Rural depopulation and public service provision in Germany -How is public service provision in depopulated, rural regions in Germany organized and what can be learned from good practices in this field?

The topic of this paper is the organization of public service provision in rural regions in Germany that are facing a decrease in size and a change in structure of their population. The decrease in population is due to rural depopulation. Especially young people are moving away from villages to urban centers, looking for better job opportunities. The change in population comes from the demographic change. Higher life expectancies and lower birth rates lead to an increase in the average age and elderly people are in need of different infrastructure and services than are the young. As a consequence the provision of public services is harder to maintain for the state and is in need of adaptation to the changed requirements. To do so many innovative projects already exist, initiated, managed, financed and supported by different actors or through their cooperation. The main actors generally involved are state, market and civil society. Their relationship and shifts in responsibility are captured under 4 labels, socialization, privatization, active citizenship and social entrepreneurship. Public services are categorized into technical, retail, social and cultural infrastructure. For each type of infrastructure two projects are introduced. The paper is aiming at analyzing the organization of the projects regarding the actor involved and the strategy used and identifying certain patterns necessary for good transferability. The main findings accordingly are that active citizenship is the main form of organization in the projects. The civil society is taking over tasks of the state through own initiative. Furthermore the importance of the cooperation of all three actors is underlined. All actors have certain tasks they can execute best while good coordination and communication is important in a successful project. For a successful project and in the transfer process the two afore mentioned aspects are important as well, as are the local situation and the utilization of this situation.