Welcome to join Nordregio Forum 2022!

October 2022

How to attract people to your region?

Many Nordic cities and regions share a common challenge - how to attract people to work and live in their area. At the same time, the Nordic regions are going through a green transition that adds additional complexity, demanding a search for a labour force with the relevant skills and providing them with sustainable living conditions.

Nordregio Forum 2022 welcomes you to meet your Nordic peers for joint discussions, mingle, study tours, listen to inspirational speakers, gain new research insights and share good practices in our workshops!

Scroll down to learn more about this year's programme!

When: November 23-24, 2022

Where: Hamar Culture House, Hamar, Norway

What: Nordregio Forum is the annual meeting place for professionals and policymakers working with regional, rural and urban development in the Nordic countries. It is a forum for exchanging ideas and trends, sharing new knowledge, and challenging national and regional policy agendas.

23 November: Mismatch in the labour market

During the inspirational keynote, meet Even Aleksander Hagen (Innlandet County Mayor) - the youngest mayor in Norway with a strong vision on how to develop the inclusive and sustainable region of Innlandet.

The panel discussion will set the scene on what kind of labour mismatches exist. Why? And what are the potential solutions? A variety of angles will be discussed by researchers and practitioners from all around the Nordics, among others Rikard Eriksson (Umeå University), Kresten Olesen (Reglab DK), Jukka Teräs (Norrum Oy) and Jimmy Sand (The Swedish Secretariat for Gender Research/NIKK - Nordic Information on Gender, University of Gothenburg).

After the coffee break, we'll hear research insights on the status quo and potential of Nordic competence mobility by Anna Lundgren and Ágúst Bogason (Nordregio).

The Nordic Solutions session will invite you on an inspiring journey with companies, organisations, projects and initiatives that have successfully tackled the labour market imbalance problem. For example, the platform MindDig supports businesses and municipalities in Northern Sweden by searching for talents to work in "green industries". Meanwhile, the Greater Copenhagen region is actively working on facilitating cross-border competence mobility.

After inspirational discussions and examples, we welcome you to join one of the following policy workshops.

Policy workshop participants will have an opportunity to contribute to the development of policy recommendations based on Nordic research findings and translate the results to the local/national context.

Date: 23 November

Time: 16:30-17.30 CET

Place: Hamar Culture House

Overcoming the obstacles to competence mobility

Less than 2% of Nordic citizens live in a different Nordic country than the one in which they were born. What are the hindering factors of working in another Nordic country and what are the potential solutions?

A just green transition: assessing local benefits for the Nordic rural areas

Is there a Nordic recipe for gaining local benefits from the green transition in rural areas? Is the transition just enough for the rural communities?

Urban-rural typology

Get to know what is the urban-rural typology and how to applly it in regional development and planning?

Breakfast mingle is a networking opportunity for Forum participants to discover new contacts and discuss potential collaboration ideas!

Date: 24 November

Time: 08:15-08.50 CET

Place: Hamar Culture House

"Effective leadership is based on strong collaboration" - says John Moodie, Senior Research Fellow at Nordregio, who will facilitate the mingling based on insights from an ongoing project on regional leadership.

24 November: Urban communities in green transition

After the breakfast mingle, you're again welcome to the main Nordregio Forum 2022 venue to hear the latest research insights on urban communities in green transition. The session will address the most prominent city planning challenges. How are human well-being and access to green spaces integrated into city planning? Findings from the NORDGREEN project will be presented by Luciane Aguiar Borges (Nordregio) and Johanna Palomäki (Espoo city case). How to plan socially mixed and inclusive neighbourhoods? Insights from Mats Stjernberg (Nordregio). How to measure the transition - recommendations by Timothy Heleniak (Nordregio).

The Nordic Tour will bring us to inspiring cities that have found ways to plan for green, healthy and sustainable urban communities. We'll hear from cities in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway.

After the lunch break, welcome to join study tours in Hamar and its surroundings to learn about their innovative labour market ecosystem, green transition activities, and inclusive urban planning practices!