Empowering Rural Citizenship For Democratic-Participatory Governance and Resilience

May rural areas are currently ever more impacted by globalization dynamics, so that their citizenship is simultaneously glimpsing opportunities and suffering constrictions and/or socioeconomic precariousness. In these circumstances, those attitudes, policies and practices aimed to boost rural resilience reveal attempts of furthering the flexibility and/or adaptation of rural societies which spread in line with the current neoliberal restrictions to public policies, one of whose outstanding examples are the CAP budget cuts. But, these flexibility and/or adaptation would be also opportunities to empower rural citizenship for a democratic-participatory governance aimed to face duly globalization challenges and by so working for resilience and sustainable development. Anyhow, those policies working for such empowerment should not forget that rural citizenship integrates a blurred amalgam of diverse social actors with very complex, heterogeneous and uneven situations and interests. The presentation of this paper will be illustrated with the analysis of several Spanish cases.