ABSTRACT
There are many different actors involved in the production and reproduction of the rural: rural residents and in-migrants, farmers, corporations, tourists and visitors, the media, lobby groups, academic researchers, and a plethora of other social actors, as well as non-human actors including plants and animal, as discussed in previous chapters. This chapter focuses on the role of the state in the production, reproduction and regulation of the rural. The state’s involvement is extensive and takes several different forms. The state is fi rst of all active in defi ning the rural through offi cial classifi cations of rural and urban areas that are subsequently employed in both the framing and the delivery of government policy, and through various non-governmental actors in lay interpretations of where is rural (see Chapter 2). The state is also involved in describing the rural, through the collation and analysis of statistics about the rural economy, population and environment, and through the production of maps and reports that portray and document the rural. These descriptions inform government policy, but they are mobile representations that can be translated and deployed in different ways by a variety of actors. For example, maps of the rural landscape initially produced by state cartographic agencies for military purposes, or to assist with the process of governing, are put to new use by tourists who utilize them to access the countryside for leisure and recreation.
