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The Netherlands is a small, highly urbanised and densely populated country. The distances are short and levels of welfare high. Throughout the 80s and 90s, people were generally satisfied with service levels in rural areas and experienced the rural areas' quality of life as high. Around 2006, however, the population started to decline in several rural regions. The government responded with the development of two national Action Plans for Population Decline. This paper analyses the national action plans, their content and implementation. It looks into the problem definition and assignment of responsibility, their success in addressing population decline problems, and in keeping depopulation on the political agenda. The paper concludes with some reflections on what we can learn about population decline and related policies based on the experiences in a highly urbanised country like the Netherlands.

AbstractThere has been a dramatic expansion and diversification of knowledge, expertise and expectation associated with farm animal welfare and we witness its increasing adoption within legislative and policy strategies. This article examines how the understanding of what constitutes farm animal welfare and how it should be enhanced, has shifted since it first entered the modern political arena in the sixties. It explores farm animal welfare as a critical and shifting area of imbrication of 'science' and 'society' and charts this process in particularly theUKand TheNetherlands. We demonstrate how public and scientific debates about what constitutes animal welfare, what counts as evidence of animal suffering and how welfare enhancement should be encouraged, has unveiled the tensions underlying its construction as a policy problem between social and animal science, productivity and integrity, as well as production and consumption and has turned animal welfare into a matter of societal choice. The article unravels the social construction of animal welfare science and reveals its limited capability of delivering 'facts' or 'evidence' in any truly objective manner.

We focus on the governance instrument of partnerships for rural areas, because these have become important for the implementation of rural development policy in Britain. Emergent forms of governance are often assumed to enhance participatory democracy as they facilitate the involvement of nongovernmental actors and citizens. However, governmental policies about partnerships often use 'representation' to democratically legitimise these new forms. Partnership members themselves also use these concepts in their everyday language—they too say that they represent and participate. We explore the different meanings of both being a representative and being a participant, based on a qualitative study of three local rural partnerships in Wales. Our analysis reveals important nuances in how four types of representatives (from the public, private, community, and voluntary sectors) differ in their perceived duties and attitudes towards their constituencies. But, above all, most partnership members see themselves rather as participants than as representatives. However, partnership members can also hide behind being participants in two ways. First, they can downplay their organisational membership and their organisation's self-interest. Partnership members who most actively participate in 'driving the partnership forward' are also those who have the most self-interest in doing so. And, second, they do not have to worry about accountability mechanisms because their individualised participation has been decoupled from responsiveness to 'others'. The neoliberal notions of participation obscure the political nature of working in partnership where decisions over rural development have to be made among members with different and possibly conflicting interests.

This book explores how rural gender relations are changing in a globalizing world. It integrates experiences across the globe through the discussion of four key themes in rural gender research: agriculture, international development, gender identities and mobility. The first section (chapters 2-6) examines how mobility affects men and women in rural areas. It explores gender differences in mobility patterns and analyses how mobility affects rural gender identities and relations. The second section (chapters 7-11) focuses on agricultural change, the response of individuals within farm households and the implications for gender relations in rural areas. The third section (chapters 12-17) focuses on the construction of identities and the changes occurring in the definition of rural femininity and masculinity as a result of rural transformations. The fourth section (chapters 18-23) examines the role of international development policies in advancing women's well-being in the less developed parts of the world and some of the unintended consequences of such interventions. The contributors to this book present empirical work from the global North and South.

Provides an overview of the potential role of organic agriculture in a global perspective. This book discusses political ecology, ecological justice, ecological economics, and free trade. It includes role of organic agriculture for improving soil fertility, nutrient cycling and food security and reducing veterinary medicine use, and more

This paper contributes to the debate on spatial justice in a geography of regional uneven development in the EU. The purpose of this study is to provide a philosophically grounded and empirically informed review of how regional inequality relates to spatial justice. This is done inventorying spatial injustices through a systematic literature review, unravelling the kind of injustices based on a philosophical principle and categorisation of (in)justice. The paper starts with a discussion of how spatial justice has been conceptualised, looking more particularly into Nancy Fraser's egalitarian understanding of social justice. Her tripartite distinction of justice as (re)distribution, recognition, and representation allows us to re-examine regional inequality and to sharply formulate what is understood as just or unjust. Through a spatial reinterpretation of Fraser's prism, we then re-examine 134 empirical papers carefully selected with a scoping review method. Our results reveal six manifestations of regional injustice in the EU, which not only encompass an unequally distributed regional development of economic wealth and access to services, but also signal a cultural hierarchy imprinting territorial stigmas and neglecting environmental issues, as well as a political geographical divide of deeply felt rural and regional misrepresentation.

AbstractThis article addresses the construction of professionalism in rural partnerships in Achterhoek, a region in the east of The Netherlands, where public, private and community representatives are involved in the spatial reorganisation of agriculture. In contrast to the dichotomy between 'professional' and 'citizen' that can be found in the literature, we argue that professional identity is a multi‐layered construct. Moreover, professional identity can be seen a source of political capital. Based on a qualitative case study of one partnership, we conclude that it is not just civic or community representatives who are unable to access all the relevant layers of professionalism. Partnership members from small interest organisations also lack the professionalism that stems from scientific knowledge. Even when these actors have access to scientific knowledge, only a few of them can identify with and align themselves with the dominant discourse. Community representatives are particularly prone to question the legitimacy of the professionalism that dominates such partnerships. They are proud of their experiential knowledge and draw on this to contest professionalism, which they disapprove of. If the governance of local partnerships is to be a bottom‐up process more lay people and local inhabitants need to be involved. Their experiential knowledge could bring about a cultural change in governance that goes beyond the current decentralisation of decision‐making to the local level.

This volume looks at the construction of gendered citizenship in different rural contexts. These contexts represent different welfare state and gender regimes, and different rural/agricultural conditions as characterized in different countryside types. This is a study of gender, citizenship and gender regimes, in a rural context with an international list of contributors.

In this paper, we apply a civic perspective and social innovation theory to examine how residents of a Dutch village experiencing rural depopulation and austerity value an experimental civic initiative aimed at improving liveability, and what explains their evaluation. Using multivariate statistical analysis, we found that most residents were positive about the initiative and its contribution to local liveability. We also found that a substantial group knew very little about the initiative and that low-income groups, in particular, lacked the interest to identify and become engaged with it. Furthermore, we found that voluntary engagement had no predictive value for evaluation. Above all, tangible outputs explained the evaluation. A perceived increase in collaboration within the village and novel forms of collaboration with the local government also proved important, but only when they were accompanied by realised tangible outputs.

AbstractIn the context of public budget cuts and rural areas facing depopulation and aging, local governments increasingly encourage citizen engagement in addressing local livability issues. This paper examines the non‐engagement of mid‐aged and elderly residents (45+ years old) in civic initiatives that intend to improve the livability of their community. We focus on residents of depopulating rural areas in the North Netherlands. We compare their engagement with the behavior of residents in other, not depopulating, rural areas, and urban areas. Using logistic statistical analyses, we found that the majority of the aging residents did not engage in civic livability initiatives during the past two years, and one‐third of this group had no intention to do so in the future. In all areas, the main reasons for non‐engagement were that residents had other priorities, felt not capable of engaging, or felt that the responsibility for local livability belonged to the local government. Furthermore, it appeared that non‐engagement was predominantly explained by the unwillingness to engage, rather than by specific motivations or lacking abilities.