Until recently, a greater concentration on urban social policy issues and urban deprivation has tended to create an urban sociological and urban welfare bias. However, there has currently been an increased interest in countryside issues and rural social welfare. This has led to a greater demand for British and transnational rural studies, hence this edited collection. Here, exemplars ranging from the more industrialized regions of Britain, Continental Europe, the USA and Australia, and of rural localities in the less industrialized contexts of India and Mexico, direct attention to multi-dimensional factors affecting rural space, socio-political urban-rural power relations, conflicting urban-rural tensions and opposed values. The authors add to existing studies that inform contemporary urban-rural dialogue, in respect of social policy and rural welfare in a changing global countryside.