The Ruralities in Global Policies

Abstract

This paper aims at providing a scheme, theoretical and historical as well, of contemporaneous changes of rural societies by referring to the specific experience of west-European countries. This concept of rural – that opened the field of rural sociology – can be seen as an historical construction: it was elaborated by hybridizing the model of modernisation and the disappearing peasant worlds; it was actually a political and cultural compromise that gave a place to rural populations in the modernity mainly in reference to public goods. Today the dominant paradigm is one of market competition but it must also be articulated to public goods especially environmental goods at the global level. This is an on-going process that leads to a great variety of policies, rules, organisations (dispositives) that concern life (from animal to global change) and contribute to define new ruralities. Resulting regimes of rurality, as configurations of relations between global processes and territories, are briefly described. These dispositives have to be analysed by social sciences especially in order to understand the new inequalities and exclusions of this globalised world.