Rural areas are experiencing complex challenges of depopulation, population ageing, declining public services, shrinking local economies, and an increasing number of (rarely mapped) vacant and deteriorating buildings. The RurALL project consortium looked at vacant and deteriorating buildings from a different angle and saw them as an opportunity to address these intersecting challenges and pave the way for revitalising participating territories through the buildings’ mapping and reuse.
This required different forms of knowledge, resources, actors, levels of governance and modes of engagement to come together. And our consortium set out to lay out the practical tools and actionable steps to guide communities and municipalities through the process of creating inclusive and sustainable governance structures. As the project is finishing, we are sharing the MSGM manual as one of the central outputs of our cooperation.
Browse through or download the Multi-Stakeholder Governance Model manual here and watch a video presentation here. If you’re curious about the whole picture, browse the full project library here.
These cross-cutting challenges were the starting point of RurALL’s Multi-Stakeholder Governance Model, which provides a framework for bringing together public authorities, citizens, businesses, civil society organisations, researchers, and other relevant actors to understand local challenges and shape and implement responses together.
The model works across two dimensions. Vertically, it connects different levels of governance — from local and regional to national and transnational. Horizontally, it brings together different actors operating within the same territory. This combination helps connect local knowledge and lived experience with institutional capacities, technical expertise, and other resources.
Crucially, multi-stakeholder governance is more than bringing people together in a meeting. It requires defining aims, mapping stakeholders, deciding how different groups should participate, choosing appropriate engagement methods, and continuously collecting and responding to feedback. The RurALL manual compiles practical tools, methods and recommendations, as well as the extensive experience with them from the project, to support each of these steps.
The approach was tested through 11 pilot actions in diverse rural contexts across the Danube Region. In practice, this structured participation improved coordination and trust, strengthened community ownership, and helped turn discussions into actionable next steps and concrete outcomes. At the same time, the pilots showed that meaningful participation takes time, resources, facilitation, and sustained effort, which is why we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel but share, test and keep upgrading the available resources.
Finally, the model is not a one-size-fits-all solution, but offers a common, structured but flexible framework that can be adapted to different local realities. In this sense, RurALL’s innovation lies in the approach and governance process, not just in the physical reuse of buildings.