Introduction

This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part discusses territorial behaviour. It describes Policy toward these areas and their political behavior often differs from the norm for the political region and hence creates spatial differentiations. One can recognize a behavioral territorial hierarchy formulation in the selection on "Space, Territory and Human Movements". The part suggests problems raised by structural aspects in the public management of natural resources. Structural-functional analysis in political geography has a well-developed tradition in the social sciences where the trend has long been dominant. The promise of structural-functionalism in the field of politics is nothing less than to provide a consistent and integrated theory from which can be derived explanatory hypotheses relevant to all aspects of a political system. Invariably aspects of size and shape of political territory are first isolated and examined in terms of the area's viability.