ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests some basic guidelines for a better understanding of contemporary peripheral rural areas as contexts for economic development. In the decades following World War II rural issues achieved a significant degree of prominence in the academic literature, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Four main approaches to rural issues are to be found during this period. They include: a neo-classical approach which focuses on the management of agricultural units or farms; a Marxist-oriented approach which stresses the social change taking place in the countryside; and a populist approach and a Catholic-inspired socio-economic approach, both focusing on the peasant family and on its modes of reproduction, trying to base in those families a third development path between capitalism and socialism. For those who are the critical descendants of the structuralist view, global integration gives added value to, and is based on, local differentiation, thus making territorial diversity a persistent characteristic of the world-economy itself.
