ABSTRACT
The preceding case studies were selected so as to provide a range of different geographical and sociopolitical contexts in which to examine policies and plans for rural people in the developed world. These contexts range from small and compact nation-states to vast subcontinents with high levels of internal diversity. The accounts of rural policies reflect these differences of scale, and although terms such as ‘peripheral’ and ‘marginal’ have been coined in each of the countries under scrutiny, there are significant variations in marginality to be acknowledged, for example between the north of the Netherlands and northern Canada or peripheral areas of the USSR. Remoteness should, therefore, be recognized as at least partly a scale-determined phenomenon, and the consequent range of scales on display in this book is liable in many ways to skew comparative analysis of remote rural areas.
