Building bridges across the plurality of rural development research

Excerpt

Contemporary rural development has been shaped by local and global social, political, economic, and environmental transformations that characterize the last several decades (Torre 2022). While the same could be said of cities, there appears to have been widespread acceptance that cities will each experience their own unique dynamics—while rural researchers and practitioners continue to argue for recognition of the diversity and uniqueness of rural realities. During the twentieth century, rural communities were characterized by dramatic emigration outflows, which contributed to a rapid demographic collapse and the subsequent withdrawal of necessary public services such as education, health, administration, and, quite paradoxically for communities where agriculture is a landscape landmark, increasing food security issues. At the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars began to highlight the diversity and resilience of rural communities in response to these dynamic forces. Rural places are increasingly presented as sites where open innovation does occur among a broad range of businesses, supported by the criticality of social capital as a neglected resource that the statistical needs of managerial governance often fails to fully capture. …