Understanding the diversity of European rural areas - Transition Pathways towards Sustainability in Agriculture: Case Studies from Europe - page 46

rotation forests; employment rate in primary sector; rate of specialized farming),
consumption pressures (nights spent in camping grounds; share of urban areas according to
OECD urban/rural typology; UNESCO world heritage sites; employment in recreation
activities) and protection interests (share of total NUTS 2 area occupied by Natura 2000
sites; share of rural areas according to OECD rural/urban typology; share of mountain
areas; rate of holdings with organic farming), at the regional level NUTS 2.
The six clusters represent the combination of the three drivers of rural occupancy, and
can therefore be characterized as: Cluster 1: Consumption countryside; Cluster 2: Mixed
countryside; Cluster 3: High nature value and consumption; Cluster 4: Consumption in
agricultural countryside; Cluster 5: High nature values; Cluster 6: Specialized agriculture.
As with any other typology, the picture would be changed if a few of the selected
variables were excluded and other variables included. However, despite this limitation it is
worthwhile reflecting on the challenges raised by this new combination of drivers affecting
European rural areas. If we want to understand how agriculture will progress and how
sustainable it may be in the future, we also need to understand the multiple drivers affecting
rural areas which interact with the agricultural sector. In areas where agriculture has
difficulty being competitive in global markets, the pathway towards sustainability in the
future may be a different agriculture structure, sustained by those who consume the
countryside such as lifestyle farmers and urban citizens. In areas with high conservation
value, the pathway towards sustainability may be the acknowledgement and compensation
of the conservation role of traditional farming. Such novel combinations are still to be fully
acknowledged by the dominant administrative and policy regimes and therefore are not
fully unfolded.
Conclusion
In this chapter we have noted the enormous diversity of land use and socio-economic
conditions in rural Europe. Our understanding of change can be explored through the lens
of individual land management units if our focus is household dynamics, but it became
clear from the early 1990s that treating each farm as an independent economic entity failed
to capture the empirical diversity of adjustment processes and the wider connections to
regional economies. Farms were thoroughly embedded within distinct rural economies in
many complex ways, particularly through off-farm pluriactivity, and increasingly, via a
number of other means such as direct sales. Furthermore, farmers are embedded in local
communities and these have been in a state of flux in many parts of Europe and are today
diverse in terms of actors and networks with changing social values and new concerns, and
are also often reshaping relations with urban communities. Consequently, understanding
regional diversity has emerged as a subject of scrutiny and several authors have
conceptualized new differences across rural Europe, in farming and in relation to the state
of the rural as a whole.
Social science has been relatively quick to engage in these changing ruralities, once the
baggage of old style rural sociology and narrowly conceived farm economics was left
behind in favour of a broader view of rural economic space (Woods, 2011). Rural areas of
Europe are now much more impacted by consumption of rural space than in the recent past
but we should not forget that although there have been some significant changes in the
policy architecture, support for production remains dominant in terms of the injection of