Andreas Klärner

Rural areas are rapidly becoming the focal points of green transition and its associated political conflicts. The resulting ‘green discontent’ is currently fuelling a broader ‘rural discontent’. However, little is known about how people living in rural areas interpret green policies. In this study, we analyse interview data and examine focus groups with participants from two rural, peripheralised research areas in eastern Germany. Results reveal that questions of justice lie at the heart of green discontent and clarify how these questions align with people's experiences and conceptions of rural life. Based on Fraser's three dimensions of social justice and concepts of spatial justice, we examine green discontent as a multifaceted issue. Consequently, we emphasise the importance of attenuating, recognising and representing the profound (but sometimes mundane) changes caused by green policies to everyday rural realities.

This study describes the electoral implications of spatial polarization in Poland, the Czech Republic and eastern Germany. Empirically, it highlights the voting behavior of residents from selected territories as examples of disadvantaged regions in these three countries, and the conditions that shape such behavior. We explore whether these implications can be explained by argument on populist preferences in peripheralized areas. An analysis of the results of the last three elections to the Polish, Czech and German parliament was used. In each country, we selected two territorial units representing less developed areas and contrasted them with a socioeconomically privileged area and the nationwide results. In Germany and the Czech Republic, support for populist parties is well above average in the peripheralized regions studied, and low in the dynamically developing places. There is no single political force that exploits voter discontent in lagging areas. Depending on the prevailing cultural and socio-economic conditions, these forces may be more right-wing, more left-wing or even rather centrist. In Poland support for clearly populist parties in disadvantaged regions reaches similar levels as in the rich community. Political differences are primarily visible on the conservatism/liberalism axis.

This article presents a mixed-methods research protocol suitable for studying everyday mobility and its effects on life chances for a wide range of populations. We argue that it can address, among other issues, two important methodological challenges in the study of mobility: addressing pre-reflexivity and habits, as well as differentiating between voluntary and forced movements. The research protocol combines a problem-centered interview, two weeks of GPS tracking, and a subsequent mobility interview. It has been shaped by its application to more than 60 socially disadvantaged residents of rural peripheries as part of an international research project. It contributes to existing qualitative methods of spatial analysis because its design incorporates not only theoretical considerations but also insights of real-world application from conducting it in varied contexts and with different populations, which are typically underrepresented in more elaborate research designs. Nevertheless, due to its thematic openness, the design is not only interesting for mobility research, but also for other research focusing on spatial phenomena at the individual level. We provide a detailed account of the method’s implementation, contextualize it in relation to previous approaches, and discuss the analytical potential of the data obtained. We suggest that by triangulating movement data with interview data, perceptions and meanings of everyday mobility can be uncovered that would otherwise remain at a pre-reflexive level.

In a mixed-methods study on poverty in Germany, we conducted qualitative interviews and collected quantitative data on ego-centered networks using a name-generator approach and a single set of respondents. Based on the qualitative data, we first developed a typology of negative ties and then evaluated which of these ties the name generator (on conflicts) had measured. To some extent, the conflict name-generator (CNG) captured the complexity of the negative ties in the typology, but it captured only a small fraction of the negative ties mentioned in the narrative interviews and it missed some specific ones. Discussing the limitations of the CNG in the light of our typology of negative ties allows us to learn more about being nuanced in formulating appropriate questions for eliciting negative ties.

This paper introduces and discusses regional opportunity structures as a concept for analysing the interlinkages between structural conditions in space, social inequalities, and people’s agency, with a focus on non-metropolitan areas. The concept adds value in the following ways: (1) it emphasises the regional scale as an important spatial context of access to opportunities; (2) it accounts for the complexity of the regional context, which provides a plethora of opportunities; (3) it recognises the interdependencies of regional effects and other drivers of inequality; and (4) it takes the regional level seriously as a background of the agency of a region's inhabitants.