Rural Development - Global North

The subject of Rural development in Sweden and Europe (Gobal North) was established in 2005 due to the urgent need for research on Swedish and European rural development. The increasing importance of attention to rural development in the global North had brought attention to the scattered and the meagre research on the subject in Sweden. 

Changes in the world since 2005 have only shown the astuteness of SLU’s decision to establish the subject. Our research is sought after like never before as we face challenges of sustainability and need a critical perspective on development and environmental questions today. We are one of very few academic institutions in Europe, and the only in Sweden, dedicated to the study of European rural development. Our research is grounded in the major challenges confronting rural areas in Sweden and Europe today and our work shows how there is no sustainability without social justice. To deal with sustainability challenges, we work towards better understandings of the social, political and cultural contexts of policy interventions and everyday life in rural areas. Together with our division's ›cooperation and extension team‹, we nurture a network of researchers working on rural development and collaborate with practitioners and policymakers.

By bringing to bear intersectional perspectives of power on the issues of rural  development, forestry and forest lives, energy, climate interventions, rural governance and local democracy, rural entrepreneurship, food security, agricultural and forest labor markets as well as migration we challenge  mainstream imaginations of the rural as residual, uninhabited, spaces for extraction and passive providers of food and natural resources.