Rural Networks have been implemented as an instrument to enhance EU rural developmentpolicies in the funding period 2007-2013. Gaps in European programme documents concerningthe networks’ purpose and their evaluation led to a survey of the National Network Unitsbeing conducted in 2010. Besides investigating how these gaps are bridged nationally, the surveyaimed to provide an overview of the development of the networks, of the initial experiencesand challenges faced in running the networks, and to assess their potential impact.

Property regimes shape the social relations, in particular, social settings, and represent an important element for external intervention and sustainable rural development. The introduction recalls common aspects and specific conceptualisations of property analysis in the field of economics, sociology and social anthropology and summarises main academic discourses about property rights in order to develop a differentiated understanding of property. In Section 1, general trends in property relations characterising modern rural societies are outlined.

Faced with a changing economic environment (poor functioning of the groundnut sector, economic liberalization, etc.), rural households seek first and foremost to secure food for their families by diversifying their production and their economic activities in the village and in urban centres through temporary migration. In this context, the farm seen as an institution cannot be considered as a company in the sense of the classical economic theory. It corresponds more to a system of activities whose operation takes into account both market and family objectives.

While the development, processing and logistics of fossil resources is extremely concentrated and monopolysed, the production and utilisation of renewable energy – with the exception of larger hydroelectric plants – is deconcentrated. It is especially important that the renewable sources of energy available to us might play a decisive role in the uprise of the Hungarian countryside, as green energy production might be profitable even in areas where the land is less suitable for agriculture. There is a hot sea beneath 40% of the territory of the country.

It is well recognized that aggregation of the inhomogeneous data for soils, management, and weather within a land unit for crop simulation plays a key role in the scaling-up task of crop simulation at regional scales. While the other spatial data could be obtained at a desired level, weather data might not be available in mountainous regions where the production system is comprised of many small farms.

Through an examination of interventions in the agrarian structures and rural society of the Ecuadorian Andes over the past 40 years, this article explores the gradual imposition of a particular line of action that separates rural development from the unresolved question of the concentration of land ownership and wealth among the very few. This imposition has been the consequence, it is argued, of the new development paradigms implemented in Andean peasant communities since the end of land reform in the 1970s.

Mountainous rural communities have traditionally managed their land extensively, resulting in land uses that provide important ecosystem services for both rural and urban areas. Over recent decades, these communities have undergone drastic changes in economic structure, population size and land use. Our understanding of the exact mechanisms that drive these changes is limited, and there is also a lack of integrative approaches to enable decision makers to steer rural development towards a more sustainable path.

Ownership of agricultural land is very fragmented in Turkey, as is the case in countries within central Europe. This prevents agricultural efficiency from reaching desired levels. Land consolidation involves redistributing land ownership so that individual farmers own fewer, larger, more compact and more contiguous land parcels. In Turkey, generally voluntary land consolidation projects are performed, while some financial limitations and political conditions prevent land consolidation reach to its desired level.

A good deal of research has highlighted the surge and development of rural land sales and tenancy contracts in West Africa. However, the commoditization of land, especially through sales, does not appear to be obvious, as land transactions appear to be a major source of tenure insecurity and land conflicts. This issue is linked with the broader issue of identification and recognition of both the land rights that are being transferred and people holding them.

Este artículo pretende poner en discusión el tema del crecimiento económico, la demanda energética que este requiere, y los impactos territoriales que provocan las infraestructuras necesarias para suplir esta demanda. Esto desde la óptica del caso chileno, que por sus características energéticas la mayoría de estas se localizan en entornos rurales, sin embargo es en los territorios urbanos donde esta es mayormente consumida.

Regarding increasing pressures by global societal and climate change, the assessment of the impact of land use and land management practices on land degradation and the related decrease in sustainable provision of ecosystem services gains increasing interest. Existing approaches to assess agricultural practices focus on the assessment of single crops or statistical data because spatially explicit information on practically applied crop rotations is mostly not available.