Subproject 2 addresses the central research question:

How do institutional regulatory systems and the financing systems derived from them promote or inhibit the adaptive capacity of municipal infrastructures in rural and peripheral areas?

Infrastructures such as child day-care facilities, buses or the water supply are a fundamental part of municipal public services and face growing pressure to adapt, for example due to demographic change and climate change. In rural and peripheral areas, low redundancies coincide with increasingly limited municipal financial scope, which can hinder adaptation. Understanding these interrelations is essential in the context of discussions on of equivalent living conditions in rural areas.

The objective of subproject 2 is to describe and explain the role of institutional framework conditions and financing systems in adaptation processes of municipal infrastructures. Simultaneously the project will also investigate how regulatory and financing systems themselves may be able to adapt to changing circumstances. The project focuses  on three types of infrastructure systems with fundamentally different regulatory and financial structures: water and wastewater, local public road transport, child day-care, and primary schools. The study regions are the German Federal States of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lower Saxony, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Saxony. Methodologically, subproject 2 uses a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative part, led by Prof. Dr. Paula Prenzel (RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau), uses financial statistics to examine determinants of  municipal financial requirements and infrastructure supply, and model spatial interdependencies between municipalities. In parallel, the qualitative part, led by Prof. Dr. Daniel Schiller (University of Greifswald), deepens these findings in case studies that trace adaptation processes from an agency perspective in detail. In addition, subproject 2 is dedicated to the research group's cross-cutting theme of 'financing systems'. It examines the role of financing systems in adaptation processes of public service infrastructures.