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Social innovation is attracting increasing attention in research and policy, heightened by continuing austerity across Europe. Therefore, this paper examines earlier research into community-led local development (CLLD) initiatives in rural areas of Europe to develop our understanding of the meaning and scope of rural social innovation. We draw on a Schumpeterian view where innovations emerge from new combinations of resources that bring about positive changes and create value in society. A Schumpeterian social innovation framework is derived as the basis for re-analysing data from previous evaluations of LEADER policy in five different national contexts. This elicits a clearer understanding of social innovation in a rural development context, identifying different processes and outcomes that create social value. As the CLLD agenda and the demand for innovation in Europe gather pace, our aspirations are to inform future research and other initiatives on how to integrate social innovation into the design and evaluation of new rural development policies and programmes.

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Migration into rural areas in Western countries is often explained by the pull of the rural idyll for urban, middle-class migrants. Although previous research has shown that this counterurbanisation model is insufficient to explain rural immigration in sparsely populated countries, this paper shows that also within core regions, more diverse conceptualisations of migration into rural areas are required. This is achieved by distinguishing popular, average, and less-popular rural living areas in the northern Netherlands, on the basis of average house prices, and by analysing the migration flows to these areas. Data from Housing Research of the Netherlands demonstrate that popular rural areas attract more highly educated people and people moving from urban areas compared with less-popular and average rural areas. For movers to less-popular areas, being near to family and friends is more important. The characteristics of the movers to popular rural areas fit very well with the counterurbanisation story. Less-popular rural areas in the Netherlands share personal reasons as an important motivation for in-migration with more remote rural areas in Europe. This indicates that conceptualisations of periphery and remoteness have to be considered within the local, regional, and national context. Research into rural population change in both core regions and sparsely populated countries should consider these different contexts to be able to acknowledge the variety in the way amenities and peripherality are perceived by different groups of people.Measured from the town hall of the specific rural municipality to the city hall in the nearest provincial capital city or the nearest of the two cities in the centre of the country, as predicted by a website on travel routes. 2 * p<0.05. 650R. A. Bijker and T. Haartsen