Tag Archives: Rural Development

DERREG – Final conference and proceedings

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Two weeks ago, from October 12-13, we had our final conference of the EU-funded research project DERREG (www.derreg.eu)  in Murska Sobota, Slovenia. Here the major findings of the project were presented.

DERREG coordinator prof. Michael Woods first presented (see presentation) an overwiew of the project and an interpretative model (see below) on how regions are affected by and respond to forces of globalisation mediated by various catalyst and he ended with a typology of regional responses based on the research done in the 10 case study regions. See also the DERREG Summary Report by Michael Woods.

 

Successively the coordinators of the four Work Packages presented the main findings along four themes:

  1. Rural Businesses, Global Engagement and Local Embeddedness (presented by Andrew Copus)
  2. International Migration and Rural Europe (presented by Birte Nienaber)
  3. The Global Environment and Rural Sustainable Development (presented by Joachim Burdack & Michael Kriszan)
  4. Rural regional learning (presented by Dirk Roep and Wiebke Wellbrock)

Each overview was illustrated with findings for two case study areas presented by the respective partners.

A separate session was dedicated to policy perspective on globalisation and rural development in Slovenia and in particular the Pomurje region in the north of Slovenia were Murska Sobota is located and the Final conference took place.

At the end, guest speakers from the Goriška region in Slovenia, the Övre Norrland in Sweden, the Westerkwartier region in the Netherlands and the Steirische Mur-Drau-Bioenergie-Region in Austria highlighted four good practices of how regions can respond to global processes and benefit from it.

All presentations can be downloaded from the DEREG website: http://www.derreg.eu/content/events/final-conference-derreg-project (at the bottom of the webpage).

At the DERREG resource-centre other proceedings are made accessible too, such as the WP reports, the case study context reports and case study summary reports. Look at http://www.derreg.eu/content/resource-centre.  Finally, a database of good practice across the WP theme’s and case study areas has been built and made accessible: look  at http://www.derreg.eu/content/good-practice-database.

Last but not least: video clips are made for each of the ten case study regions and when ready these will be published on You tube and announced at the website.

The project will finish by the end of this year. The partners are now working on several scientific publications in journals and books. By the end of this year and beginning of 2012 DERREG related articles will be published in two special issue of the European Countryside, an online journal (see the content of latest issue). Next will be an edited book published by Ashgate titled ‘Globalization and Europe’s Rural Regions‘  which will capitalise the findings for the 10 case study areas.

Publications will be announced at the resource-centre of the DERREG website, as for the video clips, and information will be posted on this blog.

Conference call – Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society (new deadlines)

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In June I published a post about the upcoming conference ‘Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society: International Conference on Multifunctional Agriculture and Urban-Rural Relations’, which included a call for Working Group proposals. The deadline for submitting Working Group proposals was 1 September 2011. This post is to announce that the deadline for submitting Working Group proposals has been postponed to 15 september 2011. If you would like to convene a working group but don’t have time to write a proposal, you can also express your interest by sending me an e-mail (han.wiskerke@wur.nl). Have a look at the conference website for an overview of the working group themes that have been proposed by the scientific committee. The deadline for abstracts will also be postponed by 2 weeks to 15 December 2011.

Moonlight farmers and Lump suckers; The ICRPS Summer School in Norway

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This Summer School about policies for rural development took place from June 25th to July 9th 2011 on 2 locations in Norway, in Oslo and in Sogndal. The course involved a variety of lectures, discussions and group word on issues such as natural resources, community development, rural services, renewable energy, food & agriculture, policy and climate change. The diverse group of students (some of them already working in rural development), faculty members and two OECD researchers included mainly people from Europe and the US (especially Canada) and discussed not only rural development in Norway, but compared this with interesting cases in their own countries. I only attended the second week in Sogndal, a town located between Bergen, Oslo and Trondheim, at one of the most beautiful fjords in Norway. Sogndal is located near the largest glacier in Europe.
Moonlight farmers refers to the agricultural situation in Norway: only 3% of the land is used as arable land, the average size of a farm is small and many landowners have a job which they attend in the daytime, while doing farm work during ‘moonlight’ (in fact in summer the daylight lasts very long in Norway).
Lump suckers refers to innovation in aquaculture in the Norwegian fisheries. Norway is a large exporter of fish, especially salmon. In aquaculture farms salmon is produced under controlled conditions. One of the biggest problems is lice-infection on salmon. An ex-professor which runs a research station and aquaculture farm in Sogndal is developing some important innovations: he grows a special type of fish, called lump suckers, which suck the lice of the salmon. He also experiments with improving the immune system of salmon.

More information can be found on the ICRPS website: http://www.umb.no/icrps2011. The papers and presentations are on the X-drive of the Rural Sociology Group. For a report with some impressions of the lectures or other information you can  mail to lummina.horlings@wur.nl . There is also a special Linked in group: International Comparative Rural Policy Studies Consortium.

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Conference Call – Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society

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A major demographic milestone occurred in May 2007. For the first time in the history of mankind the earth’s population became more urban than rural. This process of urbanization will continue in an accelerated pace in the forthcoming decades: the growth of the world population from 6 billion people in 2000 to 9 billion people in 2050 will mainly occur in urban areas. By 2050 the urban population will approximately be twice the size of the rural population.

However, this does not mean that urban areas are or will become of greater importance than rural areas. On the contrary, the urban and the rural have always heavily relied on each other and will do so even more in an era characterized by rapid urban population growth. Cities will continue to need resources such as food, fibre, clean water, nature, biodiversity, and recreational space, as well as the people and communities that produce and provide these urban necessities and desires. Hence, key questions for the next decades are how, where and by whom these urban necessities and desires will be produced and provided and if and how this can be done in manner that is considered to be socially, economically and ecologically sustainable and ethically sound.

In recent years the concept of multifunctional agriculture has emerged as an important reference in debates on the future of agriculture and the countryside and its relations with the wider and predominantly urban society. This is an expression of the fact that agriculture is not only valued for its contribution to food and fibre production and the economic development of the agro-industry, but needs to be assessed according to a much wider range of social, environmental, economic and ethical concerns. At farm level multifunctional agriculture is characterized by a variety of entrepreneurial strategies and activities, such as processing and direct marketing of food products, energy production, care for elderly and disabled people, and tourism. But multifunctional agriculture is also expressed at higher scales, such as the regional level (e.g. collective nature and landscape management schemes and regional branding) and the national level (e.g. policymaking and implementation).

Due to the multiplicity of activities, the multi-scalar character of multifunctionality and the geographical contextuality of expressions of multifunctional agriculture, research on multifunctional agriculture and changing urban-rural relations is highly fragmented, disciplinarily as well as geographically. Hence, this conference aims to advance the scientific state of the art in research on multifunctional agriculture and urban-rural relations by bringing together scholars of different disciplines (sociology, economics, spatial planning, land use planning, regional planning, urban planning, crop sciences, animal sciences, soil sciences, architecture, etc…) from all parts of the world.

Working group themes
The conference facilities allow for a maximum of 21 parallel working group sessions. The scientific committee has proposed 21 working group themes (see http://www.agricultureinanurbanizingsociety.com/UK/Working+group+themes/)   and is inviting prospective working group convenors to submit a short (max 500 words) call text for the theme they would like to convene. Proposals for a working group call text can be send to the chair of the scientific committee by email (han.wiskerke@wur.nl) before the 1st of September 2011. The deadline for submission of abstracts will be 1st of December 2011. Abstracts will have to be submitted to the convenors.

More information

Please check the conference website for more information.

Torri Superiore Ecovillage: resisting the abandonment of rural marginal areas in Italy

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 MSc-thesis by Alberto Giani

Modernization of agriculture has clearly shown not to be a viable solution for marginalized areas, while a mix of retro-innovation, fantasy and passion is showing a possible novel way forward for the re-utilization of abandoned areas and the revitalization of its socio-economic life.

Torri Superiore Ecovillage is such as case, that I studied in my MSc-thesis (click here for my full thesis report), part of my Master Organic Agriculture in Wageningen Univesity.

Torri Superiore Ecovillage can be defined as a bounded space re-created by in-migrants (new-rurals) that came and establish their lives in a place out from the mainstream society, utilizing external resources (both human resources and capital) and skills to revitalize through a neo-endogenous process the economic potential of a semi-abandoned low productive rural area.

Agriculture in a marginal area can rarely be a remunerative activity. In particular if an area has been abandoned for years and offers no opportunity for mechanization. Making a living in agriculture thus demands a break with the mainstream perspective on agricultural production. A capitalistic approach to land use, based on the integration in markets, is barely impossible in these areas. However from a different rural development approach still work can be created in the production of quality food remunerating a little salary to built a decent life, allowing people to live as much as possible in harmony with the environment without depleting it from its natural resources. Patrimonialization, broadening, deepening, re-grounding, creating local outlets are all strategies that can stimulate the rebirth of a local nested economy embedded in the territory, as is the case in Torri Superiore Ecovillage. This case represents a positive experiment in the restoration of economic efficiency in a marginal rural area.

Current policies discourses do stress the importance of creating proper conditions to make people stay in or return to marginal areas, but in practice the cost of the land, the bureaucracy and the taxes make it almost impossible for anybody to stay in marginal rural areas or for people without any experiences (so called new-rurals) to return to these areas.