Managing development with civil society in a globalizing rural

This chapter presents an interesting perspective on the Pomurje Region by focusing on one of the impacts of globalization, a short but very intense process of amenity migration. The transformation of the rural landscape is a process driven by individuals who are motivated by economic factors, overall development or preservation and promotion of an area. Rural areas in Slovenia are multifunctional localities with heterogeneous and mosaic structures, exposed to intensive restructuring and trapped between traditional processes and structures on one side and contemporary development processes of modernization, restructuring and globalization on the other. In the post-Second World War period rural Slovenia was shaped by a political system that strongly emphasized industrial development and suppressed development of the agrarian sector. The Goricko Landscape Park (GLP) was established in 2004 as a response to various environmental threats, especially intensive overgrowth due to the abandonment of cultivation.