The agricultural sector in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is confronted by two huge problems simultaneously: transition processes and sustainability. Institutions are very important for both these problems. The purpose of this paper is to make clear that the institutional setting is very...

Institutional problems and the corruptive use of social capital give ground for misuse of institutional gaps and cause intentional failures for financial benefits. Based on social capital theory and transaction cost economics (TCE) this paper describes how the institutional environment in the...

In the past, much rural development planning has relied on the concept of growth poles. With the “new rural paradigm”, we find that place-specific development and bottom-up approaches have become more popular than ever. Such place-based development often envisages the use of social capital....

Drawing on Nahapiet and Ghoshal's (1998) distinction between the structural, relational, and cognitive dimensions of social capital, this paper analyses the performance of Water Communities (WCs) in the Bregalnica region of the Republic of Macedonia. WCs are farmer-managed local irrigation...

The establishment of Geographical Indications (GI) can be considered like an instrument, that from initiative of public policies of rural development, can have application for the protection of territorial agri-food productions that present tipicity. In the case of being Local Agri-food Systems...

This article highlights the interaction between social capital, pooling and quality premiums and their influence on cooperative members’ decisions regarding their product quality. A necessary condition for cooperative equitable principles such as complete pooling is that there exists a high...

This study provides a literature review of social capital in cooperatives. We integrate the social capital concept with cooperative lifecycle theory and describe the change of cooperative social capital along the lifecycle. We propose that cooperatives in different stages of the lifecycle are...

An emerging requirement for the evaluation of the rural development policy is the adoption of an objective method accounting for both material and immaterial achievements, and measuring the performance in order to understand the degree of accomplishment of policy objectives. In this paper we...