dc.description |
Development is many things for many people. And in recent years, the whole enterprise
of development has been questioned from many sides. In this book, we take stock of many
of the critiques of development discourses and recipes, while aiming to preserve some of
the insights we still deem valuable. We take a look at many approaches to development,
some of them under that name, others not usually labelled as ‘development’ but de facto
influential approaches to it.
We focus on rural development, that is, the development of rural areas, including
villages and small towns, and consider the rural in its global aspect. Rural development,
in other words, is not restricted to the developing world; it is a highly relevant topic for
Europe and North America as well. And it is not restricted to reflections on agriculture,
or recipes for it. Rural areas have never been purely agricultural, we argue, and in the
last century or so, they have become more and more multi-functional: people do many
things in rural areas, land is used for many purposes. We will show that mono-functional
land use is an exception, usually the result of very open and globalized markets and/or
very strong government policies. |
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