The rural areas in the European Union are facing numerous challenges not only to their development but also to the sustainability of significant number of rural communities. To increase the rural resilience and to fight with rural decline and peripheralization process the EC created a long-term vision for rural areas. In the work on the vision rural stakeholders were directly involved thanks to the living labs created in the EU Horizon 2020 SHERPA project encompassing representatives from society, science and policy

To help support rural areas in achieving the vision the Rural Pact has created. Further EU research projects are being implemented to support creating better targeted and tailored policies.

Many of these projects make use of the multi-actor approach creating rural living labs also know as multi-actor platforms.

The aim of the study is to present the possibilites of supporting rural policies with the multi-actor approach. The study is based on the approach to creating social innovations employed in the Horizon Europe ESIRA project. The study shows both the theoretical and practical issues related to creating and running rural multi-actor platforms in different regions of the EU with different socio-economic context and diverse challenges faced by rural communities. 

The study results can improve the employment of rural living lbas by showing good practices and challenges faced by the creators of living labs for different policy contexts.