The conditions for service access differs distinctly between the north and south of Sweden, and older residents of islands face different challenges of aging in place. As islands are a specific form of geography that place restrictions on mobility in different ways, service provision is sometimes hindered, or absent. This study aims to understand the conditions of accessibility and mobility for older people living on smaller islands in Sweden. With the perspective of rural mobilities, the study investigates two islands located in the north and south of Sweden, respectively. The purpose is to discern how the islanders perceive their need for mobility and accessibility as they age, and what they deem to be desirable future developments of services in their local contexts. For this purpose, 18 island residents aged 65-85 from two different islands were interviewed via telephone. The study finds that the community on the islands act as a safeguard against declining service provision, and that the residents are vigilant against solutions that threaten to erode the social cohesion of the community.
This article examines how rural tourism transforms livelihoods, attachments, and land claims in the Çamlıhemşin district of Turkey's Eastern Black Sea region. Building on recent ruralisation scholarship, it integrates tourism, overlooked in these debates despite its growing role in rural landscapes, into the analytical framework, and extends discussions developed primarily through Southeast Asian cases to a setting where tourism intersects with a longstanding tea economy and decades of rural–urban migration. Drawing on participant observation and open-ended interviews conducted during fieldwork in 2025, the findings show that tea cultivation produced variegated ruralities: coastal villages sustained livelihoods through tea, while settlements deeper in the valley combined small-scale cultivation with circular urban migration. These mobility patterns preserved village properties, kinship networks, and land attachments across distance, laying the material groundwork for tourism's emergence. As tea income declined and regional development shifted towards tourism, inherited assets became activatable through three mechanisms: converting mansions and highland cottages into rental properties (spatial value-activation), generating local employment beyond agriculture (labour market formation), and symbolically revaluing rural residence. Tourism, however, does not produce uniform outcomes: its interaction with pre-existing resource configurations yields divergent trajectories, from mass, construction-intensive development where agriculture persists to more eco-sensitive tourism where it has almost ceased. The article concludes that tourism constitutes a distinct form of ruralisation in which rural life persists not despite deagrarianisation but through the re-functioning of inherited rural assets into visitor economies.
The mental health of farmers has been receiving increasing attention in recent years. While studies are available in many European and non-European countries, there is a lack of corresponding data in Germany. This study therefore examines the prevalence of burnout among women on farms in Germany and the relationship to various, partly gender-specific, risk factors. The study uses data of an online survey of 7345 women that was conducted in 2021. The risk of burnout was measured using the “Personal Burnout Scale” of the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI). The results show that 21.5% of women on farms in Germany represented in this sample suffer from burnout, with non-family employees without management functions showing a particularly high burnout rate of 27%. The strongest associations with the CBI Burnout Score were observed for self-rated general health status, stress related to household and farm work, lack of free time, and family and generational conflicts. However, the comparability of the present results with previous studies is unclear due to the potential influence of the COVID-19 pandemic at the time of data collection. It cannot be ruled out that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as isolation, fear of illness, and financial uncertainty, may have biased the data. Nevertheless, the study is the first Germany-wide survey of the prevalence of burnout among women in agriculture, and therefore offers initial important insights into a previously under-researched topic.
Market outlet choice is a critical strategy adopted by farm households to enhance their welfare through improved crop revenue, food security, and overall living standards. This study leverages the wave 3 cross-sectional data of the Ghana Socioeconomic Panel Survey to examine the impact of market outlet choice on crop diversification, per capita household consumption expenditure, and food consumption score. To account for endogeneity and address the potential problem of self-selection bias associated with the random participation in a given market outlet, the multinomial endogenous switching regression (MESR) model was used for the estimation. The results indicate that participation in the consumer-based, institutional and contract-based, and intermediary and wholesale-based market outlets increases the count of diversified crops by 22%, 13%, and 34%, respectively. Food consumption score and per capita household consumption expenditure are higher among participants in all market outlets relative to non-participants, with participation in the intermediary and wholesale-based market outlets resulting in the largest welfare gains. Gender disaggregated findings show that female-headed farm households benefit more from market outlet participation, with increased crop diversification and food consumption score. Policy efforts should prioritise reducing transaction costs through investments in rural infrastructure, strengthening farmer organisations and promoting gender-sensitive market interventions.
This scoping literature review focuses on the operation and orientation of social innovations (SI) in agri-food systems, in order to understand their role in sustainability transformations. Its main objective is to analyze and synthesize the types of cases studied in SI literature, with a specific focus on what is reported regarding their characteristics, how they form relations, the societal problems they respond to and their contributions to transformation processes. The review is based on 86 empirical English articles published in Scopus and Web of Science between 2013 and 2023, covering 168 empirical SI cases. The data reveal limited geographical variation and a Eurocentric focus in the study of SI, but diverse spatial and operational foci of SI cases. We identify seven SI types: community food networks, food equity initiatives, capacity-building programs, agri-cooperatives, social agri-enterprises, agri-environmental initiatives, and tech-driven agri-services. These often-localized solutions address different internal and external relations, aim to respond to a variety of societal needs and problems, and are rhetorically linked to transformations of various kinds. In addition to providing insights into key trends in the operation and orientation of SI, this analysis contributes to the discussion on the transformative potential of SI, including the ambivalent role of strong ties between SI and the state. Furthermore, this study identifies potential research avenues for the study of SI in agriculture and food with a particular focus on rural places. In particular, we call for reflexivity in researchers' normative assumptions, more rigorous reporting of relations and transformative contributions, and more systematic approaches to better integrate findings across SI cases as well as with adjacent concepts.
Lack of accessibility is both a defining characteristic and a key obstacle for the development of remote rural areas. In the Nordic context, challenging travel conditions have reinforced the need for new, sustainable transport solutions. This article explores the perceived potential of electric aviation as an environmentally low-impact and innovative way to improve accessibility and thereby strengthen the socio-economic development of remote regions. The study applies an analytical framework on accessibility components to explore how electric aviation could strengthen remote rural areas in the Nordic countries. The study adopts a qualitative approach exploring five case studies, selected through a pre-study to identify which routes in the Nordic region would benefit the most from the introduction of electric aviation. These case studies draw on focus group discussions with local stakeholders and aviation experts from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. The study offers an analytical contribution by suggesting an additional dimension to Geurs and van Wee's accessibility component model highlighting the importance of energy infrastructure to better understand and support the green shift in the transport sector. Stakeholders perceived electric aviation as a possible contributor to regional development, but only under restrictive conditions relating to affordability, service frequency, integration with local transport, public trust, and energy infrastructure. The study highlights both the promises and challenges of electric aviation and its perceived potential impact on regional development trajectories in sectors including tourism and healthcare as well as the design of sustainable and context-sensitive transport policies.
This paper traces the multiple metabolisms in Chinese apiculture through three ethnographic stories, adopting the orienting practices of following material flows and untangling metabolic knots. The first story analyses the Langstroth beehive as an animal infrastructure that renders honeybees as metabolic labour. The second follows the flow of honey back to nectar – a metabolic output of flowers – to examine the intimate metabolic relations among insects, flowers and weather. The last story addresses the metabolic disruptions caused by pesticides used on lychee trees, reflecting the complex interactions between lives and materials, as well as lychee growers and nomadic beekeepers. Acknowledging the profound and universal interconnectedness of these metabolisms, the paper argues that achieving metabolic justice requires developing careful attentiveness to metabolic multiplicity while confronting the situated conflicts over diverse metabolic care practices and the hidden structural challenges of Chinese smallholder farmers’ precarious livelihood. Ultimately, metabolic justice must confront the uneven material-social politics affecting both human and more-than-human actants marginalised in contemporary food regimes.
The last agricultural transition to productivist farming presaged disconnection between farming and non-farming people. This paper draws on social licence to operate (SLO) and community engagement literatures to draw attention to the role of in-person engagement between farmers and the public to bridging the disconnect which, despite its importance to the farmer's social licence, has not attracted research attention nor critical review of the farming industry's settled conception of engagement as reconnection with the consumer in the marketplace. Taking the ruminant livestock region of the south-west of England as its geographic area, we address this lack of critical review and empirical research. We present findings from in-depth interviews with beef and/or sheep farmers and senior representatives of regional and national organisations working in the ruminant sector. Findings align with research in other European and North American context which finds a deficit model approach dominates farmers' engagement practices despite being unconducive to achieving a resilient social licence to farm (SLF). We add nuance by emphasizing a range of secondary purposes and practices to farmers' engagement. This suggests accessible pathways towards a broader more relational approach to in-person engagement with the farmer qua person-in-community with fellow non-farming people. We offer a novel engagement-as-integration framework as a starting point for the farming industry to support farmers transition towards in-person engagement with non-farming people that is more conducive to overcoming the disconnect and to building relationships between farmer and non-farming people that is the bedrock of the farmer's resilient SLF.
While tourism-led rural development commonly brings economic benefits, it also typically alters the appearance of traditional villages. Thus, balancing the economic benefits from rural tourism development and the protection of traditional architecture has been difficult. Existing research on the impact of tourism development on vernacular architecture primarily focuses on cases of rural tourism development driven by commercial enterprises or local residents. Nonetheless, the spatial effects of rural tourism development within the government-led mode have been insufficiently explored. The current research addresses this gap by examining the impact of government-led tourism development on the architecture of the traditional village of Lijiashan, Shanxi Province, China. Employing a qualitative multi-method approach, encompassing field surveys and in-depth interviews, the study found that while the government-led model has successfully maintained the overall appearance of the village and improved the preservation of traditional Yaodong courtyards—cave-shaped folk houses—it also presents drawbacks. Standardized renovations and delays in repairing Yaodong courtyards have negative spatial impacts on the historical fabric of the village, including the damage of authenticity and the shift of original appearance. Therefore, this case highlights the complex interplay between rural development, preservation of vernacular architecture, and the specific challenges and opportunities presented by a government-led approach.
Starting from the critique of a lacking conceptualization of smart rurality and urban-rural hierarchies in smart development debates, the paper examines how dominant understandings of smartness are translated, interrogated, and reworked in rural contexts. Drawing on the concept of hierarchical knowledge production, the paper argues that the underlying challenge of rural smartness is less about technology itself than about who defines problems, sets benchmarks, and gains recognition as “smart.” Based on a qualitative interview study, the analysis focuses on rural meaning-making of dominant discourses surrounding smartness in Estonia, a country widely seen as a digital frontrunner. The findings show how dominant smart discourses not only universalize urban norms but impede rural agency to participate in the knowledge production surrounding smartness by limiting non-urban areas to the position of being “less smart” and failing to recognize already existing “quiet smartness” attuned to rural needs. By highlighting the limitations of dominant understandings alongside the potential of alternative conceptualizations of smartness, the paper contributes to an evidence-based knowledge production on smart development that is more inclusive to rural realities.
Millets have recently re-emerged in India's food discourse, framed as a solution for sustainable agriculture and rural livelihoods. Their marketing is promoted as an opportunity for marginalized farmers. This article critically examines millet marketing as a case of the marketization of neglected and underutilized species (NUS), foregrounding the power dynamics it entails. Our findings from qualitative fieldwork in the greater Bangalore area point to four key processes: (i) academic narratives that shape entrepreneurial agendas and construct market needs, (ii) the positioning of millets at the frontier region of neoliberal markets, (iii) the establishment of Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) to make millets accessible to urban marketers, and (iv) marketing narratives that position millets as a traditional crop that can satisfy modern palates. We argue that understanding asset ownership and processes of assetization seem crucial to exposing potentially emerging power struggles caused by the marketization of millets. In addition, marketing narratives support these processes and stabilize power relations in the value chain in favor of downstream actors. These are important insight for the marketing of similar crops, which would make concerns about smallholders' loss of power during marketization processes more tangible and thus easier to challenge.
A recent and still-emerging current within the well-noted phenomenon of counterurbanisation is what may be termed neo-rural back-to-the-land, involving especially new rural in-migrants seeking a land-production orientated sustainable life. Although apparent across the global North especially, living such a life is very challenging and, not least via its radical rural spatiality, is likely to be experiencing a tough ‘trial by space’ (Lefebvre, 1991). However, in rural Wales it has been encouraged via the Welsh Assembly Government's planning policy in support of One Planet Development (OPD) enterprises. Although subject to a very detailed range of extremely strict criteria, this policy allows construction of buildings in ‘open countryside’ that would not normally be seen as suitably placed. After setting up the global presence of neo-rural back-to-the-land counterurbanisation, the paper introduces the Welsh development of this policy, drawing on published sources and key informants, before its main focus examines how OPD is playing out for three case studies. The latter are all couples with children, rather than communal enterprises, seeking to combine a high degree of self-sufficiency from their smallholding with wider ways of living in tune with sustainability principles. A broadly positive, if qualified, sense that they are passing their trial by space is important in the context of assessing the contribution that radical forms of rural development can make to the huge global planetary sustainability challenge facing us all.
High-altitude rural settlements are particularly vulnerable to disasters because difficult terrain, limited infrastructure, and limited preparedness resources can constrain rapid evacuation. However, field-based evidence from these settings remains scarce. This study conducted an on-site evacuation experiment in a predominantly Tibetan village in western Sichuan, China. Seventy-seven residents aged 8–83 completed an approximately 300-m uphill or downhill route while GPS wristbands recorded location, instantaneous speed, heart rate, and elevation at 1-s intervals. Spatial trajectory analysis, age-group comparisons, interviews, and vector autoregression were used to examine environmental and physiological influences on evacuation. Participants slowed at sharp turns, intersections, and the later portions of uphill routes. Irregular branch roads and visually ambiguous shortcuts were also associated with hesitation and occasional route deviation. Young participants moved faster overall but showed larger within-route speed declines, whereas older participants maintained lower and more stable speeds. Short-term acceleration dynamics were dominated by their own lagged values, while lagged heart rate provided statistically detectable but limited additional predictive information. These findings suggest that route geometry, wayfinding complexity, and age-dependent fatigue should be considered when planning evacuation routes and shelter access in high-altitude rural settlements.
In existing research on cooperative and specialized village development, two trajectories typically dominate: either cooperatives continuously strengthen, driving smallholders toward modern agricultural organizational forms; or cooperatives weaken, leading to the decline of local industries. Drawing on Chungang Village's strawberry industry in central China as a case study, and based on fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation, this paper reveals an overlooked trajectory of cooperative evolution, in which cooperative influence substantively recedes as the market system matures, yet smallholders do not exit and the local industry sustains market vitality over the long term. The study finds that during the expansion phase, the cooperative helped the local industry establish structural embeddedness with external markets by integrating dispersed households and connecting them to external resources. As the market system matured and penetrated downward into the village, the coordinating functions originally performed by the cooperative were gradually absorbed by stable merchant relationships, marketized service systems, and long-term transactional networks. The paper argues that the historical contribution of cooperatives in specialized villages may lie less in maintaining long-term organizational control than in helping smallholder-based industries establish market connections at a particular stage, and that once these connections become stabilized, the necessity of the cooperative as intermediary may decline without leading to industrial decay. This processual perspective challenges the new institutionalist criteria conventionally used to evaluate cooperatives, including organizational continuity, unified marketing, and sustained membership participation, by showing that their absence does not necessarily indicate governance failure or inauthenticity. In sectors characterized by high value, long market radius, and frequent transactions, such indicators may instead reflect the completion of a stage-specific market-connecting function, pointing to the need for an evaluative lens attentive to relational outcomes across time rather than organizational form at a single moment.
The 2019-2020 fire catastrophe in Australia has generated vigorous personal and public reflections about the nature and role of fire in Australian society and how to manage fire across the continent. Within local communities a variety of attitudes and perspectives has been debated, often with limited mutual understanding. To take advantage of this historical moment post-the catastrophic summer of 2019-20 and to contribute to more effective communication between the parties, we sought to examine the various ways in which inhabitants of a rural region experienced and understood fire, along with sources of agreement and disagreement.Semi-structured interviews about attitudes to different fire experiences were conducted with non-Indigenous people from a range of gender, age and professional backgrounds. Data were analysed according to a framework derived from Foucault and others whereby different discourses could be distinguished through which participants had access to a range of fields of meanings of fire and by means of which they expressed their views.Our analysis showed that attitudes were informed by a range of formal and informal knowledge sources comprising several distinct fire discourses, which we have called ‘home’, ‘local farming’, ‘conservation or ecology’, ‘land regulation’ and ‘First Nations fire practices’. Individuals could move freely between different discourses in common speech, reflecting on their own values and attitudes and demonstrating awareness of those of others in the broader community, while tending to utilise specific discourses according to their social or professional roles.We conclude that this discursive fecundity and flexibility may be employed to improve communication and dialogue within communities and to enhance the development of policies and practices that support shared interests and common goals.
Agricultural extension services are increasingly mobilized in agri-environmental contexts, where they complement regulatory approaches by supporting farmers in managing soil and water quality. From a societal and policymaking perspective, producing and delivering such information entails non-negligible costs, making it important to understand how prior participation influences both engagement and preferences for service design. To address this, we conduct a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) to examine Flemish farmers’ preferences for soil and water quality advisory programs. To complement this ex ante analysis, selected variables derived from an ex post assessment are incorporated as interaction terms in the choice model, allowing us to assess whether prior engagement with such programs is associated with differences in participation decisions and preferences for program design. Using random-parameters logit and latent class models, we find that farmers consistently prefer advisory services delivered by practice and research centers, farmer unions, and private consultants over government-affiliated advisors, and are strongly sensitive to participation costs. While previous engagement does not significantly increase willingness to participate, interaction effects indicate that prior participants are more averse to regulation-themed sessions and more cost-sensitive. These findings suggest that increasing program visibility alone is unlikely to improve uptake. Instead, advisory programs should prioritize perceived relevance and institutional legitimacy, notably by ensuring diversity in advisory providers and strengthening their perceived independence and credibility.
