This book focuses attention upon rural social policy and welfare issues within selected areas in the US, Australia, continental Europe and Britain as well as in countrysides within less industrialised India and Mexico. This edited collection adds to the new genre of geopolitical and socio-economic rural transnational studies. * Discusses the multi-dimensional factors affecting rural space, socio-political urban-rural power relations, conflicting urban-rural tensions and opposed values * Adds to the existing studies of contemporary urban-rural dialogue, in respect of social policy and rural welfare in a changing global countryside