Delivering Integrated Rural Development: Insights from Northern Ireland

This article explores progress being made in the sphere of integrated rural development in Northern Ireland, based on the experiences of 15 LEADER II local action groups. Research suggests that the local action groups experienced difficulties in developing integrative and multi-dimensional approaches to rural development during the initial stages of strategy formulation. In addition there appears to have been an emphasis on delivering the products of rural development with little importance attached to supporting processes such as capacity building and animation. However, as the programme progressed, this article examines the potential added value of LEADER II in Northern Ireland as demonstrated by the enhanced scope for cross-sector dialogue and local collaboration rooted in partnership based activity.     

Economic Development,Entrepreneurial Embeddedness and Resilience: The Case of Pubs in Rural Ireland

Public houses, or “pubs”, have and always had an important role in the Irish culture, economy and society. Even more, pubs located in the Irish countryside represent vital networking places for local communities, and provide a significant contribution to local supply chains with their purchasing. Their decline in number, registered in recent decades, significantly affects local communities, determining the vanishing of many jobs and business opportunities in areas frequently characterized by small population catchments, infrastructural deficit and spatial remoteness. This paper explores the impact of pubs in creating economic development in rural areas of Ireland. The paper examines the current pattern of procurement and employment associated with pubs in the Irish countryside and its effects upon local supply chains. In addition, the paper investigates pubs' activities and publicans influence with regard to concepts such as entrepreneurial embeddedness and resilience. The authors present and discuss findings from an analysis conducted on a unique data set obtained with the use of a survey questionnaire, corroborated by information gathered from interviews with pub owners and managers. Results increase the level of knowledge about the formation of social networks and economic capital in rural Ireland, and provide valuable insights for practitioners and policy-makers about the role played by pubs within rural supply chains.     

Materiality and Mutable Landscapes: Rethinking Seasonality and Marginality in Rural Ireland

Drawing on examples from Achill Island, County Mayo and from the north Antrim uplands, notions of marginality, isolation, and cultural stagnation associated with upland landscapes are explored in light of contradictory material and documentary data, raising questions about the materiality of marginality and challenging static, nationalist presentations of rural Irish life in the post-medieval period. Discussion of the Irish evidence is contextualized with reference to the twentieth-century construction of marginality in southern Appalachia.     

Planning for Rural Housing in the Republic of Ireland: From National Spatial Strategies to Development Plans

This paper examines the role of spatial planning as a policy framework for managing rural housing within an integrated territorial development strategy. The paper focuses on the Republic of Ireland, which provides a useful case for analysing spatial planning and rural housing relationships, due to the State's recent shift towards spatial planning (formalized with the publication of the Irish National Spatial Strategy), as well as the level of housing construction that has been observed in an increasingly post-productivist countryside (triggered by counter-urbanization flows, increased affluence and demands for second holiday homes, etc.). The paper reviews all policy instruments that have been used to manage rural housing at various scales (from national strategies to local level development plans). It is argued that while spatial planning adopts an integrative vocabulary, as policy moves down the spatial scale hierarchy, multi-dimensional spatial goals are implemented through traditional, narrow land-use regulation. This often leads to rural housing being addressed in isolation from its wider social and economic context, disconnecting housing from wider rural community issues and ultimately failing to deliver a coordinated and coherent spatial policy for managing rural settlements.     

The Adoption of Agriculture in Ireland: Perceptions of Key Research Challenges

This paper outlines the results of a project carried out 2007–2008 providing oversight of key challenges in the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition in Ireland as understood by those researching the period. The project involved interviews with practitioners from a variety of fields in order to obtain qualitative data. The resulting synthesis is not a ‘consensus’ statement of priorities, but a reflection of a very diverse research field. Given that the project took place at a time of considerable change in Irish archaeology, the strengths and weaknesses of research into the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition are of broader relevance.     

蒋介石的农村合作经济思想

本主要依据档案资料研究蒋介石的农村合作化思想。全共分五个部分。分析蒋介石开展农村合作化运动的原因、主要内容、合作社的基本形式及其特点,以及中体西用式的合作教育,从中揭示其开展的农村合作化运动的实质就是加强专制统治,调和阶级矛盾,抵制共产党的土地革命政策。     

秦汉时期的农业和农村经济管理措施

秦汉统治者为加强对农业和农村经济的管理 ,采取了一系列发展农业和农村经济的重要措施。这些措施在一定程度上促进了农业和农村经济的持续和稳定发展 ,为秦汉统治政权的长治久安奠定了坚实的经济基础     

Rising Second Home Numbers in Rural Ireland: Distribution,Drivers and Implications

This article highlights a marked growth in the number of second homes in Ireland since the mid-1990s, which is concentrated in the rural and coastal parts of the peripheral Border, Midwest, Southeast, Southwest and West regions, together with parallel growth in the number of long-term vacant dwellings in these regions. These phenomena are linked to economic and population growth, the “laissez faire” nature of land use planning in rural Ireland, the generous fiscal treatment of housing, as well as tax incentives to encourage house building in economically marginal areas. The social and economic impacts of these dwelling on individual localities vary, depending on their number, usage patterns and the nature of the local economy and housing market. However, their environmental consequences are largely negative as is their impact on the national economy and on the economies of those regions where vacant dwellings are concentrated. Thus, our research questions the value of housing-led rural development, as they can result in excessive output of vacant and second homes and highlights the importance of adequately resourcing planning authorities if the worst excesses of rural housing overdevelopment are to be avoided.     

Transport Costs and Rural Development

Innovations that reduce costs of transport from rural locations may also reduce transport costs to rural areas. As transport costs fall, producers can afford to concentrate and achieve economies of scale. This paper explains an initially negative, but ultimately positive, relationship between reductions in transport costs and rural development. A two-region general equilibrium model with firm and worker spatial mobility highlights the firm and household location implications of costly transport-service use by both industry and agriculture in the context of scale economies and product differentiation. The computable general equilibrium model is initialized and verified with a bi-regional social accounting matrix and then used for simulations. Changes in relative transport costs are shown to affect relative regional wage rates, thus also determining the location of "production-cost-oriented" firms.     

绿色农业视角下青海特色农业发展路径及对策

绿色农业是二十一世纪农业发展的理想模式。青海独特的地域环境和资源条件形成了丰富的特色农业资源,也为发展绿色农业奠定了基础。文章通过对青海特色农业绿色化发展条件的分析,指出了特色农业的发展目标,并提出了实施路径及相关对策。     

农村合作医疗制度的历史考察

农村合作医疗制度是新中国农民在自愿互助的基础上建立起来的集体医疗保健制度。在20世纪50年代中期它随农业合作化运动的兴起而产生,1965年毛泽东的一月指示和“六·二六”指示推动其发展,1968～1969年《人民日报》组织的大讨论带来大办合作医疗的热潮。“文化大革命”后,合作医疗逐步实现制度化,但自80年代开始传统的合作医疗日趋萎缩。90年代以来党和政府为发展、完善合作医疗制度做出了很大的努力,进一步提出建立、完善新型合作医疗制度和医疗救助制度。农村合作医疗的实践积累了丰富的经验。农村合作医疗不仅是适合中国国情的保障农民防病治病的好办法,受到广大农民的欢迎,而且得到世界卫生组织的高度评价。     

Institutionalizing Participatory,Client-Driven Research and Technology Development in Agriculture

This article identifies key characteristics of participatory research and development(R&D) in the agricultural sector: it is client-driven, requires decentralized technology development, devolves to farmers the major responsibility for adaptive testing, and requires institutions and individuals to become accountable for the relevance and quality of technology on offer. Through case study material drawn from Latin America, Asia and Africa, the article then reviews ways by which institutions have responded to these characteristics and raises issues for further elaboration. Steps need to be taken, in particular, to safeguard equity, both between the more and less vocal groups of farmers, and between the requirements of present and future generations (the latter referring particularly to environmental concerns). It is argued that participatory R&D alone is insufficient to deliver innovations relevant to diverse client groups: policy mechanisms are required to define which clients are to participate, whose agendas are to drive the process, and what organizational innovations are needed to move agricultural R&D in these directions.