Abstract :
There has been an increasingly noticeable silence at the centre of contemporary rural studies concerning the ways in which rural areas are governed. This is in sharp contrast to other areas of the social sciences, where issues of governance have recently assumed major prominence. This paper sets out to explore this rather curious neglect, initially by examining the governance literatures now found across the social sciences, and then through using these to identify and delineate some important research questions for those concerned with understanding contemporary rural change.
