The rural out-migration of young people leads to problems such as “brain drain” and the overageing of the rural population. The purpose of this paper is to study return migration motives among students originating from rural areas. The case study relates to the province of Akmola, northern...

While the rural exodus dominates public and scientific debates, considerably less attention has been given to studying why the overwhelming majority of people worldwide remain immobile. As a consequence of this, the reasons why people stay, especially in economically weaker rural areas, are...

Empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that an individual’s position in an income stratum—more than the absolute income level—determines subjective well-being. However, studies on subjective well-being suffer from a critical methodological weakness: they use exogenously defined...

Livestock plays a pivotal role for smallholder production systems in mountainous Northern Vietnam. Economic risks, especially the loss of livestock, are major reasons for slipping into poverty. Normally, insurance systems could step in to assist. In developing countries however, insurance...

The Growth Enhancement Scheme and e-voucher program, rolled out across Nigeria in 2011 by the federal government, provided the institutional basis for private agro-dealers to engage in the distribution of subsidized fertilizer, improved seeds and extension services to farmers. However, the...

This article addresses one of the key challenges facing transitional and emerging economies: managing rural–urban migration to tackle rural decline and the associated rapid urbanisation. We introduce New Institutionalism as a novel conceptual framework to analyse the interactions between the...

How do cultural practices influence the process of participatory governance within local administrative structures? We address this question by reflecting cultural dimensions, such as collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and power distance within a contextual sensitive “cultural sensemaking”...

It is often claimed that participation empowers local actors and that an inclusive decision-making process is crucial for rural development. We aim to investigate how formal and informal rules are set in local decision-making processes and how those rules may impact the actual level of...

In this study, we augment Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) with an institutional embeddedness logic to develop and test a mediated model of the effects of perceived corruption on attitudes, social norms and perceived behavioral control, which in turn determine entrepreneurial...