Leadership and Local Power in European Rural Development

The broad processes of economic and social change in Europe's rural areas have consequences for local configurations of power, and for local political responses to these broad processes. This volume constitutes a contribution to a growing body of research on local responses, local actors, questions of leadership, power, autonomy and control in the evolution of responses to wider economic and social restructuring across rural Europe. Its purpose is to examine the diversity of these local political responses with specific reference to the implications of these responses for local configurations of power in rural areas. The contributions to the volume all recognize the ways in which constructions of the rural in different national contexts shape political responses to rural restructuring, and how local power finds expression through the dominance of certain constructions of rurality over others. Underpinning many of the contributions is the observation that the ways in which rural problems are defined and solutions developed owes as much to cultural conceptions of what the rural is and should be, as to the economic context in which such problems appear or the policy mechanisms developed for their solution.