Progress in Sustainable Rural Development

Abstract

This collection of papers constitutes the formal proceedings of a conference held in July 2006 at Cairns in Far North Queensland. The conference was jointly run by three Commissions of the International Geographical Union: • The Sustainability of Rural Systems • Land Use Cover Change, and • Local Development. It followed the IGU regional meeting held in Brisbane, Queensland during the first week of July, 2006, and brought together some of the world's leading scholars interested in the general topic of Sustainable Development. The edited papers in this collection were submitted after the event. They cover a wide variety of economic, social and environmental themes of practical use to the management of rural and peri-metropolitan systems. More significantly, they reveal the large variety of concerns which are prominent in different nations and also the different philosophical or idealogical approaches through which those issues are perceived and analysed. The papers are grouped thematically, except for the first item, and their content has been standardised as much as possible to give a common look to the volume. The rest of this overview examines the themes and approaches adopted by each group of papers.