ABSTRACT
For more than a decade, scholars and policy makers have been deliberating on the changing nature of state activity in contemporary societies. Central to this process has been an ostensible shift in the way rule is exercised, from that of government by a central authority known as ‘the state’ to new forms of governance enacted by a range of state and non-state actors. While initial literature on the subject tended to imply that governance was essentially an urban phenomena (see Pierre 1998), a substantial body of research has since been undertaken on the topic of rural governance to show that the extent and impact of such changes are equally significant for rural economies and societies (see, for example, Edwards et al. 2001; Eversole and Martin 2005; Goodwin 1998; Herbert-Cheshire 2000; MacKinnon 2002; Marsden and Murdoch 1998).
