The Quest for Ecological Modernisation: Re‐Spacing Rural Development and Agri‐Food Studies

Abstract

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 new 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. Significant potentialities now exist to further deepen the theoretical and conceptual engagement between environmental social theory and rural sociology, not least to strengthen what might be new pathways for rural development.