Remote Rural Living and Welfare: Global Conversations on Social Policy Challenges and Innovations

The majority of the world’s population lives in urban environments today; and much of social policy debate internationally focuses on socio-economic challenges and policy innovations for urban spaces. Nevertheless, roughly 3.4 billion people live rurally worldwide; the majority of people in low-income countries live in (remote) rural areas, thus, human development and wellbeing depends on the improvement of the welfare of rural populations, particularly in the Majority World. While rural populations make up a small proportion of the population in Western Democracies, unequal access to public services is creating new political cleavages between urban centers and rural peripheries, feeding radical populism and fracturing social cohesion (World Inequality Report 2026). Despite often being overlooked, a focus on rural challenges and conditions for social policy is important for the development of welfare systems worldwide.

The spatial dimensions of poverty, opportunity and welfare differ in (remote) rural areas from those in urban spaces, with distances and dispersed populations creating specific challenges for public service delivery and access, e.g. in health, social care and education/childcare – often exacerbated by neoliberal politics and services privatization.

This session invites the following contributions:

• research on social policy in (remote) rural areas, discussing lived experiences and outcomes
• presenting social policy initiatives and innovations on local, regional or national levels
• critical theoretical thinking regarding the adequacy or adaptability of key theoretical concepts of welfare state research for (remote) rural welfare and social policy
• And contributions exploring methodological innovations in studying place-based and/or co-created insights on rural living and welfare.