European Integration and Rural Development: Actors, Institutions and Power

摘要

European Integration and Rural Development responds to the evident and somewhat surprising lack of attention to rural policy and governance in the scholarship on the European integration project. While this omission perhaps reflects the knee-jerk presumption of the countryside as the perpetual periphery, this volume's contribution is pertinent considering that regional and rural policies, such as the LEADER+ under focus here, continue to represent the vast majority of expenditure under the EU budget. It is of course the theoretical lens which one chooses to provide focus that conditions what is most clearly visible and the first chapter provides a critical outline of the most prominent European integration theories. The focus on the rural in this volume means that this is essentially a study of the local-level implications and manifestations of European integration. The chosen multi-level governance (MLG) framework complemented by a structural-constructivist methodology applied to a comparative case study of the implementation of the LEADER+ programme in Finland and Germany serves this purpose well. This amalgamation of a largely structuralist theoretical framework with the more interpretative, epistemologically different methodology in the analysis of rural governance forms the second novel contribution that the volume makes and responds to many of the criticisms previously levelled at the popular MLG framework.