TABLE OF CONTENTS: Preface; Gertrud Buchenrieder and Tom Dufhues. Issues and evidence of social networks in boosting rural households' welfare; Gertrud Buchenrieder. Open issues and implications for measuring individual social capital in developing countries; Tom Dufhues and Gertrud Buchenrieder. What...

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...

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...

Purpose: Ethical consumption is on the rise amidst concerns about the environmental and health impacts of industrial agriculture. In light of increasingly complex food choices, alternative food networks have emerged. However, their success depends on a deeper understanding of the product...

Producer organisations bear great potential to link small-scale farmers to markets. In post-communist economies, historically negative attitudes towards cooperatives are blamed as barriers to collaboration, but little is known about the broader range of motives to (not) cooperate. We use a...

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...

Despite the benefits associated with the free movement of people, governments often try to regulate urban immigration by constraining the agency of potential rural out-migrants in moving to cities and/or in expanding their agency to enable them to stay put. We apply an institutional framework...

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”...

Social capital has been recently held up as a conceptual framework to build a bridge between the diverse disciplines involved in rural development. However, despite its potential and the impressively rapid take-up of the concept by the community of development professionals, it remains an...