Research shows that community-based adaptation (CBA) can empower grassroots agents to determine their preferred responses to climate change. After two decades of practice, recent analysis is highlighting that CBA has its limits, which we argue is in part because it is predicated on an idea of ‘the communal’ as being local, static, and spatially distinct. We investigate the relationship between the

The influence of private financing on ecological conservation has grown in recent years, but little is known about the actual links between large-scale development projects, public-private contractual arrangements, and community-based conservation. We analyze the political economy of such links by considering a conservation area under management by a rural community involved in wind energy projects

Climate change challenges agricultural production in Eastern Canada by affecting water resource availability. Farmers' adoption of improved water management practices and technologies can play an important part in the region's climate change adaptation strategy. To facilitate the diffusion of agricultural beneficial management practices (BMPs), it is essential to examine the factors that influence

Governments around the world are seeking to achieve socially just transitions to environmentally sustainable modes of agricultural production. Policy makers have increasingly sought to engage an array of societal actors in the collaborative design and implementation of associated policies, which we refer to as Agri-Environmental Policy (AEP) initiatives. Yet, the existing literature includes little

Rural studies now has a well-established corpus of work exploring how rural spaces and practices become (re)presented within various media and how these representations serve to perpetuate the ‘cultural fantasy’ of the rural idyll. To date, however, there has been a dearth of studies which have considered the role that social media may play within representing rural spaces and activities. The following

The meaning of riverine landscapes to society has evolved to serve our ever-changing needs, from harvesting and transporting resources to arenas for outdoor recreation and contemplation. From the 18th century, rivers have been important resources for industry and hydroelectric power. The objective of this study is to explore and describe the rhythms of everyday use of a river environment using multiple

Agri-environmental measures are applied on 80% of the farmland in Estonia. Nonetheless, as an Eastern European country, the history of intensification is shorter than in Western Europe and yield gaps mean that the pressure for intensification is still high. There are various land management measures that can relieve pressure on the environment, but the factors that trigger the adoption of such changes

The protection of heritage buildings is essential because they signpost the narration of a community's past into the future. Investment in the protection of heritage buildings through incentives in the form of government grants provides a lifeline for the future preservation of built heritage, which can boost an urban area's local economy. This study sought to evaluate the distribution of heritage

This paper looks at scalar politics, power struggles, and institutional emergence in Daw Lar Lake in Karen state, Myanmar. It brings to light tensions between centralized and decentralized approaches in the country's natural resource governance, and how these are manifested in the current legal stalemate with regard to the formal management status of the lake. Building on earlier research on legal

Most young people engaged in agroecology in Zona da Mata Mineira, Brazil, participate in popular education. Popular education is a Latin-American concept that entails transformative learning, among others. Despite the large body of literature on popular education, there is little knowledge about how it supports reflection, enhances situated abilities, and affects relationships between young farmers

This article describes a case study of virtual herding and digital fencing technology implementation for goats in Norway. With the abolishing of physical fences, the goats can roam free in a physical sense, but in the digital realm, they are controlled by a virtual fence. The virtual fence, or digital boundary, is set by the famers and interacts with a collar around the goats’ necks. The collar first

Rural studies has made considerable theoretical and empirical progress on gender and agriculture, yet almost none of this work focuses specifically on women involved in livestock production in the Global North. To address this gap, we explored the experiences of women involved in extensive livestock farming in Spain, including their motivations, identities, challenges, and sources of learning and support

Publicly-funded programmes of business support are important vehicles for rural development, and over the last two decades, group-based models of business support have become popular, in which dedicated advisors work with small firms in groups, rather than one-to-one mentoring. A fundamental goal of such programmes is to foster enhanced inter-firm knowledge exchange and learning, and improved firm

Over the past two decades, indebtedness has been at the centre of the world's attention, but social conflicts against private debts have only rarely been studied. Drawing on a global database of 65 cases ranging from 1765 to 2020, we offer a preliminary glimpse at such mobilisations. We find that anti-debt conflicts seem to have increased exponentially since the early 1980s and that they have involved

Understanding how farmers perceive and manage critical decision points in response to challenges and opportunities can help to develop effective support for resilient European farming systems. Individual narratives of farm stories provide insight into important management changes over time and the context in which they were made. We analyse 46 personal narratives from family farms across a range of

Economists would assume that farmers with a net benefit will adopt programs incentivizing the delivery of public goods. Farmers who reject participation in such programs for principled reasons challenge this wisdom. This paper borrows from Will Wright's description of the North American cowboy to illustrate the motives and beliefs of this group. A survey in Switzerland about possible incentivizing

Restructuring rural communities can be seen as natural population level experiments of great social epidemiological interest. Following the extensive decline in small-scale fishing in the later decades of the 20th century, many coastal communities have undergone considerable societal restructuring. In Norway, this has entailed a substantial reduction of the fishing workforce, concurrent with new employment

Most food in developed countries, including organic fruits and vegetables, is sold through supply chains run by large wholesalers and supermarket chains. A certain share is sold through local marketing channels such as speciality stores, food box schemes, farmers' markets, and community-supported agriculture (CSA). This study uses qualitative interviews and a quantitative survey to expose the differences

While innovation is viewed as crucial means of promoting competitiveness of rural SMEs, rural areas can be blighted by an ‘underdeveloped innovation environment’. Perhaps due to an urban bias in innovation research, open innovation through university collaboration among rural SMEs has not been extensively examined. Using a dataset of 880 rural SMEs from the UK, the paper suggests that rural SMEs are

Rural fire services increasingly rely on older volunteers, providing an opportunity to examine the challenges of the ageing volunteer base that is underway in rural communities. To advance knowledge on the phenomena of ‘older voluntarism’, a case study of a rural volunteer fire department in Ontario, Canada was undertaken, drawing on semi-structured interviews with 24 fire service members. Findings

In these times of distress, self-reliant villages and sustainable development are more crucial than ever. Support is much needed to uplift durably impoverished communities. Rural electrification has been recognized as playing a key role in helping poverty-stricken rural regions to develop sustainable livelihoods. Yet, despite several plans initiated by governments, rural electrification alone has fallen

This article explores the family organization of work in small-scale dairy farms in Mexico. By drawing attention to the division of labour by sex, the paper explores how gender norms and tradition interplay with economic interests of profitability in defining who is able and accountable to perform each task. The article builds on ethnographic research in family dairy farms in Los Altos de Jalisco (Jalisco

The change of scale and potential reconfiguration of decision-making powers make the French context of reterritorialization of food seem favorable to the transition of agri-food systems in certain areas. However, it also includes a movement towards normalization and integration into the dominant system, which may lower the goals of transition, through the norm conveyed by actors and systems. Based

Innovations have the potential to help us address and overcome many of the challenges that agriculture is facing today. Yet, at the same time, they have the potential to create new, sometimes even more challenging, problems, especially when they are not governed in a sustainable way. Governing agricultural innovation sustainably requires understanding of all components that influence, and are influenced

In this article, the authors reflect on social consequences of the deagrarianization process, based on their study conducted in the Błaszki commune in central Poland. The study shows deagrarianization in the making, as the region is prone to land being concentrated among the largest farms and to the deactivation of the majority of smallholders. Our research indicates how farmers specialize, quit livestock

Conventional ex-ante evaluations rely on a mix of economic, environmental, and social indicators to assess the potential impacts of Genetically Modified (GM) crops prior to their commercial release. While these predictive studies have produced useful knowledge, they have also consistently overestimated the ex-post outcomes of GM crops for African smallholder farmers. Yet these same assessment methods

The myriad potential benefits of digital farming hinge on the promise of increased accuracy, which allows ‘doing more with less’ through precise, data-driven operations. Yet, precision farming's foundational claim of increased accuracy has hardly been the subject of comprehensive examination. Drawing on social science studies of big data, this article examines digital agriculture's (in)accuracies and

Agricultural industries are facing a dual challenge of increasing production to meet the growing population with a disruptive changing climate and, at the same time, reducing its environmental impacts. Digital agriculture supported by big data technology has been regarded as a solution to address such challenges. However, realising the potential value promised by big data technology depends upon farm-level

Ecological approaches to farming are gaining increasing interest in the EU's Rural Development (RD) policy. From a societal perspective, these approaches are expected to deliver public goods in terms of environmental and social benefits for both consumers and rural actors. This study aims to investigate the policy discourses that are being used in the Rural Development Programmes (RDPs) of Sweden,

Two major agricultural transformations are currently being promoted worldwide: digitalisation and ecologisation, that include different practices such as organic farming and sustainable intensification. In literature and in societal debates, these two transformations are sometimes described as antagonistic and sometimes as convergent but are rarely studied together. Using an innovation system approach

This study offers a detailed and original assessment of the practices of prescription veterinary medicine use on UK dairy farms. The emergence of antimicrobial resistance as a global threat has necessitated an increasing focus on medicine use in agriculture. While an abundance of studies have recently emerged to demonstrate and evaluate strategies for medicine reduction, this paper seeks to understand

The cultural, economic, and nutritional importance of rice led many countries to investigate how domestic rice production can meet current and future demands. In rice production, the role of social capital and personal networks of producers compared to biophysical and economic assets, are less well understood even though case study analyses routinely indicate that they play an important role in production

Agricultural smells permeate many rural areas and yet are little researched. Following scent trails can reveal much about rural relations and contestations. This research explored how smell emerged as one of the most controversial subjects during planning consultations over proposed intensive poultry units in the UK counties of Herefordshire and Shropshire. It considers how sensory knowledge is constructed

Prosecco, a wine that two decades ago was virtually unknown outside of Italy and was considered inferior to other sparkling wines, has become immensely popular. But how did Prosecco producers gear up to meet a booming demand in a highly regulated wine industry such as Italy's? Is this an example of an inclusive growth trajectory? Who is capturing the benefits of this growth and who is bearing its hidden

Rural extension and innovation approaches have been extensively studied. However, we currently lack a validated quantitative instrument to assess those approaches at a subjective level. Landini and Beramendi (2019) developed a psychometric scale to access rural extension agents' beliefs about extension and innovation (BExIn scale) and validated it in Argentina. In this paper, a transcultural validation

Background The physical, social, economic, and political contexts in which organizations operate influence their mission and organizational capacity – the available resources nonprofits use to carry out their purpose. The current study examines organizational capacity by uncovering strengthes and challenges of rural human service organizations (HSOs) in rural, persistently poor counties in the South

A mixture of identities, livelihoods and a heterogeneous landscape characterizes the communities located in the rural-urban frontier. The perception of the inhabitants of these communities regarding environmental and sociocultural change is linked to their livelihoods and land use decisions. We use the case study of the ancient agricultural chinampa system in the Xochimilco wetland of Mexico City to

Fairtrade International (FTI) sets forth in its theory of change a food future that consists of fair trade, small farmer and farm worker empowerment and sustainable livelihoods for producers in the Global South. The enactment of this socio-technical imaginary, what we call the Fairtrade imaginary, relies upon the construction and maintenance of agencements that use voluntary standards as the means

Pressure from global retailers to reduce food costs has altered downstream agri-food work regimes, with many food producers having adopted more flexible modes of working and employed migrant labour from lower income countries. Since the expansion of the European Union (EU) in 2004, the farming and food sector in the UK has recruited large numbers of migrant workers from central and eastern EU countries

The so-called conventionalisation of organic farming debate revolves around tensions between organic agriculture as an alternative to the dominant agri-food system and the rise of organic agribusiness. A contested issue is the conceptualisation and assessment of the impact of capitalist expansion in the organic sector on the transformative power of alternative agriculture. This article engages with

This short commentary on the Special Issue ‘Agricultural Regimes and Migrant Labour’ emphasises the colonial roots of employment conditions and labour relations in the contemporary capitalist food supply chain; the continued reliance of agriculture on racialisation and unfree labour; and some of the individual and collective ways in which these have been resisted.

This article presents an ethnography of the no-middlemen markets in Athens, where producers from all over Greece sell foodstuffs directly to consumers. No-middlemen markets offer an interesting lens through which to view the political foodways created in Athens, reflecting a wider changing landscape of shifting responsibilities for better food futures. I draw from theories on moral economy and reflect

How to deal with the transformation of place in the face of global capitalism is marked by many active debates. This paper dives into the transformation of the city of Solvang in California, from an agricultural village to a tourist destination. One way to analyse the process is to treat it as commodification, where values produced in places are being turned into exchangeable commodities. What results

Understanding the complex process of generational renewal (GR) in agriculture is essential for supporting the continuation of farming. This paper demonstrates how multiple factors, simultaneously and through their mutual interactions, influence GR and related individual decision-making processes. Results originated from 155 in-depth interviews performed on 85 farms in eleven European regions, and were

This paper intends to propose an integrated methodology for reconstructing the rural landscape of Mongardino, a municipality in the cross-border area of the UNESCO Buffer Zone of the ‘Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero and Monferrato’. A multi-source approach was established to detect land use changes that occurred in its dynamic agricultural mosaic from the 17th century to date and intuiting

This article discusses the concept of terroir in the light of the communication practices. It provides a literature review illustrated with a case observation. The author identifies three key stages in the constitution of the terroir through communication: organizational norms and interaction; the circulation of public relations, marketing and media messages, and promotion; and a meaningful consumer

The dynamics of rural change are often linked to frameworks of ‘rural community resilience’, a body of literature associated with various aspects of society including social capital, community initiatives, and governance. Drawing on emergent literature, this study aims to explore how assemblage approaches may disseminate resilience thinking via dissolving structure-agency and bounce-back-transformative

In peri-urban areas, agricultural land loss is a prominent issue. At the same time, the demand for local food provision is growing. As a response, local authorities are engaging in farmland preservation procedures to protect and revalorize agricultural land in order to encourage local food production. However, little is known on the impacts of farmland preservation on other development policies such

The potential of social innovation to address intersecting social and spatial inequalities in regional territories is increasingly recognised. Against this background, the results in this article are based on a qualitative study of constellations of actors in peripheral rural regions engaged in socially innovative approaches to regional development. Empirically, the example of EPAM–a network of new

Local Action Groups (LAGs) are multi-sectoral, area-based partnerships operating throughout the European Union to support participatory local development in rural areas. One of the operational elements of the programme is that multi-sectoral partnerships at the local level select and fund local development projects. The aim of this paper is to explore the dynamics of the selection process at the local

This paper aims to provide insights on the association between exposure to rural general practice vocational training placements and subsequent rural practice location in Western Australia. We further explore the possibility that the observed associations might depend on an individual's rural upbringing and or an individual's exposure to general practice during medical school. To this end, a cross-sectional

The agricultural sector in developed countries has been experiencing a growth in the percentage of women, yet very little economic research documents the role and contribution of farm women across these countries. Through an interdisciplinary systematic literature review of 184 international peer-reviewed, English-language studies between 1970 and 2020 we investigate the economic contribution and visibility

This article examines critically how digital technologies are being introduced into agriculture. The authors argue that this introduction takes place through the interacting forms of expertise and coalitions of authority in relation to both private and public players in smart farming initiatives. The piece adds to current debates about the origins of and driving forces behind emerging technologies

Academic literature has so far explored food democracy and citizen participation in agri-food system governance mainly in relation to the ‘food’ end of agri-food systems, and primarily in urban contexts. We argue that this focus can be usefully extended to agricultural production and to wider territorial processes occurring in rural areas. In this study, we examine the development of a grassroots movement

Introduction Farming is a physically and psychologically hazardous occupation and farmers face numerous attitudinal and structural barriers to accessing mainstream health and mental health services. As Internet access increases across rural Australia there is potential for online interventions to help overcome barriers and provide new avenues for improving farmers' mental health and wellbeing. However

Creators of alternative proteins (APs) claim to provide solutions, so-called promissory narratives, to the messy and complex problems in our food system. Through these promissory narratives APs are said to offer responsible consumption. Our article uses convention theory to explore how justifications by AP companies change and expand from primarily using civic concerns (e.g. the environment, animal

Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) establish metrics and collect farm-level data to measure sustainability in the food system. Rooted in the private sector, MSIs advance goals that were once the responsibility of the state. To make sense of this trend, we distinguish three ideal types of accountability systems in the United States agrifood system: community-based, state-led, and private-ordering

This study aims to identify the variables measuring the sustainable development in agriculture, its antecedents, barriers and consequences, confirming its factors and testing the relations between them. Having in mind these aims, the research was conducted through three phases. In phase 1, qualitative research was adopted, holding 23 semi-structured interviews with family farmers. Phase 2 and 3 used