Rural areas in Europe host more than 55% of the overall population and embed a unique and peculiar cultural and natural heritage. Nevertheless, they are facing common issues of disengagement, depopulation and economic and social crises. Rural communities are increasingly interested in setting up inclusive and participatory regeneration processes, but participatory planning experiences in rural areas are still limited. This paper introduces the Community-based Heritage Management and Planning methodology (CHMP) developed within the RURITAGE project, and analyzes and presents the results of its implementation in six demonstrators around Europe and beyond. The methodology is based on the establishment of Rural Heritage Hubs (RHH), intended as the community of local stakeholders and a physical place to run the co-creation activities. We used four types of feedback—online survey, in-presence survey, consultations and interviews with RHH Coordinators—to analyze the implementation of the CHMP. The research findings show that through built capital (RHH places activated) and through the activation of local social and human capitals (RHH communities engaged in the process), participatory processes can attract local communities and engage them into the development and the implementation of local regeneration plans, fostering heritage ownership and inclusion.

This paper contributes to gender mainstreaming and waste management literatures, which largely neglect the empirical dimensions of gender mainstreaming in environmental practices, and have a complete lacuna in waste management. Informed by an ecofeminist approach which argues that gender equality is necessary to achieve environmental sustainability, the paper, and its underpinning research, utilizes feminist and participatory methodologies for implementing gender mainstreaming in waste reduction innovations. This enables the links between greater gender awareness and more environmentally sustainable waste management practice to be explored, and the opportunities for, and obstacles to, adopting gender mainstreaming in waste management to be assessed. The largely qualitative data, drawn from surveys, focus groups and evaluations in eleven European cities, suggest that while developing gender awareness in waste reduction is complex, with many factors contributing to its adoption, a link between waste reduction initiatives achieving CO2 equivalent savings and greater gender awareness can be observed.