Introduction to A Research Agenda for Global Rural Development

Abstract

For our contribution to the Elgar Research Agendas series, we three longstanding rural and environmental researchers have come together to begin to answer the timely and creative question of, what is the current research agenda for rural development studies? This is clearly an ambitious and challenging question too. As authors, we have been pursuing internationally comparative research over most of our long careers, as well as being based deeply within our own national research cultures in France, the UK and Brazil. We have also increasingly evolved as interdisciplinary rural researchers, as indeed the sub-disciplines of rural sociology, geography and development, and rural social science have merged not least as a result of the wider challenges of the environmentalization of social science (see Marsden (ed) 2018). Moreover, this is not unrelated to the radical questions being posed about global rural development in a post-colonial, increasingly globalized and ‘underdeveloping’ as well as ‘developing’ world. There are clearly many routes to rural ‘development’ and clearly competing ideas and theorizations of modernities.