Digital Engagement and Resilience

Digital Engagment and Resilience is a project that is 'cross cutting' across all dot.rural themes and projects.

By distilling “meta-lessons” from the Themes and projects, and working to complement the Integrated Impact Assessment, the project will generate findings which will comprise a distillation of key pointers for increasing resilience of rural communities through digital technologies.

Specifically, by indentifying patterns across time, and across geographies, this research will be deliberately investigating and identifying those aspects of digitally-enhanced resilience which are generalisable, scaleable, and - in contrast – non-transferable and specific to context, together with existing and future constraints on resilience attributable to limitations in broadband provision in rural UK.

This comprises innovative work in the field of rural community technology-enhanced resilience. Typically, transformation may or may not take place at local level, and the lessons remain at local level. This research assesses those lessons and contextualises them one alongside the other, and “tests” their robustness beyond individual locales and circumstance. Patterns of transformational impact, and potential for such, will therefore be identified for the first time.

In addition, by deliberately liaising with the policy sectors, inhibitors and enhancers in the “system” of policy (local, regional and national) will be identified. This will enable to possibilities of transformation to be identified, and the policy hindrances to be pinpointed. Such an approach “restores” individual projects to their socio-political and policy context, and thus the analysis of what is likely to change, to transform, and remain, is much more intelligent.

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