International Journal of Rural Management

As early as the industrial revolution, rural depopulation occurred in all Western countries due to the attraction of cities and declining agricultural employment. In Israel, that decline accelerated after the mid-1980s of the last century. However, the proportion of rural households in Israel has declined less than in France, which this study uses for comparison. The small size of Israel has allowed young families to inhabit the countryside while working in nearby cities.

Such rural urbanization has not happened in Israel’s periphery, such as the Eshkol region (western Negev), where bad public transportation makes it harder to commute to Beer Sheva or Tel Aviv. Nowadays, low birth rate, ageing population and progressive depopulation characterize the Eshkol region. This study looks at the authorities’ coping with the ‘rural exodus’ comparing it to that of French authorities in the Limousin peripheral region.

The tea plantations in the Northeast Indian state of Assam, launched by the British colonial regime in the mid-nineteenth century, had considerably transformed the socio-economic profile of the state. Its impact on the state’s peasant economy, however, was enervating. Controlled by the British companies, the plantation sector saw few local planters, although a section of the Assamese peasants traditionally engaged in tea cultivation in their homestead on a small scale. After India’s independence, many Indian entrepreneurs entered the plantation sector largely because of the departure of the British planters. The Assamese entrepreneurs found it difficult to emulate this due to lack of capital. Since the 1970s, however, a significant section of the local small and middle peasants, as a part of a conscious drive, took to small tea plantation (STP). The last two decades have witnessed a dramatic growth in the number of such small planters, which has brought about a major change in the rural social landscape of Assam.

Attempts to discuss small-scale artisanal mining (ASM) within the lenses of environment–poverty paradox have had two contending schools of thought. The first lens is the most dominant and holds that a single factor, ‘poverty’, drives people into ASM. The second lens contends that multiples of complex factors better explain who and why rural populations elect to enter employment in ASM. The literature appears to have largely focused on the single perspective, while the multi-complex web of factors has been largely ignored or at best just mentioned in passing. Employing the multi-complex perspective, this article provides a novel framework for unpacking the multiple factors that drive rural people into ASM in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We argue that a single factor (‘poverty’) is inadequate to explain why rural people choose ASM as an alternative livelihood source and any policy intervention based on such perspective may rarely succeed. Our discussion highlights that institutional failure, including foreign/external takeover, poor politico-regulatory environment and unfavourable climate have sanctioned rural people to engage in such arduous and unsafe livelihood support activity which degrades the environment. Both theoretical and empirical studies from SSA have been used to support the argument.

Evidences world over largely acknowledge the contribution of empowered women on education and health of the family. Since all over the world microfinance (MF) is mainly intervened through women, their economic empowerment should have a salubrious impact on poverty and social variables. The linkage of MF with Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) accepted by United Nations in 2010 further boosted this belief. However, literature on MF linkage with social transformations does not provide concrete evidence. In this article, with the help of a set of 92 cross-country pooled data for 9 years (2007–15), a linkage assessment of MF and MDGs related to poverty, that is, poverty headcount ratio and school enrolment at primary level of female and ratio of girls to boys in primary education, that is, Gender Parity Index, is attempted. With the help of pooled ordinary least square regression, three models were separately developed for the selected MDGs. While the findings do provide evidence about the participation of poor in MF and poverty reduction linkage, the education-related MDGs were less influenced by the MF programme. This prompts to suggest that overall capacity-building interventions at grass-roots level are also required along with MF for achieving MDGs.

This research note provides an anthropological insight on Seafood Kitchen, a microenterprise under ‘Theeramythri’—the flagship project of Society for Assistance to Fisherwomen (SAF) in Kerala. SAF as an agency was formed in a critical situation where the livelihood aspects and resources of the coastal communities were destroyed after Tsunami in 2004. Department of fisheries under government of Kerala initiated and established microenterprises for fisherwomen under ‘Theeramythri’ to make use of the local resources through women empowerment. Seafood Kitchen was one of the many initiatives of Theeramythri. With the intervention and support of government and organizations like SAF, fisherwomen now come forward to take up microenterprises and their involvement shows remarkable changes in family and society. The present study highlights the different aspects of Seafood Kitchen and its scope for development of fisherwomen in the coast of Kerala from an etic perspective.