Rural Margins Research Articles

Rural Marginalisation and the Role of Social Innovation; A Turn Towards Nexogenous Development and Rural Reconnection

AbstractRural development in Europe is a long‐standing issue that has been supported through EU policies in various ways. The effects of rural development have been uneven, and differences between well‐to‐do and marginal rural areas have been increasing both across and within countries. This process is reinforced by the current financial crisis. Recently, social innovation has been introduced as the new panacea for realising development and growth while, at the same time, warranting social inclusion and counteracting social inequality. A central question of this article is whether social innovation may help to effectively fight rural marginalisation, why that could be the case and what conditions then must be met. Three examples of rural social innovation are used to distil specific features of social innovation and compare them with other concepts and approaches to rural development. Rural social innovation is distinctive in its dependence on civic self‐reliance and self‐organisation due to austerity measures and state withdrawal, and its cross‐sectoral and translocal collaborations. This article concludes that it is time to go beyond earlier ideas of exogenous versus (neo‐)endogenous development and introduces the idea of nexogenous development with socio‐political reconnection as an engine of revitalisation.

The EU Macro-Regions : Approaches and Patterns

With the decline of the nation state and the increasing importance of regionalisation, the EU has launched macro-regions, i.e., areas, including territories from several countries, that share common goals and operating under multi-level governance. This paper focuses on the EU territorial cooperation strategy, utilising the concept of "macro--region" and the perspective of the macro-regional approach. Following the first macro-regions (such as the Baltic Sea Region and the Danube Region), the EU recently launched the Adriatic-Ionian Macro-regional Strategy, which was seen as an additional tool for cooperation between local and regional authorities that overlooks the Adriatic Sea. Nevertheless, future developments in the region appear at the present to be quite uncertain, owing to structural industrial decline, rural marginalisation and a lack of infrastructure adequate to support the entire cooperation area. To overcome these constraints, the concept of macro-region must be strengthened by creating alternative ways to engage in cross-border cooperation between areas subject to similar conditions. Matching among regions that belong to different Euro-countries within the framework of a macro-region may be the best way to forge a consistent path towards territorial, economic and social integration. This will help to create a common pole of cooperation characterized by various strategies that can act as accelerators in creating territorial capital.

A flâneur on wheels? Bicycle mobility and the sociological gaze in Edward Thomas's In Pursuit of Spring

This essay assesses Edward Thomas's In Pursuit of Spring (1914) as a bicycle travelogue, which anticipates the modern sociological gaze. It argues that bicycle mobility is critical to how that gaze is experienced and mediated, and contrasts this mode with urban flânerie and other forms of pedestrian travel. In extending his critical gaze in a sweep across Southern England, Thomas alludes to earlier journeys by Cobbett, Jefferies and Hazlitt, yet he presents a very contemporary perspective of modernity and its effects as it ripples out of London, across the expanding suburbs and through the transforming rural margins of the Home Counties. In the unique human-powered mobility the bicycle provides, Thomas also gains relief from mental illness and finds a space–time in which to pose existential questions about himself and modernity. In this regard, he follows his friend Robert Frost and anticipates the bicycle fictions of Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien.

Voices of the Poor From the Margins of Bengal

In opposition to the traditional approaches to health communication that treat the subaltern sectors as passive recipients of messages of enlightenment configured in top-down interventions, the culture-centered approach foregrounds the importance of listening to subaltern communities at the margins through dialogue. We build on earlier culture-centered projects in rural communities of West Bengal, India, to develop participatory research strategies for understanding the local processes through which the structural marginalization of the poor plays out in rural Bengal. Study results point toward the marginalization of the poor both communicatively and economically, attending to the ways in which communicative marginalization lies at the heart of economic oppressions. Through locally articulated concepts of "health as shortage" and "communication as shortage," community members put forth alternative rationalities of health that highlight structural resources at the heart of health. These local articulations of shortage offer an alternative rationality for organizing health promotion efforts in the rural margins of Bengal through the foregrounding of discourses of shortage.

Reviving the Mediterranean Olive Community

This article presents the findings of a collaborative investigation by six nongovernment organisations (NGOs) from five European-Mediterranean countries to identify a framework for reversing rural marginalisation in Mediterranean communities through sustainable forms of community-based agricultural development. The project brought together knowledgeable community organisations, farming communities and experts to address systemic problems that continue to threaten the survival of rural agricultural communities. The investigation resulted in a framework for community revitalisation based on the principles of fair trade. The framework is intended as a guide to developing individual community economies as well as to foster effective linkages among Mediterranean olive oil producer communities and consumer markets.

Sustaining the Ancient Olive Community: Strategies for Mediterranean Sustainable Development

This article presents the findings from a six month investigation conducted by a network of six non-government organizations (NGOs) from five European-Mediterranean nations, five local agricultural communities, represented by the NGOs, and three academic institutions. The aim of the investigation was to identify strategies for reversing rural marginalization in Mediterranean communities by establishing sustainable forms of community development by cooperating in the production and trade of olive oil. The network was funded by a grant from the Anna Lindh Foundation for Dialogue Between Cultures. The intent of which was to bring together knowledgeable community organizations, practitioners, and experts in order to address systemic problems that threaten the survival of rural agricultural communities. Regional economic cooperation was found to be an effective strategy for the long term revitalization of rural communities that have been disadvantaged by the effects of globalization. The investigation resulted in an approach to economic development that fosters sustainable development and cooperation among rural communities of the Mediterranean region.

National Symbols and National Identity: Currency and Constructing Cosmopolitans in Tunisia

This article examines the imagery on Tunisian banknotes and its role in constructing a state-sponsored vision of Tunisian national identity. In addition to analyzing the currency itself, the article embeds the symbols used on the money in a social and historical context by looking at other public uses of the historical figures pictured and drawing on ethnographic work conducted in Tunisia. The article suggests that the banknotes must be seen as part of a larger discourse about the nature of Tunisian identity. In particular, this discourse focuses on Tunisia as a cosmopolitan nation that is open to the modern world and posits that this openness is rooted in its history. Although the currency suggests the co-presence of modernity and tradition, tradition is relegated to the rural margins while the urban centers are celebrated as the modern future. Beyond looking at the historical figures represented, the article examines historical absences. Most notably, there are no pre-modern Arab figures on the banknotes, which reflects an ambivalent relationship with an Arab identity. This ambivalence is also reflected in the usages of French and Arabic, which tend to naturalize French in a manner not found in other North African currency.

Creole Glossary: Tārāshankar Bandopādhyāy's HānsuIT Bānker upakathā

Tārāshankar Bandopādhyāy's novel Hānsulī Bānker upakathā ‘The Tale of Hansuli Turn’ (1946–51) straddles the period of independence and partition in India. Its literary staging of the creolized Bengali spoken by a marginal, un‐touchable, semiaboriginal group is both formally innovative and politically imaginative. Tārāshankar disperses the book's glossary throughout its text, and the workings of this glossary embody an unusual perspective on class and caste segregation in modern India. Te novel's historical narrative tells of the disin‐tegration of a rustic, semifeudal Kahar community under the crises of war and modernity in the 1940s. While this history says that proletarianization and loss of idiom are inevitable for such figures of the rural margins, Hānsulī Bānker elaborates a counterfactual possibility. Tis alternative history is not simply a romanticized novelistic preservation of a dying way of life but a minimal imag‐ining of a different line of connection between the realm of subalternity and the public sphere. In its reimagining, Hānsulī Bānker also rethinks and prefigures modern India's other internal partitions, internal diasporas, and emergent political dilemmas and the history of the Bengali novel itself.

Livelihoods and production cycles in the Malagasy artisanal ruby–sapphire trade: A critical examination

This paper examines the livelihoods of artisanal ruby and sapphire miners in Madagascar, with a special emphasis on how market factors influence operators. For these stones specifically, the link between miner vulnerability, artificial treatment and buyer presence is examined. Vulnerabilities related to miners’ livelihoods arise because of the specific mining and processing practices related to these stones, as well as other factors such as corruption, rural marginalization and poverty. The paper also investigates alternative livelihoods and the idea of including and accepting the dynamic buyer into the ‘mining community’.

Rural Marginalization, Policing, and Crime in Lithuania

The paper analyzes the significant increase in rural crime in post‐independence Lithuania (1991–2004). It is argued that the changes in the crime situation in rural areas are associated with the formation of a stratum of post‐socialist rural poor. Three sub‐divisions of the marginalized rural poor are discernible: (1) pauperized post‐socialist peasantry, (2) poor, impoverished, and culturally estranged urban immigrants to rural areas, and (3) marginalized second‐generation rural youth. Political, socio‐economic, and legal factors contributing to the formation of each of the three sub‐divisions within the rural underclass are analyzed, as well as determinants of their group behavior. It is argued that in order to increase its effectiveness, rural policing needs to be more differentiated to be able to respond effectively to the group behavior typical of each of the three groups of rural poor.

In situ agrobiodiversity conservation: Examples from Nepal, Turkey and Switzerland in the first decade of the convention on Biological Diversity

Applications of in situ agrobiodiversity conservation practices within agricultural production systems have the potential to reduce the risks of agricultural modernisation and enhance sustainable development. The aims and approaches for in situ conservation differ according to the requirements of communities and nations. Approaches to in situ conservation in the decade after the Convention of Biological Diversity are reviewed within the contexts of marginal agricultural systems in Nepal, Turkey and Switzerland. Numerous approaches are currently utilised, including: the informal de facto retention of agrobiodiversity; the provision of state assistance; the marketing of agrobiodiversity products; the use of technological innovations to develop local diversity; the establishment of conservation reserves; community assistance programmes and the raising of awareness of the issue amongst all sectors of societies. Emerging complementary in situ approaches applicable in the rural margins suggest a framework for effectively conserving agrobiodiversity by working with local people.

Marginality and the New Geography of Domestic Violence Policy in Post-Communist Poland

The article explores the spatial distribution and institutional geography of domestic violence service provision in post-communist Poland. A new institutional geography providing services to victims of domestic violence is emerging in Poland as a result of NGO activism and new pro-woman policies implemented by the state. NGOs, often in partnership with local governments, are the most vital means of service provision in large and medium size cities, while in rural areas, public agencies predominate in the institutional geography of service provision. The assumption that NGOs will emerge to address the needs of victims of domestic violence is not realistic in rural areas. While urban Poland is developing an institutional geography to address domestic violence, state and NGO activists must focus on shrinking the rural margins of Poland's institutional geography.

In situ Agrobiodiversity Conservation for Regional Development in Nepal

The majority of rural communities have limited agricultural development opportunities within the hills and mountains of Nepal. While the dominant development model, which focuses on technology transfer and the evolution of commercial production systems, is effective when access to inputs and markets enables farmers to produce and trade successfully, many communities are marginalised from development opportunities by poverty and poor infrastructure. Complementary development approaches that value, conserve, develop and market agrobiodiversity could alleviate the extreme poverty where these conditions prevail as in the hills and mountains, the rural margins of Nepal. Formalised in situ approaches to agrobiodiversity conservation are in their infancy in Nepal, yet suggest that opportunities exist for a complementary agricultural development approach in the rural margins based on working with the local diversity, rather than its elimination. The obstacles of widespread poverty and inadequate infrastructure ensure that effective in situ agrobiodiversity conservation programs must provide for the needs of local people for sustainable development.

Transition in a Cold Climate: Management Regimes and Rural Marginalisation in Northwest Russia

This paper examines why and how the development of the forestry and fishery sectors in Northwest Russia have taken very different trajectories during the transition period and examines the impacts of these trajectories on the rural areas concerned. The drive to establish natural resources as “resources” in an economic sense during the transition period acts as the starting point for the analysis. However, the success of this drive has depended on the adaptation of formerly Soviet institutions to the new circumstances. These include the privatisation of Soviet production units (lespromkhozes and fishery kolkhozes) and the introduction of new systems for the distribution of fish and forest resources (auctions and quotas). From the analysis of data collected from four types of actors in Murmansk Oblast (a collective fishing farm, State owned logging companies in forestry villages, fishery management units and local forest management structures), the paper seeks to present these actors’ adaptations, changes, opportunities and ultimately destiny during the 1990s.

Buddhist Revitalization, Modernization, and Social Change in Contemporary Thailand

This paper provides both an overview and an analysis of contemporary Thai Buddhism and the changing nature of its traditional relationship with the state. It argues that in recent times as modern urban Thai society has become increasingly differentiated, it has started to question the totalizing and instrumental politicoreligious and moral dimensions of national civic religion. Attention is focused in particular on the expanding and autonomous urban middle-class which led to the emergence of a new cultural gestalt, a reformulation of traditional values and conceptions of social order. Importantly, this social class engendered new fundamentalistic Buddhist movements since the 1960s as a challenge to state hegemony. As a consequence of some thirty years of uneven national development, a number of active rural and urban monks are now confronting such immediate concerns as the stresses and anxieties of urbanization, rural marginalization, and environmental degradation. This, the author suggests, is helping to reshape and redefine conventional religious soteriologies. In this paper the author discusses modern events in Thai civic religion1

Language, education and political power: Some reflections on north‐south relationships

Abstract This paper is concerned with the interplay of language, education, culture and political power between countries of the South and their former colonial masters. After some general thoughts on the use of language for political control, cultural preservation or destruction, and the dilemmas facing governments in multiethnic, multilingual states as to which linguistic and/or educational policy they should pursue, the main thrust of the paper is concerned with the colonial linguistic legacy. Different colonial situations are considered and problems facing African countries in particular are looked at in some detail. One depressing conclusion is that linguistic dependency is leading not only to technological dependency but, in rural areas, to scientific and technological marginalisation. The choice of language of instruction is one of the least appreciated of all the major education problems that come before international forums. (Coombs, 1985: 256)