1st Edition

Rural Governance International Perspectives

Edited By Lynda Cheshire, Vaughan Higgins, Geoffrey Lawrence Copyright 2007
    336 Pages 8 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    304 Pages 8 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Recent decades have witnessed the transition from the government of rural areas towards processes of governance in which the boundaries between the state and civil society are blurred. As a result, governance is commonly linked to ‘bottom-up’ or community-based approaches to planning and development, which are said to ‘empower’ rural citizens and liberate them from the disabling structures of top-down government control. At the same time, however, a range of other actors beyond the local level have also become increasingly influential in determining the future of rural spaces, thereby embedding rural citizens within new configurations of power relations.

    This book critically explores the social causes and consequences of these emerging governance arrangements. In particular, the book seeks to move beyond questions of empowerment in governance debates and to consider how new kinds of power relations arise between the various actors involved. The book addresses questions concerning the nature of power relations in contemporary forms of rural governance, including: how community participation is negotiated and achieved; the effects of such participation upon the formulation and delivery of rural policies; the kinds of conflicts that arise between various stakeholder groups and the capacity of each group to promote its interests; and the prospects of this new approach for enhanced democratic governance in rural areas.

    1 Introduction: governing the rural

    LYNDA CHESHIRE, VAUGHAN HIGGINS AND GEOFFREY LAWRENCE

    Part I

    Managing new forms of governance

    2 Trust and control in farmer–government partnerships: a Dutch case study

    JASPER ESHUIS

    3 Delineations of private and public: emerging forms of agri-environmental governance in Central and Eastern Europe

    THOMAS SIKOR

    4 Governance and innovations in the Nordic periphery

    NILS AARSÆTHER AND TORILL NYSETH

    5 Governing rural landscapes and environments: the strategic role of local community and global corporate partnerships

    PETER HOPPE, ROY E. RICKSON AND DAVID BURCH

    6 Initiating network governance through competition: experiences from eighteen German regions

    WOLFGANG MEYER AND SEBASTIAN ELBE

    7 Reflexive agency and multi-level governance: mediating integrated rural development in Hungary

    GUSZTÁV NEMES, CHRIS HIGH AND FARAH HUZAIR

    Part II

    Contesting government strategies: state policy and local agency

    8 Neo-liberalism, neo-mercantilism and multifunctionality: contested political discourses in European post-Fordist rural governance

    MARK TILZEY AND CLIVE POTTER

    9 Transformation and representation in Barangay Sibalew, The Philippines

    ROBERTO SALADAR AND ALISON LOVERIDGE

    10 Governance, participation and empowerment: a non-prescriptive approach

    PABLO RODRIGUEZ-BILELLA

    11 Contested forest: logging the Main River watershed in Western Newfoundland, Canada

    PETER SINCLAIR AND HONNA JANES-HODDER

    12 Contesting competition: governance and farmer resistance in Australia

    JACQUI DIBDEN AND CHRIS COCKLIN

    13 Individualism, cooperation and conservation in Scottish farming communities

    KIRSTY BLACKSTOCK, KATRINA BROWN, BEN DAVIES AND PETER SHANNON

    Part III

    Prospects for democratic governance

    14 Leadership in place: elites, institutions, and agency in British rural community governance

    MICHAEL WOODS, BILL EDWARDS, JON ANDERSON AND GRAHAM GARDNER

    15 Democratising governance in Australia’s regions: the value of regional networks

    JO-ANNE EVERINGHAM

    16 Legitimacy, deliberative arenas and the new rural governance

    STEVE CONNELLY, TIM RICHARDSON AND TIM MILES

    17 Governing bottom-up in rural development: the legitimacy dilemma

    BENEDIKT KORF

    18 Are shadows dark? Governance, informal institutions, and corruption in rural India

    CHRIS HIGH, RACHEL SLATER AND S. RENGASAMY

    Conclusion

    19 Rural governance and power relations: theorising the complexity of state-citizen interactions

    LYNDA CHESHIRE, VAUGHAN HIGGINS AND GEOFFREY LAWRENCE

    Biography

    Lynda Cheshire, Vaughan Higgins, Geoffrey Lawrence