Focusing on the demands of the new innovative, sustainable and inclusive rural development paradigm, the monograph raises the discussion regarding new approaches and success factors that are vital in current rural socio-economic development and policy transformations. The bottom-up policymaking, self-organization, creative use of knowledge in rural areas, and many other rural innovations are aligned in this book with new social movements’ theories, which help disclose, explore and explain the rural development paradigm shift. Rural development forces of the 21st century center on the agents of change - rural population, and, surprisingly - urban population(!), and the political debate concerning EU Common Agricultural Policy and European Green Deal, illustrated with multiple case studies. This book will be of interest to a broad audience of readers, keen on scientific, political, and practical issues of innovations in rural areas and their future development pathways. The monograph is authored by a team of scholars from the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, Institute of Economics and Rural Development, Department of Rural Development.

The report highlights the diverse challenges facing rural areas, their unused potential, and the inability of sectoral policy alone to address these challenges.

The report highlights the diverse challenges facing rural areas, their unused potential, and the inability of sectoral policy alone to address these challenges.

Three billion people live in rural areas in developing countries. Conditions for them are worse than for their urban counterparts when measured by almost any development indicator, from extreme poverty, to child mortality and access to electricity and sanitation.