Globalization and Europe’s rural regions - challenge and opportunity

Ceredigion is a rural country located on the west coast of the British Isles. This chapter focuses within this broader region on the coastal Mid Wales local authority of Ceredigion, where rural isolation and peripherality remain structural factors to be negotiated alongside multifaceted globalization processes, in determining Ceredigion’s political-economic development trajectory within the emergent global countryside. It considers examples of endogenous economic development from Ceredigion, where the importance of place is attested to through business practices focused upon selling ‘localness’ to a global market, and where ‘place-branding’ is used to tell particular stories about the provenance of food, drink and clothing, as well as experiences in eco- and luxury tourism. The chapter also draws on research as part of the Wales Rural Observatory on migrant workers in rural Wales, funded by the EU Rural Development Programme for Wales, which involved statistical analysis and survey interviews with migrant workers from Poland, Portugal and the Philippines.