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This book explores the gender effects of the current transformation of agriculture and rural life. It presents a comparative perspective on key research themes of rural gender relations, with each section beginning with a comprehensive overview. Five themes are addressed: (1) developments in rural gender theory and research methodology; (2) changes in farm households; (3) patterns of rural migration; (4) the impact of national and international policies; (5) and the construction of gender identities as a result of rural changes. This book will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of rural sociology, agrarian change, rural geography and gender studies. The book has 23 chapters and a subject index.

AbstractRural 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.

All over Europe more and more farm families start new income generating activities on and off the farm to supplement the decreasing income from primary productions. Farmwomen play an important role in these strategies but are at the same time perceived as less professional entrepreneurs compared to men. This is due to women's cautious and small‐scaled approach to entrepreneurship, which is in its turn explained by women's lack of resources. This article follows another line of argument and departs from the question why women themselves choose to behave differently and prefer certain behaviour modes above others. The article is based on two research projects, which took place in the Netherlands during 1995–2001. The first research focused on how and why farmwomen started new economic activities on and off the farm. It shows that Dutch farmwomen share a specific approach to rural entrepreneurship and paid labour, which is characterised by fitting in and multi‐tasking. Women add the new activities to their regular tasks and fit them into the already existing working scheme because they want to make sure that neither family nor farm is troubled by their initiatives. The second project focused on the development of new on farm activities over the course of time and followed five female rural entrepreneurs from 1995 to 2001. It demonstrates that women may change their approach and expand their business when they experience that work and care may be successfully combined and that their new business is rewarding financially as well as emotionally. Understanding women's specific approach to entrepreneurship is important in order to more effectively support them. So far, rural development policies are of little help to women as they usually promote a type of entrepreneur and an approach to entrepreneurship most common among men.

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.

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.

The recent rapprochement between Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Political Science (PS) is induced by the broadened understanding of political action. The debate concerning the nature of ``the political'' produces an important question concerning the possibilities of an issue- or object-oriented focus for understanding political action. The purpose of this article is to contribute to this debate through an analysis of how relations between material and social entities are continuously recontextualized and decontextualized in social and political interaction. The authors discuss established approaches to explain the concept of virtualization. Virtualization is then used in a case study on the implementation of manure regulation in East Fryslân, the Netherlands, to illustrate how cases or issues are virtualized in political decision making, which produces initial presumptions that carry conclusive weight. The authors conclude that a broad understanding of the political in both STS and PS can only be sustained through an understanding of how relations between social and material entities are continuously decontextualized and recontextualized in political and social interaction.

AbstractIn this article, we use Kooiman's theory of governance in combination with key‐conditions of community self‐steering identified in recent studies to examine how the self‐steering capacity developed of a community initiative aiming at improving the liveability of a small Dutch village. Using non‐participatory observations and qualitative analysis, we obtained in‐depth insights into how this initiative, 'Project Ulrum 2034' managed to build local autonomy from 2010 to 2018. We found that government support was crucial for many of its successes. Also, tensions came to light between 1. local autonomy, and its dependence on professional support, and; 2. broader community engagement, and accountability related to the public funding obtained leading to the formalisation of its organisation and the centralisation of tasks. We discovered that self‐steering capacities fluctuate in time, are dynamic and develop in a non‐linear way. The voluntary engagement was above all temporary, except for some activities when of direct interest to those involved. The continuity of community self‐governance was fragile, due to its dependency on external funding and voluntary engagement.

In this article, we use Kooiman's theory of governance in combination with key‐conditions of community self‐steering identified in recent studies to examine how the self‐steering capacity developed of a community initiative aiming at improving the liveability of a small Dutch village. Using non‐participatory observations and qualitative analysis, we obtained in‐depth insights into how this initiative, 'Project Ulrum 2034' managed to build local autonomy from 2010 to 2018. We found that government support was crucial for many of its successes. Also, tensions came to light between 1. local autonomy, and its dependence on professional support, and; 2. broader community engagement, and accountability related to the public funding obtained leading to the formalisation of its organisation and the centralisation of tasks. We discovered that self‐steering capacities fluctuate in time, are dynamic and develop in a non‐linear way. The voluntary engagement was above all temporary, except for some activities when of direct interest to those involved. The continuity of community self‐governance was fragile, due to its dependency on external funding and voluntary engagement.