm and household datasets. This discussion will help inform future data collection and dissemination efforts, ensuring that datasets are more effectively tailored to the needs of researchers and decision-makers working on Central Asian agriculture and rural development. The session comprises a 5 minutes introduction of the session idea, followed by three presentations of surveys from Central Asia (each 15 minutes). The presentations will be followed by a 10-minute feedback from a discussant, and finally by 20-minute Q&As.