Publications

RESCUE, an ESF-COST ‘Frontier of Science’ initiative and an ESF Forward Look, is highly integrative, and is supported by 8 Committees of ESF and COST, namely the ESF Standing Committees for Life, Earth and Environmental Sciences (LESC), for Social Sciences (SCSS), for Humanities (SCH) and for Physical and Engineering Sciences (PESC), and the COST Domain Committees for Earth System Science and Environmental Management (ESSEM), for Individuals, Societies, Cultures and Health (ISCH), for Forests, their Products and Services (FPS) and for Food and Agriculture (FA).

The RESCUE foresight initiative proposes an innovative vision about how to build the transitions towards sustainability through various innovative forms of learning and research. The RESCUE vision is built around the idea of an open knowledge system, where knowledge is generated from multiple sources (some of which are scientific) and shared at

every stage of its development; and where problems are defined and addressed by society as a whole, not just by scientists, or policy makers. This report synthesizes the contributions from approximately 100 experts in 30 countries. It is based on the input of 5 working groups that, from autumn 2009 to spring 2011, focused on: contributions from social sciences and humanities with regard to the challenges of the Anthropocene; collaboration

between the natural, social and human sciences in global change studies; requirements

for research methodologies and data in global change research; steps towards a ‘revolution’ in education and capacity building; and interface between science and policy, communication and outreach.

Rural societies are conventionally thought to be bound by tradition and resistant to change. But from the 18th century onwards many countires began to see the countryside as the basis of national prosperity, with a healthy and increasing population , and rising agricultural output fostering general econmic growth. It became an objective of the State to encourage the trend, but also to exert social control on this major part of the population in order to civilize the rude peasantry and acquire their electoral support.
This book deals with the various aspects of rural life in which the State intervened: economic matters, such as property rights and market regulations; social questions, from moral concerns to demographic policy; and the key issue of rural education.
From Sweden to the Iberian Peninsula, the United Kingdom to Hungary, and from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, using both broad surveys and in-depth studies, with an extensive introduction written from a comparative perspective, an international group of historians (brought together by COST A35) for the first time examine the rural concerns of the state, both economic and social, in a comparative European context.

Volume 20, abstracts.