Vision to Reality: The Reut Blog

One of the main goals of Israel’s master plan TAMA 35, is to encourage development and growth of the Negev and Galilee regions. However, according to the plan’s monitoring team, the fundamental failure of its implementation is in attracting people to move to those regions: The current population in the north and south are far from the plan’s hoped for number. Meanwhile, in the center, population growth continues.

This situation indicates the need to strengthen the attractiveness of regions in Israel’s periphery, or to improve their quality of place, which research has shown to be one of the main motivations of immigration to the periphery. Reut’s regional team has recognized several actions which can contribute to these goals focused on strengthening the existing uniqueness in those regions. These all focus on leveraging regional assets such as nature and landscape assets, local expertise, community activity etc, in order to create new globally competitive growth engines. For this purpose, there is a need to establish a regional multi-sector organization to signal the region’s assets to the government and to entrepreneurs.

One example of this is the development of the successful agriculture in the Arava region which relies on innovation in agriculture and combines other regional assets: inexpensive land, strong sunlight and advanced irrigation technology. In this example, the Israeli government is promoting agriculture training and research centers in the region, in order to encourage knowledge sharing between farmers as well as to improve the agriculture products, which are mainly exported.