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This book is an edited version of the unpublished final report of the
cross-national PRIDE research project, which ran from February 1999
to January 2001 and was concerned with Partnerships for Rural
Integrated Development in Europe. Four years have passed since the
project was first conceived but rural development remains as crucial an
issue in Europe today as it was in the mid–late 1990s – as do the hopes
and expectations placed upon local partnerships as a tool for its promotion and management. Indeed, that statement is true not just within the
borders of the EU but elsewhere in the world, where other governments
and local communities struggle with the challenge of transforming
essentially agricultural into more broadly based rural economies and of
building tools of local governance that can facilitate that process in a way
that is sympathetic to local circumstances and to a host of social, political, economic and cultural forces.
The research involved focusing on the rural development experience of six member states of the EU, namely, Finland, Germany, Italy,
Spain, Sweden and the UK, with some additional contextual analysis of
material from Ireland and Luxemburg. |
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