Despite the recent economic upswing in many Latin American countries, rural poverty rates in the region have actually increased during the past two decades. Experts blame excessively centralized public administrations for the lackluster performance of public policy initiatives. In response, decentralization reformshave become a common government strategy for improving public sector performance in rural areas. The effect of these reforms is a topic of considerable debate among government officials, policy scholars, and citizensÕ groups. This book offers a systematic analysis of how local governments and farmer groups in Latin America are actually faring today. Based on interviews with more than 1,200 mayors, local officials, and farmers in 390 municipal territories in four Latin American nations, the authors analyze the ways in which different forms of decentralization affect the governance arrangements for rural development Òon the ground.Ó Their comparative analysis suggests that rural development outcomes are systemically linked to locally negotiated institutional arrangementsÑformal and informalÑbetween government officials, NGOs, and farmer groups that operate in the local sphere. They find that local-government actors contribute to public services that better assist the rural poor when local actors cooperate to develop their own institutional arrangements for participatory planning, horizontal learning, and the joint production of services. This study brings substantive data and empirical analysis to a discussion that has, until now, more often depended on qualitative research in isolated cases. With more than 60 percent of Latin AmericaÕs rural population living in poverty, the results are both timely and crucial.

This book offers a unique perspective on rural development, by discussing the most influential perspectives and rendering their risks and benefits visible. The authors do not present a silver bullet. Rather, they give students, researchers, community leaders, politicians, concerned citizens and development organizations the conceptual tools to understand how things are organized now, which development path has already been taken, and how things could possibly move in a different direction. Van Assche and Hornidge pay special attention to the different roles of knowledge in rural development, both expert knowledge in various guises and local knowledge. Crafting development strategies requires understanding how new knowledge can fit in and work out in governance. Drawing on experiences in five continents, the authors develop a theoretical framework which elucidates how modes of governance and rural development are inextricably tied. A community is much better placed to choose direction, when it understands these ties.

This book critically explores the social causes and consequences of emerging governance arrangements. In particular, the book moves beyond questions of empowerment in governance debates to consider how new kinds of power relations arise between the various actors involved.

In recent decades, the responsibility for initiating regeneration programmes has been placed firmly in the hands of rural communities, with the rationale being that local people are best placed to know their own problems and, consequently, to develop their own solutions. Despite the popularity of this approach, the self-help approach has its own problems and can be seen as an attempt by governments to reduce public spending. This book provides a critical account of the discourses and practices of self-help in contemporary rural development policies of Australia and other western nations. Although it examines the problems of the self-help approach, it moves beyond a straightforward exposition of the impediments to self-help. Instead, taking a Foucauldian governmentality perspective, it puts forward a theoretical analysis of the self-help concept, assessing it as a means of governing rural development in an advanced liberal manner. It argues that self-help should not be regarded as either the empowerment or the abandonment of rural citizens by a shrinking state, but rather the application of new ways of thinking about and acting upon rural development.

Development studies in developing regions such as Southern Africa rely heavily on materials developed by Europeans with a European context. European dominance in development studies emanates from the fact that the discipline was first developed by Europeans. Some argue that this has led to distortions in theory and practice of development in Southern Africa. This book wishes to begin Africa’s expedition to develop proper material to de-Westernize while Africanizing the context of the scholarship of rural development. African Perspectives on Reshaping Rural Development is an essential reference source that repositions the context of rural development studies from the Western-centric knowledge system into an African context in order to solve African-centered problems. Featuring research on topics such as food security, poverty reduction, and community engagement, this book is ideally designed for planners, researchers, practitioners, policymakers, government officials, academicians, and students seeking clarity on theory and practice of development in Africa.

Policy-relevant and up-to-date, Rural Development deals systematically with all aspects of socioeconomic rural development, using India as a case study. The Second Edition includes an integrated treatment of the principles, policies and management of rural development; new research and statistical data; illustrations and examples from current situations; the latest measures of rural development; and a new methodology for project monitoring and evaluation.

This work aims to present the most recent developments regarding territorial governance, placing particular emphasis on rural and periurban areas. The reader will find information on the processes of development of European regions, as well as on the behaviours and strategies adopted by the different actors who live in these territories and contribute to the latter's livelihood. The first part of the book analyses the structural changes in the modes of production that have affected these territories. The second part addresses the questions of methodology and of the structures of governance of local development in rural areas. The last section makes an assessment of the geographical indications as tools of governance of local agrifood chains. The book was written by economists, geographers, land use planners and specialists of the questions of governance and management of rural and periurban areas.