Rural development
The Division of Rural Development engages in international research, teaching and cooperation that contributes to scholarship and practice on the subject of development and sustainability in rural areas across the Global North and South.
Across the globe, rural areas are undergoing rapid transformations caused by social and economic policies and movements and climate and environmental change. In these dynamic contexts, we engage with issues of justice, knowledge and power in rural transformations and environmental politics. Rural development is an interdisciplinary field of study based in the social sciences, in which we pay special attention to how ideas about development have material consequences in specific contexts.
The subject has its roots at SLU in 1996, then with research predominantly in the Global South. It was divided into two groups to highlight the need for rural development research in the Global North as well. The two groups focus on parallel yet interconnected development in the Global South and North (Sweden and Europe) and collaborate to approach rural areas as material spaces with networks of relations that span the rural and the urban across the world, the global North and South.
We bring unique insights into questions that concern the world today in relation to rural development and the environment through our work across the Global North and South, such as questions of natural resource governance, global and local inequalities, and the rise of authoritarianism and nationalism. Our strength lies in our commitment to probing how development processes unfold through interdisciplinary conceptualizations and participatory methodologies, often building on long-term field engagement. Collegiality forms the bedrock of our work together.