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,...

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...

The tradition of keeping written records of gift received during household ceremonies in many countries offers researchers an underutilized means of data collection for social network analysis. This paper first summarizes unique features of the gift record data that circumvent five prevailing...

The main objective of this work is to review the recent achievements on the mechanisms explaining local and rural development, which underpin the current definition of rural areas in the European literature. The analysis carried out in this article acknowledges a gap between local development...

Agricultural, quality agro-food, supply-chain and rural districts were introduced by Italian law in 2001. With reference to European structural policies, especially rural development policy, and to the districts' originality and relationship to the LEADER method and programmes, we wonder whether...