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The Quest for Ecological Modernization:
Re-Spacing Rural Development and
Agrifood Studies
Terry Marsden
Over recent years the sub-disciplines of rural sociology, development studies and
the newly emerging social science of the environment have been attempting to
address many of the same types of theoretical and empirical questions albeit from
different starting points. The rural sociology of advanced economies has for a long
time now drawn very productively from the field of development studies, even if
both have remained quite distinct sub-disciplines with their own communities of
interest and professional publication outlets (see Long, 2000). Similarly, the growth
of work on the sociology of the environment, particularly in the European and
North American context, has attempted to very much set its own broad agenda,
but has done so in ways which have overlapped with the theoretical agenda of the
more traditional rural sociology. Buttel (1996) and Frouws and Mol (1999) have
traced the ways in which rural sociology acted as a ‘formative’ sub-discipline to the
wider environmental sociology. And they question the extent to which these form-
ative roles are gradually being reversed. The former’s increasing ecumenical con-
cern for aspects of rural nature, as almost a ‘last refuge’ in the process of urban and
industrially based modernization, has meant that it has been the originator of sig-
nificant theoretical and conceptual impulses into the wider and growing debates
which have encapsulated environmental social science. While the latter, it might be
argued, has taken on a more industrial and urban basis – addressing questions of
ecological modernization, for instance, – it has also needed to refer to key authors in
the older, parental disciplines of rural and development sociology (see Murphy,
2000). Indeed, all three sub-areas witness the creative engagement of several key
authors who have their origins in rural sociology and anthropology. None of these
authors would just regard themselves as rural sociologists per se; rather they are con-
tributing to wider sociological and geographical debates concerning nature, space
Reprinted from Marsden T. 2004. The quest for ecological modernization: Re-spacing rural develop-
ment and agri-food studies. Sociologica Ruralis 44(2), 129–147, Blackwell Publishing Ltd.