Networks — a new paradigm of rural development?

The network concept has become widely utilised in socioeconomic studies of economic life. Following the debates around exogenous and endogenous development, networks may also have particular utility in understanding diverse forms of rural development. This paper assesses whether networks provide a new paradigm of rural development. It seeks to capture a series of differing perspectives on economic networks — including political economy, actor-network theory and theories of innovation and learning — and attempts to show how these perspectives might be applied to different types of rural areas. The paper demarcates two main “bundles” of networks: “vertical” networks — that is, networks that link rural spaces into the agro-food sector — and “horizontal” networks — that is, distributed network forms that link rural spaces into more general and non-agricultural processes of economic change. It is argued that rural development strategies must take heed of network forms in both domains and that rural policy should be recast in network terms.