This article focuses on the challenges of rural areas, the formative power of citizens and the funding programme for village development in Lower Saxony. The article elaborates the importance of collective responsibility in villages by means of cooperation between local political...

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...

The Austrian Rural Development Programme of the current period 2000 - 2006 includes the measure "Vocational training" to improve the qualification of persons involved in agriculture and forestry as well as to help them convert their operations to other uses. The educational measures play an...

The multifunctional concept became one of the most important directions of EU agriculture development. The success of multifunctional agriculture is based on growing demand for non-commodity outputs. The endogenous values of rural areas that used to be explored mainly by agriculture are turning...

Once the EU has perceived the strategic importance of local peculiarities to support rural development and high-quality productions, it has emphasized the need for more place-sensitive agri-food policies. The importance of socio-economic, historical and cultural factors as transfers of...

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...