Rural areas are places where various social groups live either permanently or seasonally. The mobilities and immobilities of these groups are related to their differential resources. The vast impact of the financial crisis on Greece relates to the major decline of its GDP and enormous increase in unemployment. The article aims to shed light on the complexities of social marginalisation and social exclusion in rural Greece, but also, and more importantly, to theorise the coping mechanisms and strategies by those affected and build upon the experiences of rural areas during the prolonged economic crisis. Population dynamics and the various social and spatial mobilities in rural areas provide the baseline for tracing rural complexities and theorising the emergent coping strategies. The concepts of rural cosmopolitanism and resilience are used to unpack the complexities of marginalisation and social exclusion in rural Greece. A brief reference to the statistical data resolves the apparent controversies related to the changing regional and local geography of poverty and social exclusion in Greece during the crisis. The more focused empirical findings, illustrated in the form of two island areas, illustrate the various coping mechanisms and strategies that are emerging in rural Greece.
Despite a longstanding literature on small farm-households, there is limited consideration of small farms' role in food and nutrition security (FNS) at territorial level. The purpose of this study is to provide insights about how small farms contribute to FNS at different territorial scales, by focusing on farmers' strategies and consequential FNS outcomes. Analysis is based on two years (2017-2019) of field work done with farmers and food system actors in SALSA reference regions culminating in a workshop done with research partners. We find that small farms deliver food and nutrition security and other socioeconomic and environmental outcomes for the farmhousehold, at local, regional and global levels. The regional level is shown to be critical for small farms, as it provides the scale at which their diversity is realised. Understanding this diversity is a goal for both research and for effective support mechanisms for small farm integration, and the multiple public and private functions small farms can deliver should be higher on the policy agenda.
The aim of this paper is to explore the linking process between a niche and the regime in the context of an emergent transition, using the concepts of 'anchoring' and 'translation' embedded in the broader multi-level perspective. The case study concerns the transition of an intensive farming system, from subsidy oriented productivism, towards an integrated farming (IF) system focusing on the market, in the canned peach sector in Imathia, Northern Greece. The study revealed an anchored regime-triggered innovation, which resulted in the creation of a market niche within the incumbent regime. In this transition, all forms of anchoring are involved, and various forms of translation were encountered while a hybrid forum was identified, serving as the 'fertile ground' upon which all subsequent networking and translation activities took place. Research findings question a clear-cut analytical separation between the three levels of the multi-level perspective, as well as the relevance of a bottomup procedure as a prerequisite for niche emergence vis-à-vis policy induced change.
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