Rural and urban sustainability governance

The rural and urban communities have a distinct structure, function and dynamism, which provide us with livelihood and define our lives through our various daily activities. Circumstances surrounding the rural and urban communities are increasingly changing, such as with the rapid development towards globalization, and consequently the number of challenges needing solutions seems to be ever on the increase. The focus of this book is on the rural and urban environments, and the wide-ranging representations of various players’ interacting activities that preserve or destroy these environments. The key issues contemporary to the rural and urban communities include appropriate overall environmental governance involving collaboration and competition among different actors, preservation or creation of a rich and lively living environment, and a search for ways to ensure the inheritance of our greatest assets for following generations. This book attempts to elucidate the following issues: how we may use rural and urban sustainability as beacons for taking relevant and necessary policy measures and for community activities, and how to further ameliorate such measures and activities. The question of rural and urban sustainability is both specific and rich in context, and offers excellent cases for extracting the essence of multi-layered environmental governance. This volume presents current key academic findings, while also considering interactions between humans and nature, such as local resource management through the commons, and rural–urban interdependence.