Why a book series?
Today, global poverty in the world remains a rural phenomenon, with three-fourths of the world’s poor comprised of the rural poor.
The challenge of ending poverty – a multidimensional issue (i.e. economic, political, social, cultural, gender, environmental, and so on) – is therefore closely linked to eradicating rural poverty. A focus on rural development thus remains critical in development thinking. But giving attention to rural issues does not mean de-linking rural from urban issues. The challenge is to understand better the linkages between them.
A book series will be able to explore both the depth and breadth of contemporary rural development issues. Ordinarily, ‘readers’ on a particular development theme are of a general nature, in terms of their topical range; and they are often academically-oriented. While useful, this kind of book publication may not be as accessible to a more popular readership.
By ‘popular’ we mean:
- financially affordable (i.e. ‘cheap’)
- more accessible to a non-academic audience (i.e. more ‘reader-friendly’ with minimal academic jargon)
- politically relevant
- sensible (i.e. responding to urgent and political needs of social movement activists and other development practitioners).
All books will be short (no more than 45,000 words each), and will be made available in multiple languages: English, Chinese French, Spanish and Portuguese, and exploratory discussions on other language editions are already underway: Arabic, Turkish and Bahasa.
