The Quest for Ecological Modernization 437are incorporated into the analysis of how those broader and long-term conditions
could be improved. A central question to consider is the extent to which scholars
engage with the debates and assumptions of territorial and environmental justice.
That is, having identified injustices in the uneven risk, distribution and quality of
resources in space, how far should we go in formulating ways of reducing or compen-
sating for this unevenness? For instance, it is quite clear from work on forestry and
community in South Wales (see Marsden et al, 2003) that any attempts by the UK
Forestry Commission^2 to encourage more participation and inclusion in the forested
areas is constrained by the quite long history of growing social and spatially based
deprivation of the nearby communities, for which the withdrawal of other state serv-
ices and support structures has played a full part. Similarly, the growing social science
research in the areas of food scarcity, and the identification of (both price and qual-
ity) ‘food deserts’ – often themselves hidden enclaves in larger, prosperous cities and
regions, see Wrigley (2002) – demonstrates, on the one hand, the acute unevenness
of rights to food consumption that the now corporate retailer-led supply chains have
reproduced. The question is, however, not simply the issue of the empirical identifi-
cation of these disparities. It also concerns how an engaging social science of rural
development and food formulates alternatives which reduce and combat these. In
the rural development field, while many of the grant-aided funding schemes emanat-
ing out of the EU still have (at least ostensibly) a strong territorial justice philosophy
behind them (e.g. Structures funding, LEADER, Less Favoured Areas, etc.), the
emphasis of a social capital and capacity logic governing local and regional alloca-
tions systems inevitably means that many rural groups and localities are failing to
develop the critical mass to establish and capture such funding benefits.^3
Hence, we can see here that progressing environmental and territorial justice
questions are almost unavoidable in addressing these new developmental trends
(see Economic and Social Research Council, 2001). For instance, what are the
consequences of the further concentration of resources and economic develop-
ment? What sort of trade-offs are possible or legitimate? How can injustices be
compensated, monetarily and non-monetarily? How can a more multi-level-gov-
ernance system in the rural development sphere (i.e. combinations of EU, national,
regional and local policy platforms) progress a renewed set of regional and local
convergence policies? Moreover, what are the social and political effects of persist-
ent territorial injustices: in and through different rural spaces?
Community and association
Much of the social science of the environment literature (see, for instance, Irwin,
2001) and rural social nature debates have tended to so far underplay one of the
traditional strengths of rural sociology: community. Somewhat surprising perhaps
is that notions of community and association have failed to re-emerge as an impor-
tant working and active mechanism between the social and the natural (but see
Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2002). Two examples illustrate this from our work
on farming and rural development, and from the forestry and community work.