ADESIMAN has received the 2026 Castilla-La Mancha Regional Environmental Award in the category of Renewable Energy, Sustainable Mobility and Energy Efficiency. This recognition highlights the work carried out by the Federation for the Development of the Sierra and Mancha Conquense through its Community Transformation Office (OTC), which aims to support municipalities, citizens, small businesses and local entities in creating local energy communities and transitioning towards more sustainable energy models.
The award is particularly relevant within the framework of the PoliRuralPlus project, in which ADESIMAN serves as the Spanish rural pilot together with the Socialinnolabs Foundation. The experience, developed in the Sierra and Mancha Conquense territory, provides a concrete example of how rural areas can lead innovative, participatory, and place-based responses to some of Europe’s main territorial challenges: energy transition, demographic decline, access to services, environmental resilience and local economic diversification.
Through its Community Transformation Office, ADESIMAN has promoted a model based on technical support, territorial engagement, and multi-stakeholder cooperation, with the aim of making energy communities understandable, accessible and useful for small municipalities. This helps them explore new ways of producing, sharing and managing renewable energy locally. This approach reinforces the idea that the green transition can also become a tool for social innovation, economic savings, community participation, and territorial cohesion.
This line of work closely aligns with the objectives of PoliRuralPlus, which promotes integrated rural-urban development strategies, evidence-based governance, digital innovation, and stronger cooperation between public administrations, local communities, businesses and research actors. In this sense, the award received by ADESIMAN is not only recognition of a specific environmental initiative but also validation of the kind of practical experimentation that PoliRuralPlus seeks to foster across its European pilot regions.
The Spanish PoliRuralPlus pilot focuses on rural-urban synergies, cultural heritage, innovation ecosystems, and new development models adapted to the realities of the ADESIMAN territory. Within this framework, the work on energy communities adds a strategic environmental and social dimension to the pilot, showing how rural areas can become active spaces for implementing the European Green Deal and for developing more circular, resilient and proximity-based economies.
The recognition granted by the Government of Castilla-La Mancha also underscores the value of Local Action Groups as key territorial actors. Their proximity to municipalities and local stakeholders places them in a particularly strong position to connect European strategies with real territorial needs, transforming major policy objectives into concrete actions that can be tested, adapted and transferred to other rural and peri-urban regions.
Within the PoliRuralPlus project framework, the award strengthens the role of the ADESIMAN pilot as a living laboratory for rural innovation. It demonstrates how a territory affected by demographic, economic and service-access challenges can also generate forward-looking solutions based on cooperation, sustainability and local capacity. The experience of ADESIMAN’s Community Transformation Office will therefore continue to provide valuable lessons to the wider PoliRuralPlus community, especially regarding participatory governance, rural energy transition and community-led territorial transformation.
With this recognition, ADESIMAN reaffirms its commitment to a fair, inclusive and sustainable transition for the Sierra and Mancha Conquense. At the same time, the Spanish PoliRuralPlus pilot gains further evidence of the potential of rural territories to act not as passive recipients of change, but as active drivers of Europe’s green and digital transitions.
