Call for papers: Rural Change: Re-Valorisation of Property Objects and the Institutionalisation of (New) Property Rights

http://www.inderscience.com/browse/callpaper.php?callID=534

Call for papers: Rural Change: Re-Valorisation of Property Objects and the Institutionalisation of (New) Property Rights

A special issue of the International Journal of Agricultural Resources, Governance and Ecology (IJARGE)

Important Dates

Deadline for Submission: 30 April, 2007

Guest Editors: Marianne Penker, University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU), Austria and Lutz Laschewski, University of Rostock, Germany

This special issue will address processes of institutionalisation in the context of fundamental social changes that currently can be observed globally. It will particularly draw upon the experiences in rural Europe, a context in which social scientists conceptualise current social dynamics as a shift from industrial to a post-industrial or knowledge society. A variety of economic, social and political processes has transformed social relations in the countryside (Marsden et al. 1993). The processes have effected massive changes not only in land use but also the economic, political and socio-cultural relations surrounding land.

One of the main causes of rural change is the transformation of agriculture and its relation to the countryside itself. The contribution of the agricultural sector to rural income and employment has been declining through recent decades (OECD 1998; Bryden and Bollmann 2000; Laschewski et al. 2002). Agricultural development has been increasingly separated from the overall rural economy and society (van der Ploeg 1990; Tovey 1998).

At the same time, the accelerating globalisation of agro-industrial corporations has reshaped the conditions for agriculture (Goodman and Redclift 1991; Watts 1996). Globalisation has changed the spatial order of agriculture (Bonanno and Bradley 1994). It has forced concentration tendencies of agricultural production in more favorable areas and marginalised producers in less favored areas, bringing about negative environmental externalities (European Commission 2000). New usages of nature and land emerge and processes of re-valorisation of rural property objects take place, which require the institutionalisation of new property rights and the redefinition and reshaping of former property rights.

The special issue draws on the general assumption that property offers a potent analytical framework to examine and compare contemporary processes of rural transformation and differentiation in Europe. Property research has been characterised by a separation into different research traditions, such as institutional economics, legal anthropology, law and sociology or political science. This issue, therefore, proposes a rather unique attempt to bridge the divide and to take advantage of the different research traditions for an innovative compilation of empirically founded papers on the revalorisation of property objects and the institutionalisation and redefinition of property rights in natural resource management, agriculture and rural land use.

For more information, please see the Journal Call for Papers website.