Appearance of the Visegrad Four’s types of rural territories in international and national development plans

Abstract

The role and function of rural areas have changed which fact makes both regional policies and its participants face new challenges. Also, resources should be utilised in a reasonable way so as to reduce existing differences between areas, while the exact concept and regional definition of rural areas has not been clarified.

In my work, I examine the Visegrad Four countries and how their types of rural territories appear in international and national rural development plans. The paper first describes the former OECD method and then the latest one, as it is more sophisticated. The European Union also relies on this method, so in the study I investigate this approach as well, thus similarities and differences of the two approaches could be underscored.

The next focus was on delimitation methods used in each country’s regional development plan. Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovak approaches are analysed. On the one hand, a comparison between both types of rural territories and international approaches is thus possible. On the other hand, we can also clarify to what extent the different types of rural territories react to recent urbanrural relations and to challenges raised by newly emerging functions of rural areas.

According to the delimitation methods which are being used by the four countries we can separate the Slovak Republic from the other three. The Slovak method is simply based on the OECD approach which does not provide a firm base for explaining local territorial and rural policies. The slightly more sophisticated Czech, Hungarian, Polish methodologies do not provide a clear understanding of rural policy either, but at least they serve as a more solid fundament for viewing decisions on territorial development. We can see many differences between the three methods. The Hungarian one also includes population density and it points out the areas that are lagging behind because of many social and economic problems. By way of simplification, we can say that the Polish approach is still sketchy, but it corresponds with the Czech method in that it is also making a distinction between “remote” and “close” rural municipalities and classifying urban areas by their functions. As a dividing line between remote and close rural municipalities this definition has been adopted: “45 minutes travel time to reach an urban centre with at least 50 000 inhabitants”.