New Communities of Interest in Rural Development and Agro-food Studies: an Exploration of Some Key Concepts

To what extent are we witnessing the application of a more ecologically modernising development process in advanced economies? This paper suggests that we are, and begins to assess what this means for rural development processes and their realities. Such a process requires, it is argued more theoretically engaged rural and environmental social science which attempts to reconstruct conceptual frameworks to ‘progress’ as well as to ‘critically interpret’ the modernisation process it confronts. The paper outlines six key conceptual starting points: environmental and territorial justice, community and association, exclusion and empowerment, consumption and production relations, corporate responsibility and accountability; and regulation and bureaucratic professionalisation. Exploration of these suggests the need to place production and consumption relations within the context of these potentially revised and more ecologically grounded processes of modernisation.