ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the role of various agencies in the field of rural economic development and specifically rural small firms policy, in order to understand the state and politics and their relationship to economic restructuring now calls for empirical evidence. Crises of accumulation in capitalist societies necessitate periodic and radical restructuring of production processes to establish new opportunities for profitable investment. As in so many other policy spheres, there has been a marked shift in the approach of central government to rural development in the 1980s. One of the distinctive features of British rural development policies and agencies is that traditionally they have existed in isolation from agricultural policy-making. Diversification to most agricultural support agencies remains one adjustment strategy which may be occasionally recommended as a tack-on enterprise to the mainstream agricultural activity.
