Disentangling rural smartness in European policies: a critical overview of the Smart Village concept

In recent years, several policies have increasingly considered smart technologies as a potential solution to overcome territorial marginality in rural areas, where digitalization and smart innovation could help local communities address challenges such as depopulation and socio-economic deprivation. At the European scale, the Smart Village Action was launched in 2017 to address the socalled “circle of decline”, showing to what extent rural smartness has been recently gaining momentum in transnational cohesion policies. This work aims to critically explore the Smart Village paradigm as a recently-emerged policy framework in rural, cohesion and/or recovery policies, investigating if and how it is variously (re)interpreted in policies and operationally applied in projects. From a methodological point of view, a qualitative policy document analysis (QPDA) and software-based content analysis were carried out on UE official documents, offering new theoretical insights and operational recommendations for understanding the concept of smartness beyond urban-centered perspectives.