1st Edition
Rural Governance International Perspectives
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