1st Edition

The EU’s External Governance of Agriculture and Rural Development Shaping Rural Spaces

By Laura Gelhaus Copyright 2025
    198 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book explores how the EU externally governs through agriculture and rural development, and how this external governance shapes rural spaces in Georgia.

    Analysing two EU policy instruments – Geographical Indications and the LEADER rural development programme – the book develops a novel way of studying the consequences of EU external actions ‘on the ground’ by bringing in sociological, rural studies, and political geography concepts of rural space. In doing so, it analyses the often less visible processes at local levels and in rural areas and proposes how to improve analyses of EU external actions more generally.

    This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of EU external policy, EU foreign policy, agricultural and rural development, post-Soviet politics and, more broadly, to EU studies.

    1. Introduction

    2. The European Union in Georgia and the world: Role concepts, external governance, and beyond

    3. Shaping rural spaces

    4. Global pressures, enlargement, and EU-ropean rural spaces from productivism to multifunctionality

    5. EU rural policies in Georgia

    6. Geographical Indications and LEADER in Georgian rural spaces

    7. Conclusion

    Biography

    Laura Gelhaus is Teaching Fellow in PPE at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.