Rural Studies is a network initiative between ten Finnish universities. This paper discusses Rural Studies as an innovative approach for pulling together the limited national resources of academic rural expertise. There are many background factors for the establishment of Rural Studies network,...

This paper discusses the challenges that the next EU programming period has given to rural policy. In the case of Finland the most important level of implementing regional and rural policies so far has been provinces (NUTS 3) but in 2007-2013 both the EU Commission and our national rural policy...

This paper aims at analyzing business services in bioenergy investments and innovations on farms in the Northern Ostrobothnia region in Finland. Finance into research of bioenergy has strongly increased during the last years both in Finland and Europe. Primary focus of this research has been so...

The aim of this paper is to analyze emergence of rural expert networks and their function on the basis of an example network. The case study concerns the European Rural Development Network (ERDN). Networking has been regarded as a central model of action during this century for most of fields of...