Socio-spatial polarisation and policy response: Perspectives for regional development in the Baltic States
Based on a relational understanding of socio-spatial polarisation as a nested, multidimensional and multi-scalar process, the paper applies a comparative perspective on current trends of socio-spatial development in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Comparing current scholarship and data on demographic and economic processes of centralisation and peripheralisation, we also examine political debates around issues of polarisation in different scholarly national perspectives. Despite variations in national discourses, our comparative perspective conveys strong similarities between the three Baltic countries in terms of socio-economic and demographic concentration in the capital regions to the di…
Rural restructuring and local/regional governance in the Baltic States after 1990
The aim of this paper is to discuss the restructuring of primary sector dominant rural areas in the Baltic States with a special focus on local governance and administrative structures. In the theoretical part, we elaborate on a principal transformation model for Baltic rural areas. Despite similar macro-economic processes in all three Baltic States, local and regional governance has developed differently and hypothetically, this has had a different impact on the economic development of regions. We have used statistics, legal documents, small case studies, observations and secondary sources of some more detailed studies for this paper.