Rural Resilience as a New Development Concept

This chapter aims to apply the ecological concept of ‘resilience’ to the socio-economic development of the rural region. It argues that two elements are crucial for and prerequisite to ‘rural resilience’: (1) regional specialisation and, connected with that, the development of regional clusters; and (2) the regional ability to transform. In our view rural resilience is shaped within the context of social, economic and environmental (biophysical) possibilities and constraints. This means that ‘rural resilience’ is inextricably connected to the design of the rural landscape; that is, landscape design and spatial organisation determine and influence ‘rural resilience’. In this chapter, we focus on two main functions of rural areas, namely agriculture and the supply of rural services, such as agro-tourism and nature and landscape management.