The website of the EU-funded research project DERREG (see blog of January 22) is now online: www.derreg.eu. Basic information about the project is now available and further information will be published as the project proceeds.
Category Archives: Rural Development
Rural development in Iowa
The coming two months, I will join the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development in Ames, Iowa. This center, part of the Iowa State University, is working with rural communities, native American communities and small producer groups to increase the capacity and resilience of these communities in tackling their problems. In the United States, the development of modern agriculture had a large impact and often devastating effects on rural communities. And, nowadays changing lifestyles, declining knowledge of food and less connection with farming and land have resulted in an obesity epidemic and diet-related diseases. Native American communities also suffer from diet-related diseases. One of the communities the center works with is a Hopi community in Arizona. A recently finished project worked with Hopi women to search for how they define, access and use traditional Hopi food. Using a community capitals approach, the participants assessed together their natural, cultural, social, political, financial and built capital. Through this, they identified their strong and weak or lacking capitals in search for improving health and living circumstances. See this website for an example of a Hopi farm.
IP- Greetings from Poland
Greetings from Poland! At the moment we are attending the IP on rural development in Lublin. The program is very intensive indeed! Within one week, we have not only become acquainted with efforts of authorities to promote rural development but, in small groups, we have also spent three interesting days in several rural districts across the Lublinski region. During this time we visited farmers, entrepreneurs and social groups to get a better insight into their everyday lives, problems and wishes for their future.
Last night, every group presented the region they visited to the whole group. From tomorrow, we will develop project suggestions to tackle the region’s development problems. So, including the many social events that are taking part alongside the programme, another very intensive week lies ahead of us!
RuDI meeting in Rome
From 22 to 24 of April, the RuDI project held its third project meeting in Rome. The aim of the meeting was to inform each other about the first year of the project, to make a synthesis of key results and to develop case study methodology. Once we have finalized the case study methodology this summer, the next phase of the project will be to conduct 20 case studies for in depth understanding of key practices in the policy process and their potential effects. For example, in the Netherlands, the European Rural Development Plan has been incorporated into a broader process of rural policy change. A key element of this process is the ‘performance contract’ between the national and the provincial authorities in which both levels of government agree on policy priority, investment budgets, co-finance responsibilities and performance indicators. The question is how different RDP Axis are brought into a system of performance contracts and whether these contracts are indeed a stimulus for more integrated rural policy design and delivery
We also presented our work to the International Expert Group (IEG) which was established for the duration of the project. In Rome, eight experts joined us, coming from a wide range of organisations including the European Commission, the OECD, consultancies and universities. The IEG helped us to reflect upon our first results and to gain new insights. They formulated recommendations for further elaboration. The experts encouraged us to find a qualitative way to analyse the transformative effects and potential impact of the rural development policy process; the ‘forgotten middle’ in current evaluation practices.
Comparing farming in China and Europe
I’m a PhD candidate from China Agricultural University. I have a major in rural development and management. Now I am a visiting researcher at the Rural Sociology Group for one year and I like it very much. Each eduaction period I attend one or two courses.
Chinese farm
Recently, I wrote an article about a Chinese farmer’s note book, with my supervisor prof. Jan Douwe van der Ploeg. I encountered this note book during my field work in Northeast China in July 2008. It’s been nearly three months since we began writing this article. Today, we finally finish the article, both in English and Chinese. In this farmer’s note book, monetary expenses and monetary entrances are all registered in a chronological order. Meanwhile, it also shows some of the networks the farm is embedded in. We also make some comparisons between China and Holland (or Europe). The data show that there is considerable dynamism; they also make clear that basically we are dealing here with a peasant-like way of farming. The article concludes with an overview of the structure of the rural economy in this part of China. I will write more about that in later blogs.
To be honest, I think there are many research experiences in rural sociology we should learn from Wageningen, especially in the field of sociology of farming. At the same time, I mind to consider the differences in social context between Western countries and China. The main problems in rural China we concluded are about “farm, farmer and farming”, which are also the hot research topics in academic field. Take farmer for example: there are about 0.73 billion of people living in rural area, but they don’t have enough land to sustain their livelihood, so many farmers go to urban as migrant workers and leave their family members home. These family members are left-behind population. My college members did a lot research on this group of people. As for my PhD thesis, I focus on applying the social capital theory in the context of rural China. To quote Jan Douwe van der Ploeg: “the theories are not in the air, they are in the people’s everyday life”. I will this mind during my research.
Rural Sociology Wageningen University 