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Rural Vision
News article21 December 2022Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development, Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy

Spain has adopted its rural proofing mechanism

The Spanish congress adopted a new law on the evaluation of public policies that includes a rural proofing mechanism.

The objective of the law is to promote a real culture of evaluation by streamlining the analysis of measures and public policies, which is part of the measures included under the Spanish recovery, transformation and resilience plan. 

The need to prevent and combat depopulation and the demographic challenge were one of the new elements included by the parliament before the adoption of the law. To this end, an additional provision has been added that reflects the government’s impetus for the implementation of the “rural guarantee mechanism”

In this way, the demographic challenge has been incorporated into the norm as one of the technical aspects that must be taken into account in a general way in the design of public policies. It has been included among the criteria of public value for the evaluation and in the elements used for the ethical code of the evaluating team.

Other variables, such as employment, social justice, gender perspective, intergenerational balance, digital transformation, social and environmental sustainability among others will also be taken into account.