Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue will focus on urban and rural development.

Persistent poverty and hunger, conflict, climate change, and pandemics significantly challenge efforts at local, state, and international levels to strengthen urban and rural livelihoods. The cross-cutting nature of these challenges requires multidisciplinary approaches using novel methodologies to understand their complexity and identify ‘bottom-up’ development strategies and sustainable solutions.

The use of participatory methods in rural and urban development is well-established across many fields of study and is generally understood as offering a reflexive approach to understanding power and agency. As with any research methodology, participatory methods are subject to limitations and criticisms, for example, being susceptible to co-optation by particular gendered interests. Since the emergence of participatory methods in the 1970s, a variety of participatory frameworks and tools have been developed to give a ‘voice’ to marginalised groups in interpreting and determining their own development needs and solutions, such as Rapid Rural Appraisal, Participatory Rural Appraisal, Participatory Learning and Action (PLA), Focus Group Discussions, and Gender Role Analysis.

The aim of this Special Issue is to present up-to-date methodological and applied perspectives on the use of participatory methods for urban and rural development in countries of the global South and North. Relevant topics include theoretical aspects of participatory development, and methodologies and tools aimed at improving our understanding of obstacles to social, economic, or environmental sustainability ‘on the ground’ as well as at identifying potential solutions.

Papers selected for this Special Issue will be subject to a rigorous peer-review procedure with the aim of rapid and wide dissemination of research results, developments, and applications.

Dr. Alec Thornton
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• participation
• sustainability
• livelihoods
• urban
• rural