Contemporary processes of rural change radically transform rural property relations, differentiating rural people’s rights to material and cultural values. The concrete processes of rural transformation and differentiation take different forms, just as we use different terms to describe these transformations. Research in postcolonial settings highlights the ambiguity of local property relations as a consequence of nation-building and development. Research taking place in post-socialist societies focuses on how concrete property practices define the rights and obligations associated with rural values. Research in Western Europe emphasizes the increasing differentiation of the countryside driven by local reactions to the transformation of agriculture and changing structure of rural society.

Property theory offers a language to examine these seemingly diverse processes of rural change. This network seeks explicit comparisons of empirical cases and theoretical work from the three settings by way of three leading questions.

• How do contemporary processes of rural change redefine the social actors recognized and legitimized in property relationships?
• How does contemporary rural change modify the goods of material and symbolic value important to social actors?
• How have the types of relationships, including rights and obligations, asserted by social actors changed in the process of rural transformation?

The network includes 15 scholars who have conducted fieldwork on rural transformations in postcolonial, post-socialist, and Western European settings. They come from anthropology, development studies, (rural) sociology and institutional economics and work at universities in Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK.

The network meets on a regular basis. 

• Berlin, Germany, April 2005: Initial exchange among network members and planning of subsequent workshops
• Torun, Poland, September 2005: Re-valorization of property objects and institutionalization of (new) property rights
• Halle, Germany, March 2006: Effects of transnationalization and globalization on access to natural resources
• Bornholm, Denmark, September 2006: Property and access to natural resources
• Norwich, UK, September 2008: Rural property and inequality
• Roskilde, Denmark, May 2011: Property and dispossession 

The network has so far published three special journal issues. 

• Marianne Penker and Lutz Laschewski (eds.), Rural change: re-valorization of property objects and the institutionalization of (new) property rights, International Journal of Agricultural Resource, Governance and Ecology, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2009
• Bertram Turner and Melanie Wiber (eds.), Paradoxical conjunctions: access to resources in a transnational environment, Anthropologica, Vol. 51, 2009
• Thomas Sikor and Christian Lund (eds.), The politics of possession: property, access and authority, Development and Change, Vo. 40, No. 1, 2009.

The Rural Property Network has received financial support from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Max Planck Society, Polforsk – The Danish Political Science Research School, Roskilde University and the University of East Anglia.