ABSTRACT
Studies of rural development have tended to adopt one of three approaches based on either chronology, location or land use. Each of these approaches can provide a useful structure for discussing rural development, but equally each tends to mislead the reader, albeit inadvertently. The chronological approach treats rural development in its historical context, reporting and interpreting events. This has tended either to treat all events as unique or to be excessively constrained by historicism in the Popperian sense. The second approach is locational, looking at areas, usually states, and describing each separately. This approach highlights the distinctive features of each country's experience, but rarely succeeds in investigating the extent to which motives and methods are similar in different countries. The land-use approach, which isolates agriculture from forestry, recreation and other activities, parallels the fragmented administrative structure and the sources of data which national governments employ for these land uses. This approach works well where decisions are taken, and policies implemented, relatively independently for each land use. When this assumption fails for either the private estate or the public domain the land-use approach to rural development becomes misleading.
