Category Archives: Rural Development
‘Gesloten vanwege stikstof’ – nieuw boek Jan Douwe van der Ploeg
‘Gesloten vanwege stikstof‘ is een nieuw boek van Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, emeritus hoogleraar Rural Sociologie, die zich grondig heeft verdiept in en verbonden met vernieuwingsprocessen in de landbouw en op het platteland, zowel in Nederland als internationaal, en uitgesproken is over waar het zijns inziens naar toe moet en waar het aan schort. Hij was onder meer lid van de Raad voor het Landelijke Gebied en adviseur van de Europese Commissie. Hij was ook nauw betrokken bij de eerste agrarische natuurverening in Nederland in de Noardlike Fryske Wâlden.
In dit nieuwe boek betoogt Jan Douwe van der Ploeg hoezeer het stikstofprobleem is uitgegroeid tot een megacrisis. En dat falend landbouwbeleid en Wageningse theorieën daarbij een belangrijke rol hebben gespeeld. De megacrisis van nu vertakt zich internationaal en is ecologisch, economisch, sociaal en politiek van aard. Ondertussen zit Nederland op slot.
Woensdag 15 november wordt het ‘eerste’ exemplaar wordt overhandigd aan voormalig gedeputeerde Douwe Hoogland, tevens oud-voorzitter van de Noardlike Fryske Wâlden.
Zondag 12 november was Jan Douwe van der Ploeg te gast in het radioprogramma Vroege Vogels. Het gesprek valt hier terug te beluisten.
Continue readingReturn to Village: Turkey’s state building in rural Kurdistan
Joost Jongerden contributed with two chapters to the book “A Hundred Years of Republican Turkey: A History in a Hundred Fragments” edited by Alp Yenen and Erik-Jan Zürcher and published by Leiden University press. One of these chapters, “The Return to the Village: Turkey’s State-Building in Kurdistan” discusses Turkey’s efforts to change the rural settlement structure in the Kurdish East and Southeast.
As part of its counter-insurgency strategy to reclaim the countryside in southeast Anatolia from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK), the Turkish Armed Forces evacuated and destroyed rural settlements on a massive scale in the 1990s. According to official figures, 833 villages and 2,382 small rural settlements, totalling 3,215 settlements, were evacuated and destroyed in fourteen provinces in the east and southeast of Turkey. Several plans for resettlement or the controlled rural return of Kurdish villagers had already been made and discussed when the evacuations took place. It took until 2001, however, for a comprehensive plan to be released, one that, as it turned out, was more concerned about the settlement structure in Turkey than with the forced migrants, and this must be seen against the background of the Kemalist elite in Turkey, which has been preoccupied with the production of places and people as bearers of Turkish identity since the establishment of the Republic.
Continue readingThe desire to stay
The Dutch nitrogen crisis has emphatically illuminated the gap between “Randstad” and “Randland”. But exactly how wide is the gap? Is there merely a struggle for money, production and nature? A story about the pain of the disappearing ‘home’.
Bettina Bock was asked by Sociologie Magazine to write an essay about farmers and rural dwellers in the context of their early 2023 issue on ‘conflict’. Together with Jolien Klok they employed the concept of restanza to reflect on current rural discontent in the Netherlands. Unfortunately it’s only available in Dutch, click here to read the essay.
Unpacking gender mainstreaming: a critical discourse analysis of agricultural and rural development policy in Myanmar and Nepal by Dawn Cheong et al.
Dawn Cheong is PhD-candidate at the Rural Sociology Group (dawn.cheong@wur.nl) . Her first paper has just been published open access in ‘Agriculture and Human Values‘:
Cheong, D.D., Bock, B. & Roep, D. (2023) Unpacking gender mainstreaming: a critical discourse analysis of agricultural and rural development policy in Myanmar and Nepal https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-023-10502-x.
Abstract
Conventional gender analysis of development policy does not adequately explain the slow progress towards gender equality. Our research analyses the gender discourses embedded in agricultural and rural development policies in Myanmar and Nepal. We find that both countries focus on increasing women’s participation in development activities as a core gender equality policy objective. This creates a binary categorisation of participating versus non-participating women and identifies women as responsible for improving their position. At the same time, gender (in)equality is defined exclusively as a women’s concern. Such discourses, as constitutive practices, produce specific knowledge about rural women and new subjectivities that prescribe and govern them solely as subjects of development. Our research suggests that such a limited discursive practice invisiblises gendered power relations and structural and institutional issues, ultimately slowing progress towards gender equality. We demonstrate the importance of studying policy as discourse, beyond the effectiveness of policies or mainstreaming tools, and call for empirical evidence on the impact of these discourses on women’s subjectivities and lived experiences.
Rural Sociology Wageningen University 