Beyond agriculture? Regulating the new rural spaces

The analysis of agrarian uneven development has tended to treat agriculture and the food system as something of a bounded and discrete element within the wider sweep of capitalist evolution. This paper begins to problematize this conception by examining some new parameters of uneven development given significant changes in the political economy of agriculture and rural development over the past decade. It does this with reference to recently completed extensive and intensive research conducted across Western Europe and, more specifically, in particular localities in England. In the latter parts of the paper some key dynamic concepts are introduced which need incorporating into the understanding of the diversity of the new rural spaces. We need to do more than simply recognize this diversity by understanding how it emerges, for whom, and by whom.