In the shift towards the Big Society, it is widely proclaimed that citizen participation and citizens’ initiatives are indispensable to maintaining services that used to be run by local or regional governments. Despite the increased interest in citizens’ initiatives, research has scarcely debated what …

Plattelandsparlement is het jaarlijkse congres van de landelijke vereniging voor kleine kernen in Nederland (LVKK)

The goal of this paper is to present the emergence of a new cooperative model for sustainable regional development through social enterprise, rooted in a historical context of societal change in the Netherlands. Our case study is the Gebiedscoöperatie Westerkwartier (GCW), a large-scale area and integrated …

Rural children are a largely understudied population in language and literacy research, despite the fact that these children often enter school with delays in their language development. Since most rural areas suffered from so-called selective rural outmigration, many parents in rural areas are lower …

Access to micro-credit has often been argued to be one of the effective ways of contributing to food and nutrition security. CARE International since 1994 introduced the Village Savings and Loans Associ-ation (VSLA) in Ghana. The VSLA since then, has been contributing to making some amount of micro-credit …

Improving smallholder farmers’ access to markets is critical in helping towards raising rural incomes and reducing poverty. Small-scale farmers in developing countries are excluded from formal markets due to power imbalance in the value chains, lack of transparency, and presence of too many intermediaries. …

Cairo. Home to twenty million people, bursting at the seams. An archipelago of planned and unplanned districts. How should this metropolis prepare for future growth? ‘Delta Strikes Back’ focuses on the rapidly urbanising agricultural landscape within the Nile Delta. Environmental pressure, ‘water wars’ …

Against the backdrop of depopulation and Big Society, citizen initiatives in rural areas are believed to be able to mitigate service-provision inequalities between urban and peripheral regions. Factors influencing the success and failure of such citizen initiatives and their potential in providing solutions …

Rural service provision through citizen initiatives: stable alternative or a spur-of-the-moment?Against the backdrop of depopulation and Big Society, citizen initiatives in rural areas are believed to be able to mitigate service-provision inequalities between urban and peripheral regions. Factors influencing …