Rural development in Europe is a long‐standing issue that has been supported through EU policies in various ways. The effects of rural development have been uneven, and differences between well‐to‐do ...and marginal rural areas have been increasing both across and within countries. This process is reinforced by the current financial crisis. Recently, social innovation has been introduced as the new panacea for realising development and growth while, at the same time, warranting social inclusion and counteracting social inequality. A central question of this article is whether social innovation may help to effectively fight rural marginalisation, why that could be the case and what conditions then must be met. Three examples of rural social innovation are used to distil specific features of social innovation and compare them with other concepts and approaches to rural development. Rural social innovation is distinctive in its dependence on civic self‐reliance and self‐organisation due to austerity measures and state withdrawal, and its cross‐sectoral and translocal collaborations. This article concludes that it is time to go beyond earlier ideas of exogenous versus (neo‐)endogenous development and introduces the idea of nexogenous development with socio‐political reconnection as an engine of revitalisation.
This article refers to Gerd Vonderach’s publications showing the relevance of discovering and (re)using the existing output of the social sciences. With reference to the terms
and
, this paper ...introduces selected classic figures of the social sciences in German-speaking countries and the discussions and controversies that have arisen in the course of analysing their work.
Este trabajo tiene como objetivo conocer la evolución de la participación laboral de las mujeres mexicanas de origen rural en los últimos 50 años. La mayoría de las investigaciones sobre el trabajo ...rural se enfocan en las condiciones del sector primario como actividad asalariada, y sus contenidos tienen propósitos comparativos de los entornos urbano y rural o son estudios de caso de corte transversal, por lo que el presente documento se justifica al explorar el ámbito de las mujeres rurales en el conjunto de los tres sectores económicos. El trabajo conjuga el análisis histórico, económico, bibliográfico y estadístico para hacer un recorrido desde 1970 hasta el primer trimestre del 2020 sobre el trabajo femenino rural en la República Mexicana, con el fin de ofrecer una visión panorámica sobre el fenómeno. Bajo una metodología cuantitativa de enfoque descriptivo y con el apoyo teorético de la teoría de la segmentación del mercado de trabajo, este trabajo pretende ser un aporte para los estudios laborales con perspectiva de género en el entorno rural, un campo que es fundamental para el desarrollo del país. El documento tiene una introducción y se divide en cinco apartados además de las conclusiones: en el primero se aborda de forma breve la perspectiva teórica de la segmentación laboral, después se contextualiza el objeto de estudio dentro de las condiciones económicas previas al neoliberalismo, en el tercer apartado se describe la participación económica femenina rural durante el periodo de transición entre modelos 1970-1989, posteriormente se muestran aspectos relevantes de la década de los 90, en quinto lugar se aborda el tema en el siglo XXI y, finalmente, se presentan las conclusiones.
Neo‐endogenous rural development depends on ‘bottom‐up’ activities that integrate external influences to increase local potential. This local focus calls for local knowledge, local resources and the ...engagement of local people to be central to development processes. Based on data from an evaluation of LEADER in England, we explore the scope for local control and the effective means of creating local empowerment within the neo‐endogenous model. Interviews were held with policy actors and beneficiaries of funding across 20 of the 64 Local Action Groups in England. These highlighted a great diversity of projects generating an equally diverse range of outcomes. However, capturing their full value was problematic, suggesting that new approaches to evaluation should be explored to increase local control of the development process. Findings also indicate that the negotiation between top‐down and bottom‐up, and local and external influences is an ongoing process. Through this process, local learning has empowered local actors to develop flexible approaches tailored to their localities, but local empowerment is more effective when top‐down parameters are clearly established.
Climate Trends and Global Crop Production Since 1980 Lobell, David B.; Schlenker, Wolfram; Costa-Roberts, Justin
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
07/2011, Volume:
333, Issue:
6042
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Efforts to anticipate how climate change will affect future food availability can benefit from understanding the impacts of changes to date. We found that in the cropping regions and growing seasons ...of most countries, with the important exception of the United States, temperature trends from 1980 to 2008 exceeded one standard deviation of historic year-to-year variability. Models that link yields of the four largest commodity crops to weather indicate that global maize and wheat production declined by 3.8 and 5.5%, respectively, relative to a counterfactual without climate trends. For soybeans and rice, winners and losers largely balanced out. Climate trends were large enough in some countries to offset a significant portion of the increases in average yields that arose from technology, carbon dioxide fertilization, and other factors.
Exotic livestock disease outbreaks have the capacity to significantly impact individual livestock keepers, as well as devastate an entire industry sector. However, there has been limited research ...undertaken to understand how farmers think about and carry out exotic livestock disease control practices within the social sciences. Drawing on aspects of Social Identity Theory and Self‐Categorisation Theory, this article explores how the ‘good farmer’ identity concept influences farmers’ exotic livestock disease control practices. Using findings from an in‐depth, large‐scale qualitative study with animal keepers and veterinarians, the article identifies three context specific and at times conflicting ‘good farmer’ identities. Additionally, a defensive component is noted whereby farmers suggest an inability to carry out their role as a ‘good farmer’ due to government failings, poor practice undertaken by ‘bad farmers’, as well as the uncontrollable nature of exotic disease.
The theoretical debates in sociology have highlighted the strengths, but also the limitations of perspectives building on, anthropocentrism, essentialism, or structural determinism. One school of ...thought that strives to overcome such limitations is relational sociology. The aim of this article is to explore how a process‐relational perspective can offer a new conceptual framework for farm‐level studies in rural sociology. It is an invitation to view the world as a tissue of interactions, of dynamic and often unpredictable processes. By injecting a dose of new materialism and thereby extending agency to nonhumans, the liveliness of nature and technology is also taken into account. Yet, reconceptualising farming in relational terms is not just a theoretical but also a political project: it spurs different imaginations, making other worlds thinkable. This would enable to show ever‐present openings for more socially just and environmentally friendly farming practices.
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