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Rural areas are essential for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), necessitating the evaluation of rural sustainability transitions. A precondition for evaluating sustainable rural development is to adapt the SDGs to rural contexts while maintaining global comparability. Besides, tradeoff relationships among evaluation indicators should be captured to overcome the limitations of traditional weighting aggregation methods. In this study, we propose an integrated framework that incorporates the SDGs into a composite indicator system for assessing sustainable rural development. Our framework quantifies these indicators using the index thresholds outlined in the SDGs dashboard, along with customized rules that reflectrural contexts. Furthermore, we employ the Pareto ranking approach to evaluate the sustainable development potentials of rural areas regarding tradeoff relationships among different indicators. In a case study of Zhaoyuan City, China, our findings indicate that only 20 % of the sustainable development goals are achieved on average across all indicator dimensions. The economic and social dimensions are closer to their ideal targets and more compatible with each other, while the ecological dimension remains relatively unsustainable. Sustainable rural development depends primarily on natural resource endowment, ecological sustainability, and residential sustainability of villages. Understanding tradeoff relationships among different indicators enables us to better adapt rural policies to the specific contexts of villages. • Incorporating the SDGs for comprehensive assessment of sustainable rural development. • Constructing composite indicator system for global comparability and local rural contexts. • Redefining potentials for rural sustainability as Pareto ranks of villages across indicators. • Identification of targeted rural policies based on tradeoff relationships of indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International efforts to combat climate change are reflected in diverse national and subnational policies, the effects of which can stimulate fundamental changes in land use at the regional scale. Since 2012, the Australian Government has provided incentives for landholders to implement "carbon farming" through methods that either sequester or avoid the release of carbon emissions in vegetation and soils. While the factors leading to individual landholder adoption of carbon farming is widely researched, there is comparatively limited analysis of broader community perceptions and potential impacts of its resulting changes in land use and management. This research uses semi-structured interviews and qualitative analysis to explore community perceptions of carbon farming in the vast and remote Mulga Lands of Queensland, Australia, a region that supports nearly 200 carbon projects across 7 million hectares. We found that individual landholders were motivated to adopt carbon farming primarily for the economic benefits, despite sharing concerns with the broader community over potential environmental and social impacts. Long-standing local attitudes, values and beliefs around perceived desirable natural landscapes, and their role in maintaining agricultural production, underpin a view that non-active land management and absentee land ownership – considered by some in the community to be a consequence of carbon farming – would contribute to ongoing rural decline. Our findings show that the scale and pace of land use changes facilitated by carbon farming have led to a community impact in the Mulga Lands. Such impacts must be explicitly considered in future research, policy and planning to ensure land use transitions stimulated by carbon farming policy are effectively and fairly managed. • Carbon farming can provide economic benefits to rural landholders. • Economic incentives motivated adoption in the Mulga lands, despite community concerns. • A mismatch in normative expectations and carbon farming has led to negative community impacts. • There is mistrust and uncertainty around carbon farming in the Mulga Lands. • Policy and planning should seek to manage carbon farming land use transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid urbanization has led to the sharp decline of some rural villages. Idle rural residential land (IRRL) is symbolic of rural decline, and the academic community is in urgent need of quantitative studies on the spatial pattern of IRRL from the perspective of geography. Taking Pinggu as a case area, we explored the spatial pattern and layout mode of IRRL and evaluated its utilizability and reuse under different spatial layout modes. Our findings show that the idle rate of rural residential land (RRL) in Pinggu, which is in a suburb of a metropolis, is more serious than that of urban land. The patches of IRRL are generally small and fragmented, showing the characteristics of overall dispersion and local agglomeration of the whole area. The agglomerative point type and scattered point type are the main spatial layout modes of IRRL. In villages, the spatial distribution of IRRL is characterized by a small and scattered point distribution, and large-area polygon agglomeration and belt agglomeration are relatively less common. The utilizability of IRRL in Pinggu decreases from the urban fringe to the surrounding rural area. The utilizability of the agglomerative polygon type, agglomerative belt type, and agglomerative point type in the urban suburbs and agricultural plains areas is higher, while the utilizability of the scattered strip type and scattered point type in the northern and eastern suburban mountainous areas is lower. Our research contributes to filling the gap in the geographical quantitative research on IRRL by exploring the interactions between humans and land under rural decline and providing a theoretical basis for the revitalization of declining rural areas and the coordinated development of urban and rural areas. • Idle rural residential land is a type of symbolic land use of rural decline. • Rapid urbanization caused unprecedentedly growing idle rural residential land. • Different idle rural residential land patterns always present different utilization potential. • The spatial pattern of idle rural residential land should be considered as the fundamental element for its reutilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural decline is an inevitable process as human society transforms from the agrarian to the urban-industrial economy, and further on to the knowledge economy. Through an extensive literature review, this paper aims to interpret why some rural areas decline while some others do not. The findings show that it is by the interactions between rural areas and the external environment that rural communities either grow, decline or even vanish. The paper emphasizes the necessity to improve rural communities' resilient capacity through adjusting their internal components' function and structure to survive the external changes. In this process, rural livelihood diversification, the creation of market oriented institutions and strong social capital are considered to enhance rural resilience and build up sustaining rural communities. Finally, three conditions for sustainable rural development in the knowledge economy are discussed: 1) development of new economic activities that can respond to potential urban demand; 2) local entrepreneurship that can establish and expand these new activities; and 3) social capital that can support the entrepreneurship in new activities with access to credits, labor, human capital, external markets and external knowledge for learning and innovation. • Rural decline is an inevitable phenomenon as human society transforms. • Interactions between rural areas and the external environment decide rural evolution. • Rural communities' resilient capacity must be enhanced against external challenges. • Collaboration within & between local actor groups is needed for rural revitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's rapid urbanization growth during the past decades which has highly promoted its affluence has induced various challenges for the countryside. The problem of rural decline of quite many villages which are suffering depopulation in turn challenges the urbanization sustainability in China. By way of in-depth historical and literature review, the paper finds distorted urban-rural relationship and the tendency of village decline owing to China's long time urban biased policy. By further investigating China's new-type urbanization strategy, the paper draws concerns about future rural development which is less mentioned in the plan. It calls for ruralization and actions to revitalize the countryside so as to be adapted to China's new-type urbanization plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is necessary for rural communities to meet conditions of decline, including depopulation, with effective strategies for rural revival and revitalisation. Based on Hirschman’s ‘exit-voice’ theory, this paper investigates the way in which local stakeholders respond to processes of rural depopulation. Case studies undertaken in Xiaoguan village in China and in Åre in Sweden reveal the effectiveness of bottom-up revitalization initiatives in combating rural decline. We show how local stakeholders’ strong “voices” in these places—which called for improved living conditions and increased job opportunities—held people and groups together, encouraging them to work together with shared values and attitude. The strong leadership demonstrated either by local committees or in stakeholders’ self-organized actions played an important role in carrying out revitalisation initiatives. We highlight the importance of not only reviving economies but also creating desirable rural lifestyles. Our findings also emphasize the need for bottom-up initiatives to align with government policy and regional development plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the impact of a new extractive industry, namely unconventional natural gas, on rural decline. Rural decline is defined as comprising loss of rural youth, reduced human capital and increasing rural poverty. Since the start of the current century, the unconventional natural gas industry has been expanding around the world, often in close proximity to pre-existing agricultural communities. The social impacts of this new industry represent a growing area of interest in rural studies. We contribute to this new research area through a case study of coal seam gas (CSG) development in Queensland, Australia, comparing regions where gas development occurred between 2001 and 2011 against a control group of similar regions without gas development. The study eliminated the influence of non-resident workforces by analysing census data based on place of usual residence as well as place of enumeration. A key finding of the study is that regions with CSG development have experienced a growing youth share of the population and, of particular note, a growing female youth share of the population. CSG regions had a higher proportion of youth with university degrees and advanced technical training compared to other rural regions. Poverty reduction was also observed in some specific CSG regions. The extensive spatial footprint of unconventional gas and increased female rural youth populations indicate a diversion from traditional boomtown social impacts observed in previous energy booms. Taken together, the results show signs of mitigating and reversing rural community decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In the context of changes wrought by globalisation and subsequent neoliberal responses, studies of locally-specific institutional frameworks of governance may suggest more effective ways of responding to rural economic decline. There is no consensus as to whether collaborative forms of governance empower regions to successfully adapt to economic change and the mechanisms through which partnerships may influence the distribution of resources. In this article we examine how formalised partnerships between governments, businesses, not-for-profit and community-based organisations facilitate integrated responses to rural decline. Research on partnership governance to date has tended to focus on power from either a relational, or a strategic-relational/structuralist point of view. We draw on literature that combines these approaches to examine how policy actors are able to generate and assemble resources to address problems through place-based partnerships. Using documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews, a case study of the Cradle Coast Authority in Northwest Tasmania shows that partnerships generate networks through micro-processes that enhance collective efficacy and build political capital amongst key policy actors, which are important pre-conditions for effective rural planning and decision making and policy development to distribute resources to address rural problems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Tension between dominant urban political and economic centres and associated rural communities continues despite various programs to decentralisation. This phenomenon is often explained in terms of a core-periphery political economy. To generate complementary explanatory hypotheses from a social perspective, we examine the impacts of rural–urban community interactions on the development of social norms such as the strength of mutual cooperation. We explore this using deliberately abstracted models of the “Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma” to represent intra- and inter-community interactions, in regionalised and centralised interaction arrangements. We have considered changes in mutual cooperation as an indicator of social capital dynamics. In our model, increasing interaction of rural communities with urban centres increases “non-cooperative” behaviour of members of the small rural communities. Moreover, as the strength of centralisation (the proportion of interaction between each rural community and the urban centre as compared with the interaction among rural communities) increases, cooperative behaviour among the members of smaller rural communities and mutual cooperation with individuals of larger urban centre decreases. Our hypothesis is that interaction with urban centres disrupts norms used in resolving local social dilemmas. If so, this partly explains the dissatisfaction expressed in rural–urban relations, which may be a fundamental emergent property of particular settlement patterns. Understanding these relationships could guide better policies to facilitate rural–urban interactions in the worldwide trend towards regionalism. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Rural development has lagged behind in contrast to the rapid development of urban areas in China and one of the biggest consequences for this change is the serious rural out-migration. The accompanying demographic problems represented by serious rural population aging and underdeveloped rural population educational level are under-researched. By comparing the average population age and educational level with and without the large number of the exodus of rural residents in rural area, this research calculated the specific impacts of rural out-migration on rural population aging and educational level in Hubei, Central China. The average age of rural population in Hubei has increased by 2.67, and the average education year of rural population in Hubei has decreased by 0.42 by not taking into account the huge group of rural out-migration in 2010. Research results indicated that rural out-migration has significantly intensified the rural population aging and deterioration of education level. And furthermore, the influences and underlying reasons of the changing rural demographic were interpreted far and wide. The counties in Hubei were divided into eight categories according to population aging, educational level and the comprehensive impacts of out-migration on the former two. Well-calibrated and differential development strategies were put forward according to various categories to which the areas belong to revitalize the rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We systematically investigated the history and potential impact of land consolidation in China. • The mechanism of land consolidation promoting rural revitalization was analyzed. • Land consolidation can provide a platform and lever and injects vitality for revitalizing the countryside. • Land consolidation is moving towards multi-objective and multi-functional transformation. • Land consolidation shows its social, economic and ecological benefits, but its potential risks cannot be ignored. Land consolidation has multi-functionality. Most of the existing researches focus on the supplementary function of cultivated land, but lack of systematic research on its function of promoting the sustainable development and revitalization of rural areas. In the context of the current global rural decline, land consolidation has been endowed with the connotation of promoting rural revitalization and regional sustainable development. This study systematically reviewed the evolution history of land consolidation in China, and then explored the current status, characteristics and potential impact of land consolidation as well as the driving mechanism of land consolidation promoting rural revitalization, and finally explained the feasible way to revitalize countryside by land consolidation in a typical case. Results showed that China's land consolidation has played an irreplaceable role in stabilizing the dynamic balance of arable land and ensuring food security. It has made or is moving towards supporting the development of modern agriculture, poverty alleviation and rural revitalization as well as regional sustainable development. Land consolidation is gradually favored in promoting rural development and revitalization because of its social, economic and ecological benefits, and it can provide a platform and inject new vitality for rural revitalization by solving the difficulties of lack of fund, land, technology, talent and industry. Comprehensive land consolidation helps to promote the overall revitalization of rural industry, ecology, organization, culture and talent. However, it also needs to be alert to the eco-environmental risks and negative effects brought by land consolidation projects. The problem-solving oriented land consolidation is needed in the process of promoting rural revitalization and regional sustainable development. The internal logic of rural decline at different development stages varies across countries, and the strategies to promote rural revitalization through land consolidation also need to be adjusted in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]