XI World Congress Program Workshops

International Rural Sociology Association

XI World Congress<br>of Rural Sociology XI World Congress of Rural Sociology

Trondheim, Norway
July 25-30, 2004

The Congress is over.
Information provided here is for reference.

Working Groups

WG	Title	Convenors
1	Mobilisation, Information, Sensitisation Of The Local Population - The Role Of Local Partnerships	Alex Koutsouris
2	Transformations in rural governance: local agency in state-community engagement	Lynda Cheshire, Vaughan Higgins Geoff Lawrence
3	Rural territory, environment and governance	Nelson Lourenco Carlos Russo Machado Reinhard Lieberei
4	Resources, property rights and the environment in the rural South: local struggles and global linkages	Tor A. Benjaminsen Espen Sjaastad
5	First nations	Garth Cant
6	Using a global medium to strengthen place-based networking? Appropriation of the internet in rural areas.	Sarah Skerratt
7	Challenging gender relations in a context of rural change	Bettina Bock Sally Shortall
8	Miniconference: From peasant agronomy to capitalist/ industrial agriculture	Wynne Wright Douglas Constance RC40
9	Extensive livestock productions. New opportunities for rural communities in a globalised world?	Manuel Belo Moreira Jan Åge Riseth
10	A post-organic future? Assessing and understanding the role of the global organic movement	Matt Reed Georgina Holt
11	How is restructuring in post-socialist countries affecting rural livelihood strategies?	David Brown David O'Brien Valery Patsiorkovsky
12	Science, policy and practice in agricultural and rural development	Helene Brives Christian Deverre
13	Rural transformations and vulnerable populations / Decentralization, privatization and the challenges for regional policy	Nina Glasgow Mildred Warner
14	Rural tourism: negotiating and re-negotiating rural spaces, culture and history	Alenka Verbole
15	The contribution of new food supply chains to sustainable rural development	Han Wiskerke Colin Sage Henk Renting Egil Petter Stræte
16	Renewal of local community through endogenous rural development social capital, community, social identity and new rural groups	Karl Bruckmeier Petra Vergunst
17	Quality and identity in food supply chains: new challenges within globalisation	Jose Muchnick Jean-Pierre Boutonnet Francois Boucher Denis Sautier
18	Globalization and family farm social transformations: resistance and mutations	Eric Sabourin Savo Trifunovic Maria Aparecida de Menezes Cheik Oumar Ba
19	Coastal communities in the 21st century: strong winds are blowing and coastal societies are changing.	Oddmund Otterstad Lawrence Hamilton
20	Biodiversity and cultural landscape management related to rural development	Erling Krogh Paul Vedeld
21	Displacement, diaspora, and development	Chuck Geisler Shelley Feldman
22	Land reform, north and south?	Chuck Geisler John Bryden
23	Responses to agri-food globlisation: Asian experience and prospects	Keiko Tanaka Larry Burmeister
24	'Back-to-the-land' in the 21st Century	Keith Halfacree
25	The "Ecologisation" of agricultures in the North and in the South : Aspects of a new international paradigm for rural development	Elsa Faugère Marcel Djama Christine de Sainte Marie
26	Job loss in changing ruralities	Ken Root
27	Social forestry: critical investigations of the social significance of forests in rural spaces	Paul Milbourne
28	Agro-food globalization and resistance in Latin America (Globalización agroalimentaria y resistencia en America Latina) http://baseportal.com/cgi-bin/baseportal.pl?htx=/HdeBarros/IRSAGT28	Henrique De Barros Marie-Christine Renard
29	Changing frameworks of agricultural and rural policy	Peter H. Feindt Lutz Laschewski Philip Lowe Hilkka Vihinen
30	Food: new desires, new concerns and new forms of consumption	Mara Miele
31	Employment and labour relations in rural areas	Anita Brumer
32	Water and rural development: its political and social aspects.	Tomas Martinez Saldaña

Working Group 1
Mobilisation, Information, Sensitisation Of The Local Population - The Role Of Local Partnerships

Disenchantment with development strategies led, since the mid-1970s, to the emergence of 'participation' as major new force in development thinking. Therefore, development theorists and practitioners have supported, for quite some time, the idea of and need for participation of people in development. However, thinking about participation has remained, in much rural development, at an idealistic and ideological level. Moreover, there exist quite different interpretations of participation - and related issues - with the most well-known one being that of participation as a means (often being under heavy criticism as 'pseudo-participation') vs. participation as an end, the latter following, more or less, the UNRISD definition of popular participation as 'the organised efforts to increase control over resources and movements of those hitherto excluded from such control'. At the same time, no UN Summit goes without ritual calls for capacity-building programmes. A capacity-building approach to development, according to OXFAM, involves identifying the constraints that women and men experience in realising their basic rights, and finding appropriate vehicles through which to strengthen their ability to overcome the causes of their exclusion and suffering. In turn, such definitions imply that people's stimulation/mobilisation has to be based on a specific mode of interaction with people, the essence of which could be summarised as the breaking up of the classical dichotomy between 'subject' and 'object' (manipulation and dominance) and its replacement by a humanist mode of equal relation between two subjects (animation and facilitation).

Given the increasing attention given by international and national governments, agencies etc. to sustainable/integrated/endogenous rural development and, therefore, the paramount role (at least on a rhetorical level) of mobilisation information sensitisation (MIS) the workshop invites papers at both theoretical and practical level (case studies) on rural development focusing on issues such as: a) approaches and practices relating to aspects of MIS like animation, capacity building, empowerment, information/communication and education/training (esp. sensitisation/conscientisation and awareness creation), agricultural/rural extension, mobilisation and, thus, participation; b) methods (i.e. soft systems, farming/rural systems, participatory action research, participatory technology development, participatory rural appraisal, strategic communication, multi-stakeholder participatory processes etc.) and/or relevant tools; c) building appropriate/innovative mechanisms/structures to support such participatory rural development processes (as well as innovations) with emphasis on local partnerships; d) the role and training of the so-called animators, change agents, facilitators, catalysts, group organisers or simply development workers.

Working Groups

Working Group 2
Transformations in rural governance: local agency in state-community engagement

In recent decades we have witnessed the transition away from the government of rural areas towards processes of governance in which the boundaries between the state and civil society are blurred. Governments are now expected to 'engage' with rural communities in designing and implementing policies of economic, social and environmental reform to ensure those policies are community-owned and relevant to local needs. Such arrangements come in a variety of forms, from daily interactions between state agents and the local communities with which they work, to formal, resourced partnership agreements at the regional level. The emergence of this form of governing has coincided with the advent of neoliberalism in many countries around the world, and is often associated with notions of 'small government', private service provision, self-help and the individualisation of risk from the state to the 'active' citizen. This coincidence of events has prompted many authors to interpret the move toward governance as an attempt by nation states to abstain themselves from their fiscal responsibilities to rural areas under the facade of local empowerment. More recently, rural researchers have rejected these rather functionalistic interpretations in favour of arguments that see contemporary governance arrangements as a new form of 'action at a distance'. From this perspective, relations of governance embed rural people in networks of power that shape and guide local development activities according to state-driven agendas.

The problem with both accounts is that they privilege the top-down power of the state in relations of governance. This precludes any detailed analysis of the agency of rural people in engaging with, contesting, and ultimately transforming rural policies according to their own objectives. These strategies of resistance may be piecemeal and specific to local conditions, and cannot be understood as part of a broader social movement. Nevertheless, they may be important in facilitating change in rural areas and in driving policy transformations according to local, rather than state, objectives.

This working group seeks to examine the potential for these kinds of negotiations and transformations to occur within state-community engagement activities. We therefore invite papers that emphasise local agency in governance arrangements and consider how opportunities for contestation and change can arise. As well as documenting empirical examples of agency in rural governance around the world, we also encourage theoretical debates about how such strategies of resistance or transformation might best be understood. Papers that consider these issues in the context of new or emerging governance structures are particularly welcome. These issues are consistent with the overarching theme of the Congress on globalisation, risks and resistance, and papers that broadly address them will make an important contribution to the rural governance literature.

Working Groups

Working Group 3
Rural territory, environment and governance

The different paths to achieve sustainable development in rural areas must take into account the interactions of social and ecological systems, which have repercussions in the ways rural territories are organised. However, the reflexive responses of coupled social-ecological systems to key biophysical, technological and social drivers are charged with great uncertainty and complexity, turning arduous the task of forecasting and managing change. Actuality, as a consequence of the reflexive dimension of human action, social changes involve transformations on the territory, which reciprocate conditioning the ways in which the social systems adapt themselves to the new spatial realities.

Rural development should attempt to consider the multifuncionality of rural territory in order to combine agricultural growth and other economic and social activities with sustainable land use, i.e. at the same time that wealth is provided to farmers and other social actors, preservation of the natural resource base should be also pursued.

But, these development processes must also take into account their integration in the interrelated and accelerated processes of Globalisation. In fact, mainly in developing regions, the logic of the global capital determines the constraints to the development of rural areas and triggers or intensifies the marginalisation forces in areas where the population presents low levels of qualification; the agriculture has low productivity levels and cannot compete in the global markets; there are increasing agricultural and rural exodus; and the farmers have few or none connections to the global networks of production of goods and services.

In the context of economic globalisation it is clear that the linkages of economy and environment, as well as the environmental impacts, are not limited by the boundaries of nation states. Therefore, it is assumed that to correct and to solve the environmental problems it is necessary, not only, to correct the economic distortions associated to the inequity of the distribution of benefices resulting from the uses of natural resources, but also to achieve better/innovative governance processes and institutions focusing on people participation, as individual and collective social actors, in the processes of decision-making related to the accomplishment of the basic values of sustainable development. These new institutions should be able, by the participation of all legitimate stakeholders, to allocate rights and enforce responsibilities for environmental management at the appropriate level: local, national, regional or global.

To achieve sustainable and equitable development is one of the great challenges that global world society will face during the next decades. Policies for reducing poverty, aiming at an equitable distribution of wealth; policies for environmental protection, which use incentives rather than regulations; strong public institutions that can operate in the difficult balances of environment / economy relationships; new technologies that can produce less, or even none, environmental degradation; and the participation of people in the decisions, which imply their education and information, are the means that society should use today to promote development.

Based on these assumptions, the Working Group should cover themes such as:

The key driving forces responsible for changes in rural territory, their pressures and impacts.
Integrated analysis of social-ecological systems: tools and examples related with management of natural resources in coastal areas, catchment basins and tropical forests.
Governance and participatory decision-making processes at different levels of analysis: from individual actors to social groups; from local to supranational institutional frameworks.
Policies and strategies for rural development
Diversification of agricultural production systems in tropical regions: food security and market resilience

Working Groups

Working Group 4
Resources, property rights and the environment in the rural South: local struggles and global linkages

Most people in the South live in rural areas. The majority of these people are smallholders and pastoralists whose livelihoods, and often mere survival, depend on access to and control over land and natural resources. Evidently, resources and their use vary immensely. However, the widespread existence of poverty in these areas might imply higher stakes and harsher struggles over land and resources than found elsewhere. Such struggles may involve various local actors (e.g. farmers, migrants, the political and economic elite, government employees). In addition, they also feed into and are products of national political processes, which, again, are informed by global discourses of "privatisation", "decentralisation", "disengaging the State", "democratisation" or "environmental degradation". The question of who has the power to decide on the use and management of valuable resources emerges as a central issue. This issue can be attacked from many angles and using various perspectives. It is important with case studies to demonstrate the day-to-day micro-politics of environmental struggles and management. But, in this working group, we also hope for studies, which try to trace the lines of influence beyond the empirical cases studied to national and global political and economic debates and struggles.

Working Groups

Working Group 5
First nations

First Nations, including for example Inuit, Indian, Saami, Ainu, Aboriginal and Maori together with Roma, are ambiguously placed within the global economy. The aim of the Working Group is to bring together Indigenous Peoples and researchers to explore issues and report on experience from a variety of national and cross national homelands. Topics to be included will be defined by the offerings that are received. Examples of what might be include: resource rights; land rights; marine rights; customary use rights; wilderness and national parks; sacred places; traditional ecological knowledge and occidental science; intellectual property rights; genetic resources; bioprospecting. Contribitions by practioners, academics and graduate students are equally encouraged. We particularly welcome suggestions for clusters of contributions within one or more of these and similar fields.

Working Groups

Working Group 6
Using a global medium to strengthen place-based networking? Appropriation of the internet in rural areas.

Research is demonstrating that the internet is being used in a variety of ways to re-present, re-create, and re-define, what it is to be rural, to live and work in rural locales, and to overcome what may be seen as locational disadvantages of rurality such as distance, poor telecommunications, road and rail communications, and a low level of (public and private) service provision per head of the population. Websites in particular are illustrating both how rural people want to be seen, and what is important to them in maintaining their own rural, place-based connectivity. In addition, findings point to differing experiences of online and offline rurality, with intra-rural digital divides being prevalent.

A further 'locational disadvantage' has been described as 'network poverty', with the internet - rather than being used to support notions of place conversely opening up possible communities of interest, which are independent of location, place, space, distance, and independent of local identities the global village, or 'networked individualism' (Welllman 2001) being the antithesis of ties to place. Is the internet, in fact, opening up a global world for rural dwellers, and letting that global world in?

This Working Group will seek to bring together multidisciplinary researchers from a variety of countries and continents, who are investigating the phenomenon of the rise and adaptation of information and communication technologies (ICTs), specifically the internet, within rural contexts. Research will be presented which unpacks the arguments outlined above, and which debates the challenges which therefore remain for us as researchers within this evolving field.

How the proposed topic relates to the Congress themes:

The workshop will address ways in which rural dwellers are using ICT (and specifically the internet and its applications) to present, and perhaps defend, their rurality, and their experiences of 'being rural'. The juxtaposition of using a global medium (which some commentators see as globalising) to do this, is of particular pertinence to the Congress. The working group will also touch on the following sub-themes: social inclusion & exclusion; gender challenges; social movements; endogenous rural development initiatives in relation to globalisation; democratisation and participation; the family farm, and alternative agricultures (where websites are used).

Working Groups

Working Group 7
Challenging gender relations in a context of rural change

Globalisation has a fundamental effect on the working and living conditions of rural women and men. Studying these effects from a gender perspective is especially intriguing because gender relations are one of the basic features of social life. With globalisation gender systems are changing very quickly and very visibly in many regions, challenging traditional power relations and ideologies in a fundamental way.

Some developments, like the globalisation of agricultural production, are globally effective, and influence rural women and men all over the world. Yet, the way it affects their lives varies profoundly across continents, countries and regions, as well as across population groups. Gender and class are important crosscutting factors, when determining whose living conditions are improving or deteriorating. Another interesting and promising aspect of globalisation in the increasing accessibility of information and knowledge which offers new opportunities for collective action and resistance on a global level.

In some regions of the world, rural men and women have to cope with sudden political and economic transitions such as in Central and Eastern European Countries, China and Vietnam. Often rural women's position seems to deteriorate as a result of these dramatic changes. But there is also evidence, that they offer women a chance of gaining more control over their lives. In other parts of the world rural life seems idyllic, peaceful and quite at first glance, whereas behind that façade all kind of problems and conflicts may hide.

With this workshop we hope to attract papers from all over the world, analysing the divergent effects of changing ruralities on various aspects of gender relations. We are interested in a wide range of topics, such as labour and migration, access to and control over resources, gender ideologies and images, participation and representation in politics, gender specific effects of fundamental societal transitions, and particularly strategies of resistence [to social change, traditional practices, exercises of power, etc.], both overt and covert. The comparison of ongoing research throughout the world offers valuable opportunity to learn from and inspire each other and to (re)establish international cooperation within rural gender studies.

Working Groups

Working Group 8
Miniconference: From peasant agronomy to capitalist/ industrial agriculture

This proposed miniconference is intended to open a topic to which RC40 members and others have given little attention although the research of some of our members has had a bearing on it.

Through the expansion of commodity chains and the explosion of Non-Traditional Export Agriculture (NTEA), we have witnessed an accelerated penetration of peasant/subsistence agricultures by advanced capitalist commodity systems and transnational corporations. While some RC40 members, particularly those working in advanced capitalist countries (ACCs) have brought aspects of the topic to some of our conferences, we have tended to focus more on what happens in the ACCs than on the former peasants and their societies -- family and kinship; village-town-city; political, social, and economic change, etc. Moreover, we have had only sporadic involvement of researchers from transitional societies.

Through this miniconference, we hope to encourage some of these scholars to bring the fruits of their research to a wider scholarly audience. We especially want to encourage researchers from the ACCs who have been working with scholars from transitional societies to bring any joint research to the proposed miniconference.

While there is an already-existing enormous literature on "development" and "modernization," this literature has been preoccupied with issues other than what happens when peasants experience the disruptions of traditional agricultural forms and begin to produce for distant markets. While much has been devoted to understanding population movement out of agriculture to urban employment (and semi-employment and unemployment), less attention has been given to those that remain in a changing agriculture. This miniconference will focus on that topic.

Working Groups

Working Group 9
Extensive livestock productions. New opportunities for rural communities in a globalised world?

Primary industries are an economic basis of rural societies throughout the world, and subjects to strong and complex forces of restructuring implying extensive changes in production forms, particularly intensity, and geographical location of production and settlements. In the age of globalization these forces are stronger than ever. This has different implications for different parts of the world. The longtime trends in industrial countries includes concentration and intensification of the production through commercialisation continuously reducing the role of subsistence family farming. Currently a steadily decreasing farming population currently faces a weakened political position and public esteem, as the urban population with weakened ties to the countryside and increased awareness of environmental problems, food safety concerns and public subsidy costs. Further, economies of Third World livelihoods have been disrupted and many have been brought to ruin through cash-crop policies and unfair trading systems. Moreover, agriculture in many post-communist countries is also in a state of economic crisis due to more or less haphazard transition from collectives and deficient economical support.

Within this context a workgroup on the actual and potential role of extensive livestock productions, can be an interesting contribution to the congress. In industrialized countries livestock productions, due to the same external forces as agriculture, has generally changed from being an integrated part of rural farming to become a marginal activity in marginal areas. Fundamental economic forces driven by the technological treadmill and trade accords, general and special agricultural, and also, national and over-national environmental policies influence livestock productions. Future perspectives of livestock productions in industrialized countries may thus be dependent of; on the one hand, that the marginalization of agriculture does not go so far that viability of rural communities is undermined, but may on the other hand manage to fill in gaps of ceasing farming, both abandoned land, and set aside areas by individually operated farms, being a valuable contribution to sustaining biodiversity, depending on that policy schemes stimulate the realization of this potential. In third world countries livestock productions still play an important role for sustenance. In some post-communist countries transhumant livestock productions (e.g. Mongolia) play an increased role due in a situation where other opportunities are difficult.

In general extensive livestock, more or less based on pastoralism, may create new opportunities to rural societies exposed to globalization forces or they may be reduced further due to the direct effects of globalization. A workgroup on extensive livestock productions could illuminate ongoing trends and perspectives and would fit well into the theme of "Alternative agricultures in the global economy", alternatively the theme "Resource,territory and environment."

Working Groups

Working Group 10
A post-organic future? Assessing and understanding the role of the global organic movement

After the recent rapid growth of the Organic movement throughout most of the world, there has been a vigorous debate about whether the movement has been able to make any changes to the dominant agro-food system or whether it has already been incorporated into the dominant systems of capitalism. This leads to the question of whether the future is post-Organic or whether the resistance offered by the movement is only just beginning. This panel seeks to assess the role of the Organic movement within contemporary societies through a variety of levels of discussion and debate.

Movement history & dynamics each national Organic movement has a history which is often only partially or episodically understood. Cultural differences several movements appear to have been stimulated by people either moving from urban areas to rural ones, or between nations, so diffusing the techniques and ideology of Organic farming. A new analysis of role of migrants in changing the culture of rural areas and farming techniques could provide valuable insights into the innovations of Organic agriculture.
Markets and sustainability whilst there is wide agreement that organic agriculture constitutes a social movement, large areas of movement activity have yet to be analysed. In particular; the relationship between the Organic movement and the Organic industry. The market has allowed the Organic industry to grow at the same time but this appears to have created a tension with the sustainability goals of the movement. The trajectory of Organic foods in the market place, the environmental impact of specific products and the compromises and conflicts of the market place could all form the subject matter of important new investigations.
Policy studies national and trans-national policy mechanisms have had an important role in helping to either develop or thwart the Organic movement. These could be further analysed or compared between regions, nations or regimes, drawing on both theoretical models and specific examples. In particular the role of food and agricultural policies needs further examination in relation both to each other and to their consequences in terms of stimulating demand and supply. Plus rural development policies need to be addressed in terms of their socio-spatial networks.

This panel invites contributions on these themes from concerned scholars, particularly welcoming contributions from post-graduate students and academics engaged with the movement.

Working Groups

Working Group 11
How is restructuring in post-socialist countries affecting rural livelihood strategies?

Primary Purpose of this Working Group: To identify and measure the impact on local communities of the macro-level national and global processes connected with the post-socialist transformation and insertion of Central/Eastern European nations into the global system.

Organization of the Program: Invited Papers for a Mini-Symposium. Potentially our working group has a maximum of around 12 hours available (see the draft programme on the IRSA website www.irsa-world.org), which we would like to use in three working sessions; sessions one and two would focus on the first two questions and the third session would deal with questions 3 and 4 that are described below.

Specific Questions Addressed by Working Group 11:

Comparing assessments of change in rural livelihood strategies in different post-Socialist Countries.
European Union and WTO accession factors affecting assessments of rural livelihood strategies.
Research strategies contributing to different assessments of change in different post-socialist countries:
1. Theory
2. Methodology (Surveys versus Qualitative Case Studies)
3. Regional and ethnic differences.
Can we identify a common conceptual and methodological language to identify change in post-social restructuring affecting rural livelihood strategies?

Working Groups

Working Group 12
Science, policy and practice in agricultural and rural development

Alongside with the market, scientific knowledge and its technological implementations can be considered as major factors of globalisation, sources of wealth as well as social and ecological disorders. The aim of this working group is to analyse how different types of scientific knowledge have been successively used in the definition and implementation of agricultural and rural development policies both in North and South countries, and how this politicised scientific knowledge has been disputed in public arenas jointly with the consequences of these policies (unevenness, environmental damages, sanitary risks...).

This thematic can be declined in three directions:

definition of policies: the processes of modernisation and ecologisation of the agricultural sector have been and are supported by sciences. Agronomy, genetics, rural economy, etc., constituted the framework of many agricultural and rural development policies. Nowadays, new sciences enter in the political sphere of agricultural and rural development, like ecology, hydrology, medicine, nutrition.
implementation of policies: state agencies, local authorities and agricultural advisory services have been using scientific resources in the implementation of the regional, national and international agricultural and rural development policies, among them again agronomy, rural economy but also rural sociology, social psychology. Nowadays, new forms of scientific resources come to the light in rural development, like cognitive sciences or landscape management.
agricultural and rural development controversies: scientific knowledge on which the policies are based are publicly disputed along with the consequences of these policies. The agricultural and nutrition crisis, the ecological effects of the productive model and of genetic innovations, the uneven dynamics of rural development carry along critics of the dominant scientific knowledge both by lay people and other scientists. The solutions to these controversies call themselves for knowledge from other scientific fields and for new ways of mobilising knowledge, in various types of fora or public arena.

The call for papers for this working group would ask scholars to explore, in these three directions, the consequences of these changes in terms of calling for scientific knowledge. This thematic deals as well with sociology of science, political science, rural sociology, or social movements studies.

Working Groups

Working Group 13
Rural transformations and vulnerable populations / Decentralization, privatization and the challenges for regional policy

Rural Transformations and Vulnerable Populations: This IRSA work group would examine the impacts of fundamental social, political, and economic transformations on the social and economic security and life chances of women, older persons and racial and ethnic groups living and working in rural communities. Work presented could focus on any nation and/or region of the world, although the primary focus would be on more developed regions such as North America, Western Europe, and/or East-Central Europe. The work group has a wide ranging focus that could embrace a diverse set of vulnerable groups and issues including Hispanic workers and their families in rural meat packing towns in the U.S.;social integration among older persons who migrate to rural retirement communities in the U.S. and Western Europe, livelihood strategies of single mothers in rural Eastern Europe; cultural survival and economic and social protections of Roma in rural villages in East-Central Europe. This work group could sponsor several sessions.

Decentralization, Privatization and the Challenges for Regional Policy: We propose hosting a session that explores how regional policy in the US and EU is shifting from a focus on redistribution to development and how this emphasis on the competitive state may undermine citizenship claims on government for depressed rural regions. This topic would address both the shift to decentralized policy responsibility and private forms of achieving government action.

Working Groups

Working Group 14
Rural tourism: negotiating and re-negotiating rural spaces, culture and history

In recent years throughout Europe, there has been a renewed interest in developing rural areas. Many countries began to search for new alternatives, and more profitable economic activities to help revitalize the countryside and rural communities as it became obvious that the agricultural sector alone was no longer the key to rural development. One of the main strategies of this search was to identify ways to encourage the diversification of rural economic activities. Rural diversification brought with it the notion that tourism could be used to help this revitalization process.

As a result rural communities and their environs became a resource with potential benefits for the farmers and the rural communities, providing them with a supplementary economic means besides that of direct production. Their role is changing from just meeting the food needs of the population to meeting their recreational and leisure needs as well which puts pressure on both rural communities and the environment.

The aim of the Working group will be to:

examine how globalization leads to acceleration of tourism development in rural areas and forces rural tourist sites and communities to compete to attract investments and visi-tors. The concept of acceleration of the impacts of tourism development does not refer only to the issue of speeding, but is also linked to issues such as authenticity, local culture;
investigate how local communities act - i.e., are they just passive recipients of externally imposed developmental plans;
explore the issue of complexity of localities - different views and interests of different individuals and social groups have in a place, as well as in rural tourism development;
look at different approaches to rural tourism planning and development and counterpart their advantages and disadvantages exploring issues such as, Who really decides? Who benefits and who loses in the short but also the long term from tourism development in a given locality?;
derive insights into social dynamics in various rural tourist destinations looking at issues such as; Who gets to participate in development? How does rural tourism develop in terms of power relations? Who really benefits and who loses from such development? What and whose excluded, how and why?;

The response to the impacts of rural tourism will differ according to the perceptions, values and experiences of those influenced by the activity and the way they construct rural areas. This includes the interests and expectations of the benefits and costs that it might bring them. This implies the need not only to look at the heterogeneity of the local population and explore within that heterogeneity the differential impact tourism may have, but implies also the need to look at the power relations in a given tourist destination.

Thus, the aim of the WG is to understand the process of rural tourism development and to know how the terms of development are negotiated and re-negotiated among various actors, and what are the effects of those negotiations on rural areas and its communities.

Papers are invited that offer both conceptual reflections on the topic as well as empirically derived insights.

Working Groups

Working Group 15
The contribution of new food supply chains to sustainable rural development

In recent years we have witnessed an impressive growth of new food supply chains that incorporate claims of sustainability, safety and quality. Along these food supply chains and between regions, there is a diversity of definitions of sustainability, safety and quality. These differences emerge from a wide variety of factors, including: diversity in farming systems; differential innovation strategies of food firms; the multiplicity of forms of territorial governance and cultural identities; diversity in the organisational structure and governance of food chains; different perceptions of the attributes of quality production; diversity in the way consumer demands are articulated to specific production ´codes´ (organic, integrated, regional, artisanal etc.); and diversity in the way safety claims are intertwined with other quality concerns (taste, health, ethics, authenticity, etc.) in consumers' perceptions and in the products' characteristics. This diversity ultimately also has differential effects in terms of the contribution of new food supply chains to sustainable rural development.

This Working Group seeks to better understand the role and dynamics of new food supply chains and their potential contribution to sustainable rural development within the context of a globalising agro-food economy and increasing food safety regulations. In particular it wishes to address the following issues and questions:

Diversity. Since there appears to be no single 'blue print' that is valid for all territorial settings, what can we learn from the diversity in the way sustainability, safety and quality is articulated in food supply chains - both within chains and between countries and regions?
Consumers. What is, could and/or should be the role of new food supply chains in the process of articulating consumer demands and their translation into farming, processing and marketing practices? Given the central role of consumption in driving the demand for distinctive food products how might consumer practices be integrated more convincingly in the analysis, both conceptually and methodologically?
Organisation and governance. What is the role and impact of different types of organisation and governance of the food supply chain? For example, the patterns of interaction among the actors involved, the contractual relations between them, technologies employed, functional and product specialisation, the degree of concentration/distribution of power along the chain. How might such factors induce a change towards greater sustainability and safety and higher quality?
Locality. What is the role and significance of local resources and actors? How do food firms interact with other local actors?
Innovation. Which innovation strategies in food supply chains can be distinguished? How can rural sociologists studying food supply chains benefit from insights derived from innovation studies?
Societal and institutional embedding. What is the role and impact of (regional) societal and institutional embedding for the successful enhancement of sustainability, safety and quality through food supply chain approaches?
Critical factors for success and failure. What are the key factors underlying the (un)successful development of new food supply chains? What are the crucial parameters to enhance the performance of new food supply chains in terms of socio-economic viability and competitiveness, safety, quality and regaining consumer trust?

We invite a wide range of papers related to any of the issues and topics outlined above or to some other aspect of the theme of this working group. Besides studies of an empirical nature the convenors would especially welcome papers that seek to take forward conceptual, theoretical and methodological deliberations. Prospective contributors are invited to submit an abstract outlining the nature and focus of their paper.

Working Groups

Working Group 16
Renewal of local community through endogenous rural development social capital, community, social identity and new rural groups

Rural areas in many parts of the world have come under increasing pressure through economic globalisation or are excluded from further development. Also in traditionally agriculture-dominated areas agriculture is gradually loosing its social and economic strength when other groups and interests enter the rural world. Two general (and interrelated) trends can be observed. New groups of inhabitants, often characterised as urban, have entered the countryside, and with them came new ideas about rurality, rural livelihood and liveability. This has caused a shift from "the countryside representing a place of production" to "the countryside as a place of consumption". Traditional forms of social interaction in the countryside, rooted in agricultural practices, are threatened to disappear. Rural societies where most people were practicing agriculture and thus lived, worked, and had their social life in the local community, have changed when more and more urban citizen and other social groups moved to rural areas. A vast proportion of these people kept their work and social contacts in the urban spheres. Rural and urban lifestyles have become intermingled - though in different configurations in different parts of the world - and new forms of social interaction and local culture result. These new forms of life and culture need to be investigated with regard to changes in the local social, cultural and economic contexts, but also with regard to opportunities and constraints resulting from globalisation. Social processes that influence endogenous (or territorial) rural development at local levels are discussed in this working group. Special attention will be paid to such complementary and mutually reinforcing processes as

the renewal of local community systems (communities of place and of interest),
the creation of social capital (to combat social exclusion and marginalisation),
the building of social identity in a rurality with different social groups (identity as a component of socially sustainable rural development),
and how these processes influence formal and informal decision making regarding rural development policies and processes.

To this working group papers are invited that offer conceptual reflections or empirically based insights. Contributions from sociology, social anthropology and other social science disciplines as well as interdisciplinary contributions are welcome.

Working Groups

Working group 17
Quality and identity in food supply chains: new challenges within globalisation

Rural areas throughout the world are faced with the challenges of globalisation in a liberalized environment marked by the end of State support and the opening of markets to external competitors. The current trend towards globalisation and the changes that have occurred, as much from a political and economic perspective as from an organisational perspective (decentralisation, outsourcing etc.), have kindled an increasing interest in new forms of production systems based on proximity.

In these new forms, it's relevant the link between food supply chains and local production systems (LPS) in industry or services.

There are, however, at least two characteristics of the agri-food sector which argue in favour of a sector-specific LPS approach:

Downstream from this sector, the food product is the only consumer good that the end user literally and physically consumes. Food thus acquires an essential importance, as individuals and social groups are looking to reconstruct identities and characteristics around the forms of their food consumption.
Upstream, the evolution of both agriculture and rural areas is being re-examined: the notion of multi-functionality is trying to take into account the complex character of agriculture today. Jobs, reproduction of the rural social fabric, environmental problems, new food quality requirements, these are the issues that have to be dealt with.

Origin of food and its links with territorial dynamics become of high importance. New agri-food development models are emerging, based on highlighting local resources (products, knowledge, competence, businesses, institutions, etc.). That means paying more attention to the diversity and quality of agricultural products as well as to the local development dynamics and the new stakes in rural areas.

This approach supposes several research questions about the local qualification process of food products that we can debate during the working group as:

development of institutional devices: role of the different types of institutions in the building of different types of quality, articulation of local/global levels through supply chains;
quality assessment: standards, rules, interactions among individual, collective, and public strategies;
Impact of qualification strategies: exclusion vs. inclusion;
the food product characteristics and its link to location or movement of firms;
the consumers' skills and perception of quality in products by virtue of their territorial origin.

Working Groups

Working Group 18
Globalization and family farm social transformations: resistance and mutations

Family farms provide most of the world's agricultural production; they supply markets with raw and processed products and have an important role in the natural resource management. In spite of several modernisation theories announcement, peasant agriculture (partially integrated to non perfect markets) have not disappeared in the southern countries. In the North family farm units coexist with family agricultural small or medium firms/enterprises. Family farming are innovative and can be found all over the world because of their capacity to adapt to different situations, showing resistance and resilience potential which can be associated to a social capacity of mutation and adaptation. By the way, both in the northern and in the southern countries, family agriculture is faced with the challenges of globalisation in a liberalised environment marked by the end of State support and the opening of markets to external competition. Smallholders, peasants and family farmers are being confronted with rapidly changing environment as they are increasingly faced to global economy processes and to their local effects: decentralisation, privatisation, economical integration, etc.

The workshop will examine the transformations and opportunities created by these change and try to analyse how they can be characterised. Is it in terms of resistance, of survival or in terms of mutation of traditional peasant societies? On the other hand, is there any perspective for a complete transformation to a market integrated firm-like model?

Several questions can guide the main lines of this workshop:

Which kind of social or socio-economical processes can explain the adaptation capacity of peasant or family farm structures: forms of land/resources access and management, the organisation of family labour and the management of family assets? the existence of reciprocity and redistribution relations, based on human values?
How, in certain conditions, family farmers and stakeholders are enabling to diversify their activities or to suit new sustainable and multifunctional types of family agriculture? How these agricultural innovation processes are triggered or inhibited by the challenges of globalisation? Interest of social capital analysis for family farming & their organisations?
Which socio-political capacities can explain the alliance and links with other stakeholders, in order to enabling rural and peasants to empower their organisations, to renew co-ordination mechanisms and to find new ways of regulating agricultural sectors and establishing public policy?
On an other way, can we observe the permanence of peasantry or the emergence of modern family farming and the end of peasant societies? for example comparing African, Latin American situations and Northern countries cases?

Working Groups

Working Group 19
Coastal communities in the 21st century: strong winds are blowing and coastal societies are changing.

This working group focuses on one particular geographical setting: the coastal zones, our border regions between land and ocean. In recent decades, governments and others have paid new attention to coastal zones. This attention reflects growing awareness of the coasts' ecological fragility, as well as their economic and recreational importance.

Rural sociology, however, has been slow to reflect this new interest in coastal zones. The field still focuses primarily on its traditional subjects: inland and mountain areas, characterized by agricultural and forestry economies.

Coastal regions too might have agricultural or forestry elements. Distinctively coastal enterprises such as fisheries, aquaculture, coastal tourism and new service industries tend to hold greater economic importance, however. Processing industries also remain important, although some of these are relocating away from their coastal origins (close to the fishing ports) to other places or countries that have lower labour costs.

As important changes take place in life along the coasts, new cross-disciplinary research groups (rather than rural sociology) have arisen to study them. Such research groups have formed under labels such as "coastal management," "fishery management," "landocean interaction," "fishery-dependent areas (FDAs)," "coastal engineering," or "biological diversity in the coastal zone," among others. Some good work has resulted, and gained impact on political decisions, but we rarely see an integrated analysis. Instead, there have been many instances where biologists, economists, engineers, journalists and others - lacking social scientists' experience and hard-earned knowledge about the holistic analysis of local communities - develop "social" models unaware of how much they leave out.

This lack leaves an opportunity for rural sociology. No other academic field is better equipped to build integrated, holistic perspectives on studies of coastal communities, or to organize and analyze the needed empirical data.

In this working group we aim to demonstrate the capabilities of rural sociology, applied on this newly important field of interest. More specifically: Through a research project for the European Community (see www.indicco.ntnu.no), one such holistic framework for coastal communities has already been constructed. This INDICCO (Indicator Coastal Communities) project developed a set of statistical tables, time series graphs, maps, interactive surveys and other (mainly qualitative) data that provide strategically important information about the present realities along Europe's coastal regions. The WEB-site for the project makes it possible to compare one coastal community with another and also to track changes in individual communities over time. It is also constructed to collect incoming information from local interest groups, arrange the information in a comparative and structured way and display the result immediately. A GIS (Geographical Information System) facility makes it possible to scale up and down in the database between local communities, municipalities, counties and countries, following changes in the geographical patterns of key indicators.

We hereby invite colleagues to apply the INDICCO framework for comparative or case-study analyses involving their own coastal regions of interest. We also invite more theoretically-oriented colleagues to consider general propositions about recent trends across coastal areas, in light of the growing wealth of comparative information. A practical goal for the working group is to collect the best papers and present them in a separate volume or journal issue.

Working Groups

Working Group 20
Biodiversity and cultural landscape management related to rural development

1. Background:
Biodiversity conservation and management has experienced increased global public attention over the last decades. Forest acreage per person has been cut in half since 1960. Around 5% of the plant species and 15% of all mammals are considered threatened by Worldwatch Institute (2001) through economic processes of natural resource extraction. Increased pollution of water, soils and air has also contributed to irreversible losses of genetic material. In recent years, the follow-up of various biodiversity agreements and conventions has led to policy goals, measures and instrument debates on international, national and local arenas for decision-making. The Biodiversity Convention (CBD, 1992) stresses conservation of biodiversity, the sustainable use and aspects of equity and fair sharing of benefits and it has a separate issue on ethical, cultural, scientific and economic dimensions of biodiversity management. Local participation is often stated as a key element to "ensure the implementation" in the national follow-up strategies.

In the debate about the future for rural areas in western countries, focus has moved from bulk production to experiences, aesthetics, tradition, culture (Holloway and Kneafsey 2000, Holloway 2000, Cloke and Little 1997, Halfacree and Boyle 1998, Marsden 2003). In terms of agricultural production, the concept of multifunctionality has been constructed to visualise how agriculture is more than volume production of food, and that agricultural practises produce collective cultural and social values. The argument about multifunctionality has been introduced in international trade negotiations (WTO) to argue for continuous agricultural support. In these discussions, the agri-cultural landscape has been mentioned as probably the most important of these collective values. However, few attempts have been made to concretise what kinds of rural cultural landscapes that could play this collective value-producing role. Another important issue is how the management of cultural landscapes is related to local participation, rural development and different social values in the societies. There is a need for new knowledge on collective preferences and values in regard to rural landscapes, but also on management models that can handle different collective needs in landscape development.

From 1980-85, participatory approaches in cultural landscape and biodiversity management has developed with shifts in focus from conservation to sustainable resource use. The overall process, which today has been termed ecological modernization came as a result of several concomittant but disparate "trend shifts" in society (Weale 1992, Jännicke 1997, Hajer 1996, Hanf 1998). The ideas behind the new participation approaches came from a rather mixed group of people (including academia, NGOs, politicians and media), with quite different intentions.

The new, participatory approach had at least three goals;

To secure the biodiversity resource better than before
To increase local economic and social values added
To improve the relationship between "rulers and those ruled"

These goals were to be accomplished through devolution of authority, resources, rights and duties from central to local levels of governance. The move also implied a shift of governance style; devolution of resources and power from public to civil society, also including increased involvement of private actors and market integration.

The narrative of local participation and its basic tenets thus had appeal to a variety of important actors, including policy makers and donors, and the approach gained momentum in cultural landscape and biodiversity management. The approach has been tried out in various forms in different context over the last two decades with very varying degrees of successes. It is now time to take stock of these experiences, and develop revised approaches.

2. Main themes;

First session: Discuss practical experiences with participatory approaches as an approach to reduce conflict levels in cultural landscape and biodiversity management and rural development ; what do we see in the field?
Second session: Governance and caretaking of biodiversity and cultural landscapes; the role of public bodies ; administrative cultures, competence and proficiency in working with local people
Third session: Discuss merits of different theoretical/ analytical approaches applied to describe, explain and resolve conflicts related to cultural landscape and biodiversity management

3. Pedagogics of workshop;

Each paper has one discussant
Use working groups to discuss papers in relation to main themes

Working Groups

Working Group 21
Displacement, diaspora, and development

Within recent memory "development" programs were cast as an antidote to the displacing effects of natural disasters, the ravages of ill-conceived human planning, accidents, and warfare. The metaphor of development as "safety net" is fundamentally changing, however, as increasing numbers of displacement studies raise concerns that development instigates displacement rather than buffers it. Nor is human displacement currently viewed as an unintended by-product of development. Though sometimes the case, just as often displacement is premeditated. This admission sometimes accompanies development projects (as with infrastructural changes); more often displacement is censored until after the fact, thus absolving project proponents of liability. This panel invites research examining development-related displacement, with preference given to cases wherein displacement is "spatially inconspicuous." That is, emphasis is on in-situ displacement where victims are "hidden in plane view" in homes, neighborhoods, or communities rather than traversing national boundaries, as with refugees. Displacement, in this sense, turns on loss of status, rights, identity, and security and may or may not have a geographical component.

Working Groups

Working Group 22
Land reform, north and south?

Most official land reform originates "from above" rather "from below." It is planned and executed by states, kings, or ruling elites and is consequently conservative in its objectives. It might be thought of as an early form of structural adjustment from within. This panel invites research which breaks the mold of conventional land reform with particular attention to locally initiated or "community-based" land reform. Of necessity, this will mean reconceptualizing the nature and objectives of land reform at a time when such reform is reappearing as a policy option and political plank in many countries, north and south.

Working Groups

Working Group 23
Responses to agri-food globlisation: Asian experience and prospects

Historically, in many Asian countries agricultural production and trade have been tightly controlled by the government. In the last five decades, however, the region as a whole has increasingly become "consumers" of food produced elsewhere. Innovations and challenges that agrifood producers and consumers face within these countries have rarely been discussed in the sociological literature on agrifood globalisation in English language. Moreover, diversity of responses and resistances to agrifood globalisation among Asian countries is not well understood.

This working group tries to fill in such gaps by examining the impact of agrifood globalisation on Asian countries. In particular, the group hopes to organise sessions that address the following themes:

Institutional and regulatory reforms to harmonise with the WTO-based trade regime;
Challenges in addressing public concerns with environmental sustainability, food safety and public health in the globalising agrifood system.
Political and cultural debates surrounding the protection of family farms and the domestic agricultural sector in the increasingly globalising agrifood system; and
Impact of agrifood globalisation on democratisation of the agrifood sector in Asian societies.

Sessions in the working group aim to compare similarities and differences among Asian countries in their responses to agrifood globalisation. Thus, each session will include several Asian country study or comparative papers to encourage discussion, debate and future collaboration among scholars from various countries about the Asian situation.

Working Groups

Working Group 24
'Back-to-the-land' in the 21st Century

The aim of this Working Group is to explore the characteristics, motivations, actions, consequences and theoretical significance for rural studies of individuals and groups moving to live within rural environments who fit poorly, or not at all, with the dominant 'counterurbanisation' model (see K. Halfacree, 2001, 'Constructing the object: taxonomic practices, 'counterurbanisation' and positioning marginal rural settlement', International Journal of Population Geography 7: 395-411) that is expressed, albeit highly unevenly, within a very large number of 'developed' countries. Anecdotal and limited research evidence suggests something of a resurgence of 'back-to-the-land' type projects - including self-build settlers, permaculture exponents and organic smallholders in a range of countries. Indeed, we may now be able to go as far as to posit that they form an integral part of an emergent, if conceptually and empirically disputed, 'post-productivist countryside'.

In the context of the conference's sub-themes under the 'globalisation, risks and resistance' umbrella, back-to-the-land projects may be put forward as a kind of social movement, or set of social movements, trying to resist the dominant forces promoting capitalist globalisation and neo-liberalism. Once in place, attention can then be given to how the playing out of these lives of back-to-the-land people contribute to endogenous rural development initiatives, alternative agricultures, social exclusion and inclusion, and local sustainability. What is the 'place' of back-to-the-land projects within rural society today?

Some key questions that the Working Group might seek to address include:

To what extent is back-to-the-land migration and lifestyles apparent across the developed world, and even beyond? If present, is this phenomenon manifested differently in different countries? Within individual countries, what is its more detailed geography?
In the present context of heightened capitalist globalisation, to what extent do present day back-to-the-land projects show similarities and differences to those from the wave of the 1960s and 1970s? For example, are they more explicit in their attempts to resist globalisation and neo-liberalism?
What are the social, cultural and ideological characteristics of those taking part in these projects? Interesting questions here include the extent to which they are able to integrate into established rural 'communities', and the extent to which they can help to revitalise rural places that have become increasingly economically and socially marginal.
What is the balance within 'back-to-land' movements between the desire to 'drop out' of dominant society and the urge to transform that society? In Lefebvre's terms, what is the balance between the 'diversion' and the 'production' of space?
How are central governments and local political institutions responding to back-to-the-land initiatives? A key issue here is the extent to which the planning system either facilitates or works to block these schemes.
More conceptually, what role do 21st century back-to-the-land movements have to play in shaping the emerging contours of any 'post-productivist' or 'multifunctional' countryside / rural space?

Papers for the Working Group are welcome to address any of these questions and others that are equally relevant but which I may have overlooked. The intention is to build up a fuller picture of the phenomenon as it exists today.

Working Groups

Working Group 25
The "Ecologisation" of agricultures in the North and in the South : Aspects of a new international paradigm for rural development

The emergence and the increase of environmental concerns in the agricultures of Northern and Southern countries can be interpreted as signs of at least two interconnected processes:

the decline of agronomic sciences and the rise of other forms of knowledge such as ecological science;
the decline of state power and the internationalisation of agricultural, food and environmental problems.

This new international regime of environmental issues in agriculture may be seen as a way to reproduce or to strengthen actual economic inequalities between Northern countries, where most of the normative discourse on ecology and environment is located, and the "South", where most of the rural poor are living.

The aim of this workshop is to examine and to compare the modalities of the "ecologisation" of the agricultures in Northern countries and in the "South". We intend to adopt a comparative focus and an historical perspective: how did environmental concerns have emerged in the northern agriculture and in the southern ones? During the colonial period, how were the questions of agricultural impacts considered both by the colonial agents and by the indigenous population? And how, after the Independence, these questions have been considered both by new governments and by peasants ? Similar questions can be asked for northern agriculture. How did Europeans farmers resist (or not) to the supremacy of the agronomic science for agriculture production?

Even if this workshop will compare situations between the North and the South, each paper has not to be in itself comparative. Papers can focus on specific field-work and on case studies. They can adopt historical perspective, ethnographical method or be more sociological. This workshop intends to be multidisciplinary (Sociology, Anthropology, History, Social Studies of Sciences, Political Economy, Political Sciences, etc.) and opened to a wide geographical range of contributors.

Working Groups

Working Group 26
Job loss in changing ruralities

Since globalization is one of several causes of job loss in industrialized countries, resistance to corporate expansion stems from employees, the local community, and sometimes government offices. Worker, community, and corporate risks are to be anticipated for global business expansion, as well as for those enterprises that are not involved in globalization but must compete with companies that have moved/expanded in that direction. Rural communities are experiencing significant unemployment, consolidation, major efforts to diversify, and necessitating governmental cooperation with other entities in an attempt to retain viability.

Working Groups

Working Group 27
Social forestry: critical investigations of the social significance of forests in rural spaces

Forests continue to represent significant components of rural land in many countries. Traditionally, academic investigations of these forests have focused on the science and economics of their production and management; themes that have only been of limited concern to rural sociologists. More recently, though, shifts in forestry policies and practices in developed countries have begun to open up more interesting social science research agendas. Changes in global timber markets and the increasing importance of discourses of sustainable development have meant that forests are now less likely to be constructed solely as economic resources requiring particular styles of scientific management. Instead, forests have been awarded a broader social significance linked to rural regeneration and development, leisure and recreation, social well-being and socio-cultural identities. Over recent years, sociologists and geographers working around ideas of social and cultural natures have focused critical attention on some of these themes, with attention given to the shifting political economies of forests, their regulation and governance, and the ways that forests are awarded a wide range of social and cultural meanings at different spatial scales. The aim of this workshop is to develop these types of critical assessment of the broader social significance of forests and forestry in rural areas. Offers of papers are sought that address one or more of the following themes, with particular reference to advanced capitalist countries:

political economies of forests, including the shifting modes of production and regulatory processes associated with forestry
linkages between the forestry sector and other 'nature industries', such as mining and water production
the changing relationships between the private and state forestry sectors
connections between the forestry sector, rural development and rural governance
the role of forestry within projects of area-based regeneration and social inclusion in rural spaces
social and cultural meanings of forests, including place-based forest identities
interactions between forestry, forests and place-based communities
constructions of forests as spaces of belonging, deviancy, safety and fear

Working Groups

Working Group 28
Agro-food globalization and resistance in Latin America (Globalización agroalimentaria y resistencia en America Latina)

This working session aims to study the impacts of globalisation on the Latin American rural society. As for the productive aspects, it will analyse the exclusion generated by the globalisation process among rural producers, subordinated to the global agro-food market dominated by transnational corporations. On a social level, it will analyse the impact of globalisation on the rural migration, the breaking up of the rural families, the disintegration of the production units and the participation of women and children in the family income. On the cultural level, it will study the impact of globalisation on the rural communities changes, the fracture of traditions in some regions and their conservation in the case of some migrants. Concerning the ecology, it will analyse the impact of the globalisation on the natural resources, the water pollution, the GMO's problem and the lose of bio-diversity.

On the other hand, it will underline the tendency for individual and collective resistance to the globalisation: the individual struggle against exclusion and the rural social movements against neo-liberal politics; the ethnic movements, women organisations, and ecologists groups fighting for a fairer rural society.

For additional information see:
http://baseportal.com/cgi-bin/baseportal.pl?htx=/HdeBarros/IRSAGT28

Working Groups

Working Group 29
Changing frameworks of agricultural and rural policy

The traditional, clientelistic and protectionist pattern of agricultural and rural policy in industrialized countries has increasingly been subject to public critique and political pressure over the last decade. In many countries, consumers, tax payers, rural residents, environmentalists, animal welfare and third world activists have gained ground in framing public debate and policy frameworks. International public opinion - including NGOs, the mass media, developing countries' representatives and agencies such as the UNDP - blame the rich countries' agricultural policy as one of the chief obstacles to fighting poverty. The pivotal role agriculture played in the failure of the 2003 WTO ministerial conference at Cancún sheds light on the importance of agricultural and rural issues for the distribution of chances for development among societies and for the development of world society as a whole. Looking at institutions, though, the picture is complicated. On the one hand, the institutional framework of agricultural policy has undergone only minor changes, while the institutional framework of rural policy is only emerging and very fragile. On the other, institutions focussed on trade, health, environment etc. target the agricultural sector from outside and might trigger considerable change.

Against this background, the working group first wants to discuss in which regard and to what degree the framework of agricultural and rural policy has changed, including issues of public, media and elite discourse; institutional and legal frameworks; changes in the composition and character of interested groups; patterns of influence and power; economic changes; etc.. Second, we want to analyze the impact and the driving factors of change. Third, we want to assess the explanatory power of diverse theories of social and political change to the phenomena described; e.g. theories of slow and fast social change, functional differentiation, political economy, cultural theory, social constructivism, governance, development theory, theories of social and policy learning, world society, world system, dependence theories, etc.We invite both papers addressing theoretical and conceptual issues and papers presenting empirical research. We especially welcome contributions that deal with the interdependence of agricultural and rural (and related) policies in developed and developing countries.

Working Groups

Working Group 30
Food: new desires, new concerns and new forms of consumption

Food and drink, eating and drinking, are daily practices that concern us all. Food scares, producers' issues, food engineering (genetically modified foods), ecological considerations and consumer issues as well as food abuse (such as excessive drinking, nutritional patterns and health, etc.) are just several of the producer/consumer oriented food concerns that have caused wide spread academic and public debates in recent years. Nevertheless, these "simple" activities also raise broad cultural, social and ethical issues that have received increasing attention in academic debates.

This workshop will explore consumer-oriented issues of food and drink as cultural phenomena, and recent developments concerning the cultural implications of changes in eating and drinking practices in contemporary life, from any perspective relevant to the realms of the the social sciences: sociology, economics, philosophy and ethics, gender studies, socio-anthropology.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

Food subcultures: organics, macrobiotics, vegetarianism, typical.
Social practices of eating/drinking (social pressure; meals and their cultural place; social hierarchies; public and private eating patterns; boundary forming)
Calculated risks? Responses to and ethical implications of food crises and scares
Body, gender and image (preparation and production of food; sport and fitness as related to food intake; the gendered body and its representation by food/drink, body/soul divisions)
Health and healing: genomics and the medicatisation of food practices
Calculated risks? Responses to and ethical implications of food crises and scares
The media: the shaping of food/drink as cultural concepts

Working Groups

Working Group 31
Employment and labour relations in rural areas

Globalization has affected rural areas throughout the world in many ways and has brought about change in the forms and relations of production. Rural areas have become the space not only of agriculture production, but also a place of residence and employment in the industrial and service sectors. Consideration of these issues will enhance research into employment and labour relations.

This working group will focus on employment and labour relations in rural areas throughout the world. Among the themes suggested for presentation are:

The dynamics of work in rural areas
The division of work within the productive chain (production, distribution, market, industrialization, consumption) and the characteristics of jobs and relations of production in each step
The relationship between productive systems and work: permanent and temporary jobs, family and salaried work, division of labour by sex
Family farms and the division of work by gender and age
Technology, employment and labour relations

Papers that undertake a comparative analysis are strongly encouraged.

Working Groups

Working Group 32
Water and rural development: its political and social aspects.

The study of water culture is a basic tool towards generating information, policies, strategies and operative knowledge that can help tackle severe water crises. Water has become a common variable in social and environmental problems, as well as in rural-urban relationships. Therefore its study is an excellent tool to face one of the severest problems of our times. The specific analysis of these themes are the core of the Round Table on The Water Culture and Development organized by Tomas M. Saldaña , Brigitte Boehm, Jacinta Palerm Viqueira, and Roberto Melville. We encourage international comparative analysis on these themes to help generate a more informed basis for water policies. The round table can have several aspects such as:

1. Water management at river basin level: conflicts among different sectors and users

The temporal and spatial distribution of water is not able to satisfy the demands of all sectors. The majority of the population is located in the high lands - where water is scarce - or in the arid zones. With regards to agricultural production, the flat lands with greater agricultural potential are found in the arid or semi arid regions . As a consequence, there are conflicts over access to, and use of, scarce water resources. Another source of conflicts is water contamination in agricultural areas, as well as in urban and the industrial ones. Many towns discharge their residual waters ,without treatment, to currents that are subsequently used for irrigation. To solve these water conflicts, rules for its use are required. Conditions for water markets also need to be defined. These could regulate the costs and benefits produced by the use of this resource. In addition, an adequate body to arbitrate the conflicts and find satisfactory solutions for water users should be established in each region.

2. Water management privatization: the case of the irrigation districts.

Privatization is understood as any transfer of property or control from the public to the private sector, hopefully with enough independent power so that when the federal government operates and maintains the reservoirs, the the producers do the same with the channel networks. The main economic objectives sought when privatizing enterprises or public services is an improvement in efficiency and performance; developing competitive enterprises whose products or services better serve the consumer. This poses several theoretical and practical problems. Questions will therefore be raised under the heading of evaluating the transfer, pricing mechanisms, water markets, reallocation , data and impacts of irrigation districts. How these questions are answered will have a direct impact on sustainable development policy.

3. Social organization and small irrigation systems.

Self managed irrigation systems are mostly "small", but large in terms of the number of individual irrigators (up to 4,000 irrigators). The administration and operation of the irrigation systems is carried out by the irrigators themselves, with little or no technical support by irrigation professionals. They show strong self management capabilities, but they are some times unable to solve conflicts over "water rights" with cities and other irrigators upstream. Lacking in technological know-how, and having unused or poorly used irrigation works, sometimes means they receive poor support in managing their systems. These systems are therefore based on a self-management of small irrigation systems, local authority and local knowledge systems. A case study approach would allow us to favour human resources formation and gain a multi-regional knowledge of organizational problems and solutions.

4. Underground water use: organizational and technical problems.

Underground water constitutes an important source for different uses. Recently, there have been cases of aquifer depletion due to the expansion of irrigation in agriculture and the fast growth of cities. Briefly, this means that if adequate management is not introduced, sustainable development will be increasingly affected. As a result, research and policy must be directed towards issues of demand control; markets, rights and reductions of pumped water; and policies for aquifer recharge that demand technical and organizational inputs.

5. Drought: the case of International border problems.

In some places water is a permanent problem among regions and among nations. In the last ten years, drought has affected in radical ways the social and economic life in Latin America, northern Mexico and the border region of Mexico-United States. This means that droughts is an important subject for research. Draught has also put a lot a pressure upon irrigation districts that are in a more vulnerable situation than small traditional irrigation systems. Drought and its longer term social and economic consequences has not received as much research and policy attention as it deserve.

Working Groups