The goal of the COASTAL project is to formulate and evaluate business solutions and policy recommendations aimed at improving the coastal-rural synergy to foster rural and coastal development while preserving the environment. Rural development in the EU is increasingly affected by changing market developments, decreasing population densities, urban sprawl, lack of employment, desertification and other environmental, economic and social pressures. On the other hand, coastal areas provide interesting business opportunities but are also influenced by economic activities in the hinterland. Multi-Actor Approaches will be combined with System Dynamics to analyse the environmental, economic, and social interactions of rural and coastal areas in a holistic manner. The underlying feedback structures governing the dynamics, vulnerabilities, limitations, and business opportunities of the land-sea system will be identified and analysed, taking into consideration the regulatory frameworks, stakeholder priorities and social-economic conditions at the local, regional and macro-regional scale levels. Multi-Actor Labs using qualitative and quantitative tools will be set up to support the co-creation exchanges between scientific experts, stakeholders, business entrepreneurs, sector- and administrative representatives. The project will be structured around six closely interacting work packages with six complementary case studies in Sweden, Belgium, France, Spain, Greece and Romania.

EU rural and remote areas demonstrate a wide range of qualities, while facing a unique set of challenges. To this end, EC put forward a “Long Term Vision for Rural Areas”, identifying specific challenges and opportunities, and proposing a Rural Action Plan. A major challenge is the diversification of economic activities beyond the traditional agriculture-farming-forestry sectors, as enabler for stimulating economic growth. Evidently, tourism could become an anchor for economic development of rural and remote areas. Motivated from the above considerations, TOURAL will focus on cultural & creative tourism as drivers for sustainable development, paying at the same time a premium to the EC Tourism Transition Pathway requirements, within the context of smart multi-destination and multi-dimensional tourism offerings empowered by macro-regional tourism cooperation and integrated local value-chains. TOURAL proposes a model to support the touristic development of participating rural regions, balancing the growth of their urban clusters with the untapped growth potential of their remote and rural grid cells. Our modelling approach will be multi-dimensional in terms of addressing complementary tourism verticals/niche sectors (underwater cultural & nature heritage tourism, cultural & creative tourism, cultural science tourism, silver tourism); participatory in terms of co-designing policy pathways and tourism offerings/services, co-creating business models and tourism products, and co-validating small-scale tourism services implementations; and integrated in terms of joint planning and business development with integrated value-chains, policymaking and cross-border cooperation, at macro-regions level. Our scope of interventions includes 3 regions from the Adriatic-Ionian macro-region (Italy, Croatia, Greece), and 3 regions from the Black Sea Basin (Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine).