The processes of depopulation represent a clearly emerging matter. Nevertheless, it is not a new issue, nor does affect only rural areas. It is a phenomenon linked to changes in vegetative growth in the most developed countries. In fact, demographic aging and depopulation are two issues that are receiving increasing attention on a European scale.

In Spain many provincial capitals have been losing population for years. For this reason, when we talk about depopulation, we are talking about a multidimensional phenomenon with an explicit territorial nature for which the solutions are uneasy or in the brief term. Although depopulation has been happening for decades, it has erupted at diverse levels during the last years in literature and mass media, in the academic field and especially, in public policies. Of this last issue, the creation of the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge stands out.

Faced with the well-known importance of depopulation, this project adopts a triple viewpoints. The first of them is the analytical. It provides rigorous analysis of the processes, mechanisms and changes that are taking place. The second bet on the propositional perspective. It provides the inputs generated to those responsible for the design and implementation of public policies. The third is the transfer of knowledge. Through dissemination, above all the involvement and mobilization of local actors as agents of change in a process of mutual learning.

Based on these points of view, several interrelated areas of work are contemplated, each with its own methodology and approach.

1) Firstly, the demographic system, given the structures and dynamics and the trends that derive from them. Attention is given to strategic groups in the process of change (women, young people and immigrants), as well as to vulnerable groups (the elderly) as a fundamental part of the rural population.

2) Secondly, the legal-normative system against depopulation, diverse and heterogeneous and present from the national to the local scale. The effectiveness of these systems is analyzed and evaluated and how they can be improved in aspects like the tax framework for entrepreneurship and the promotion of employment or the provision of public and private services.

3) Thirdly, the territorial support system, including the provision of public services (education, health, social services) and private (trade, telecommunications, etc.), as well as those of a public-private nature, as a large part those linked to mobility.

4) Fourthly, local productive systems, and specific available or latent resources, knowledge and innovation capacities, business networks and local employment markets, among others, condition internal dynamics. It analyzes how all this can form strategies based on projects and traction initiatives (local products and short chains, sustainable tourist destinations, or everything related to the ecological transition, among others). Attention is also paid to how these territories integrate and take advantage (or can take advantage) of their (real or potential) positioning in relation to nearby urban and metropolitan areas.

5) In the fifth place, complementary to all the above, the endowment of different types of social capital is studied, and to what extent they contribute to consolidating both internal processes and the positioning of the territories in their geographical context. For this, three large groups of actors are taken into account, companies and entrepreneurs, institutional actors and civic networks and social leadership. We work with a sample of case studies in Castile and Leon, Aragon, Castile-La Mancha and the Valencian Community.

Developers of the project