ESPON has just released a new article, “Thriving beyond numbers : rethinking rural prosperity”, exploring how European rural and mountain areas can move beyond traditional growth metrics to better reflect well-being, resilience and the “right to stay”. The piece draws extensively on the insights of the ESPON RURALPLAN project, in which Euromontana and two of our Norwegian members, Innlandet County and the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, played an active role.

The publication highlights a growing consensus: measuring the performance of rural territories through GDP or population change alone fails to capture what truly matters for inhabitants, particularly in mountain areas where demographic and economic structures differ significantly from urban centres.

In the article, Euromontana’s Director Guillaume Corradino stresses that success in rural and mountainous territories cannot be assessed through the same lens as cities : supporting the right to stay and enabling communities to thrive across generations remain key priorities for Europe’s mountain areas.

Insights from the RURALPLAN project

The ESPON RURALPLAN project provides practical tools to address this shift in perspective. Together with our Norwegian partners, Euromontana contributed to the project’s work on developing new territorial indicators and strategic governance models tailored to rural realities.

Among the project’s key findings highlighted in the publication :

• Broader resilience metrics should capture stress factors relevant for mountain areas, such as social cohesion, well being, governance capacity, wildfire risk, drought, snow reliability or access to essential services.
• Local authorities can integrate well-being metrics in planning and budgeting, not as administrative burdens but as tools for more informed decisions.
• Local “rural labs” and permanent learning platforms help ensure regular monitoring, cross-sector cooperation and long-term ownership of innovations.
• Narrative barriers remain strong : the idea that “shrinking” equals “failing” still dominates political cultures, whereas many rural and mountain areas prioritise quality of life over traditional growth.
• The RURALPLAN pilots demonstrated that rural innovation is most effective when it is co-created locally, embedded in planning cycles and adapted to the diversity of rural realities, from mountains to islands and cross-border territories.

The need for a cultural shift

The publication underlines that Europe’s rural and mountain areas contribute to wider societal goals, from food security to climate resilience and landscape management. Recognising these contributions requires new governance models, simpler rules and evaluation systems that value what is gained rather than what is spent.

For mountain areas, this change in mindset is essential to ensure that policies reflect their specific needs and strengths, and that indicators genuinely support the right to stay.