Building Rural Resilience

Abstract

Rural resilience is found to be supported by the presence of social capital, effective learning and adaptation, social innovation, leadership during the collaboration process, a dynamic bridging organisation and polycentric institutional arrangements. A deeper understanding of how these factors relate to rural resilience is developed through an in-depth analysis of the LCW case study. The role of the Programme team as a bridging organisation is particularly pertinent in this case due to the initial disengagement of the wider Hong Kong society in rural areas and the rural population being too depleted to drive revitalisation themselves. This required a new governance model, which took advantage of the growth in civil society, driven by the Programme team to establish new collaborative approaches to rural revitalisation.