Rural diversification in the Baltic countryside: a local perspective

Today “rural diversification” is high on the agenda in rural development. This article analyses rural diversification under conditions of post-socialist economic transition using case areas in Latvia and Estonia. The study shows that transition from centrally planned economy to market economy has had an enormous impact in the rural areas. Agricultural production and employment has decreased dramatically and rural unemployment is high. The conditions for rural diversification the first years after independence depended a lot on the local presence of non-farm activities before the split up of collective farming, in both production facilities but also in the skills and relations people had. Since independence, markets for traditional rural services and products have decreased. The extent to which local businesses find markets outside the local area and people have been able to integrate into the new labour market of service and construction jobs often in urban areas are essential for the diversification of the rural economy. Most rural inhabitants only have skills in large-scale agriculture and limited contacts to outside the local area which makes exploiting new opportunities difficult. The local capacity for withholding, developing and inducing new activities is weak. The challenge for rural development policy is to extend the possibilities of the rural inhabitants to exploit new opportunities.     

An assessment of women’s access to natural resources through communal projects in South Africa

With the passing of the apartheid regime and its multi-faceted mechanisms of exclusion, women in rural South Africa have begun expanding their access to natural resources for livelihood enhancement. One of the ways this has occurred is through community-based organizations that focus on local production as a mechanism to transform natural resources into material goods. While this practice is nearly ubiquitous throughout sub-Saharan Africa, the apartheid regime was particularly effective in limiting access to natural resources, a phenomenon reversed by the current democratic government. In this paper, we assess the impact of organizational design on women’s livelihood systems as a means of alleviating rural poverty. We surveyed women on both more formal, or bureaucratic, organizations and more informal, or socially-embedded, organizations. After locating the discussion in the relevant gender, environment, and livelihoods literatures, we employ four concepts, organizational context, environmental entitlement, livelihood systems, and gender and power relations to assess the impact of organizational design on livelihood enhancement. Having found that women derived no significant material benefit from participation in either type of organization, we conclude that women are straddling two processes, neo-liberalization and neo-traditionalism, that impact gender and power relations. This situation has left women in vulnerable positions within their organizations and with little livelihood enhancement.     

Neo-liberalism, markets and class structures on the Nepali lowlands: The political economy of agrarian change

In recent years, neo-liberalism has manifested itself in peripheral social formations on an ideological basis through strategies of poverty alleviation. This process is epitomized by Nepal’s donor led agrarian strategy, which constructs farmers as ‘rational entrepreneurs’ responsible for their own welfare. In the process it seeks to encourage smallholders to shift from subsistence to market oriented production. However, over 10 years since the current agrarian strategy was released, there is little evidence of commercialisation and the integration of rural populations into global or domestic markets, while subsistence production remains dominant. To understand this failure, one must examine both the contradictions inherent in neo-liberal ideologies and the rural political economy of Nepal. While the emphasis on self-help through market access can be understood to be an ideological process constitutive of the overdetermined nature of capitalist expansion, contradictions are evident in such ideologies when they are mobilised in regions dominated by non-capitalist economic systems. The depoliticizing assumptions inherent in such ideologies can serve the interests of capitalist expansion through glossing over the associated forms of class exploitation. However, a case study from Nepal’s eastern lowlands demonstrates how they also divert attention from complex non-capitalist modes of surplus appropriation in both the relations of production and circulation. Such forms of exploitation have not only obstructed the process of classical agrarian transition long envisaged in Marxian theory, but have also blocked the emergence of the particular form of rural commodity production envisaged in Nepal’s neo-liberal agrarian strategy itself.     

What kind of countryside do the public want: community visions from Wales UK?

This paper assesses how far community led rural visions accord with the current thrust of rural planning policy delivery in the UK. Adapting conventional visioning methods, qualitative techniques were used on eight different communities across urban, exurban and rural Wales to elicit views relating to the kind of local countryside(s) that were desired. The results show that the communities’ visions reflect an emerging consensus around local countryside priorities: multifunctionality, integration, wider countryside protection, development based on need, and local distinctiveness according with the thrust of current planning policy at national and local levels. However, there is a clear dichotomy between this and the reality of what communities actually experienced in developments affecting their countryside. Here, universal criticism was encountered over the type, pace and scale of development, the lack of rural specificity and the failure to take account of local community needs and priorities. It is hypothesized that tensions between national and local politics and stakeholder power relations are playing a crucial role in distorting the delivery of town and country planning. It is recommended that rural policy delivery must become more “joined up” and rural proofed at national and local levels concomitant with a change in the operational culture of agencies at the forefront of rural delivery. Essentially, effective engagement of top down approaches synergising with bottom up community led ideas is long overdue.     

Wasting the rural: Meat,manure, and the politics of agro-industrialization in contemporary China

This paper uses pork as a lens on China’s rural transformations. Taking the industrialization of pig farming in the reform era as a trace on broader processes of social and environmental change, it advances three arguments. First, the massive increase in pork production and consumption since 1978 has been propelled by an industrial meat regime. A party-state led and agribusiness-operated regime, it articulates modernist notions of meat-as-progress with the relentless drive for capital accumulation. Second, using Marx’s concept of metabolic rift, the paper examines how processes of concentration in the industrial meat regime are at the same time processes of separation. This dialectical approach highlights the contradictions inherent in ongoing attempts to disembed capitalist production from biological and social relations. Finally, while official party-state discourse conceptualizes “the rural” as a production base for surplus value, and/or as a site for preserving environmental integrity, the paper’s analysis reveals a further unofficial recasting of the rural: in the process of agroindustrialization, the rural is also a sink for offloading capitalist crises. Between the rivers of manure that flow from industrial livestock operations and contaminate rural waterways; the loss of soil nutrients and food calories in the inefficient conversion of grains and oilseeds into industrial meat; the erosion of agricultural knowledge and practice that accompanies the dispossession of China’s farmers; and the shifting values of pigs, pork, and manure, this is a system that “wastes” the rural in service of capital.     

The rural in dispute: Discourses of rurality in the Pyrenees

There is a widespread assumption that associates the rural with the unchanged and unchangeable. However, what constitutes ‘the rural’ is under constant transformation. In rural Europe a rapid process of social recomposition and economic restructuring is taking place causing increasing social complexity and new disputes about what is and should become the rural. This is more apparent in mountain areas, being locations that are particularly vulnerable to change. This situation is reflected in the growing diversity of discourses of rurality, which struggle to impose their particular views and interests on others. Nevertheless, little attention is paid in understanding the multiplicity of representations and interests held by rural dwellers about their own world. This paper aims to explore the diversity of perceptions and perspectives held by the inhabitants of the county of El Pallars Sobirà, in the Catalan Pyrenees. The material provided by semi-structured interviews given to local residents has been analysed through the Q methodology. As a result, four discourses of rurality have been identified, namely: the agriculturalist, entrepreneurial, conservationist and endogenous development. Finally, we argue that an underlying social structure, derived from the experiences of local dwellers of the rural population movements and the tertiarisation of local economies, exists behind the organisation of the debate on the rural. This leads us to assume that not only perceptions, but also socioeconomic reorganisations are in dispute.     

Tidal Habitats Support Large Numbers of Invasive Blue Catfish in a Chesapeake Bay Subestuary

The introduction of a non-native freshwater fish, blue catfish Ictalurus furcatus, in tributaries of Chesapeake Bay resulted in the establishment of fisheries and in the expansion of the population into brackish habitats. Blue catfish are an invasive species in the Chesapeake Bay region, and efforts are underway to limit their impacts on native communities. Key characteristics of the population (population size, survival rates) are unknown, but such knowledge is useful in understanding the impact of blue catfish in estuarine systems. We estimated population size and survival rates of blue catfish in tidal habitats of the James River subestuary. We tagged 34,252 blue catfish during July–August 2012 and 2013; information from live recaptures (n = 1177) and dead recoveries (n = 279) were used to estimate annual survival rates and population size using Barker’s Model in a Robust Design and allowing for heterogeneity in detection probabilities. The blue catfish population in the 12-km study area was estimated to be 1.6 million fish in 2013 (95% confidence interval [CI] adjusted for overdispersion: 926,307–2,914,208 fish). Annual apparent survival rate estimates were low: 0.16 (95% CI 0.10–0.24) in 2012–2013 and 0.44 (95% CI 0.31–0.58) in 2013–2014 and represent losses from the population through mortality, permanent emigration, or both. The tagged fish included individuals that were large enough to exhibit piscivory and represented size classes that are likely to colonize estuarine habitats. The large population size that we estimated was unexpected for a freshwater fish in tidal habitats and highlights the need to effectively manage such species.     

Neo-rural populations and their relations with local decision makers in rural Québec: collaboration or conflict?

The socio-demographic recomposition of the countryside is affecting local interactions and power relations. Understanding these relationships remains a challenge, as the studies to date are often limited to conflicts between neo-rural populations (newcomers) and long-time country residents over partial issues, without including decision makers. To go beyond this conflictual and fragmentary perspective, the objective of this article is to present an overall picture of both cooperative and oppositional relations between four groups, namely, newcomers, long-time rural residents, leaders of local organizations and municipal officials, in regard to all the issues that concern them. The data are based on interviews with these various actors in two contrasting rural areas of Québec (Canada). After looking at the newcomers’ mixed assessment of their participation in community life, we concentrate on areas of collaboration and/or conflict between all the actors regarding demographic, economic, sociocultural, political, environmental and agricultural issues. Three main trends emerge, revealing unexpected ways of interacting, complex power relations and antagonistic conceptions of rural spaces and their future development.     

Rural diversification in Albania

This paper examines the prospects for Albanian rural diversification with particular reference to rural tourism. In the early 1990s, tourism was identified by the Albanian government and Western development consultants as a likely vehicle for an appropriate and sustainable development strategy, given the relative wealth generated by international tourism in neighbouring Greece, Italy and Croatia. Pressure has been exerted by commercial developers for mass coastal tourism and permission for around 40 new tourist development has been granted. But Albania embraces a considerable wealth of natural and cultural heritage, which provides opportunities for the development of small scale rural tourism carefully integrated into the local economy with respect to organic farming, quality wine production and sustainable fishing. But sensitive social integration is vital where it is difficult to identify rural communities where there is a conspicuous absence of local consensus. The resurgence of traditional social systems and the empowerment of local actors in cases where organised crime has taken root pose major problems for rural diversification. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Rural gentrification in Catalonia, Spain: A case study of migration, social change and conflicts in the Empordanet area

The intensity of rural depopulation in Catalonia has diminished since the 1980s. New population growth patterns are occurring in rural areas, basically due to immigration. Although there has been a certain awareness of the magnitude of this process and its territorial distribution, little is known about the protagonists in this immigration and the impact on rural municipalities. Results are presented from a study of the immigration process in a group of rural inland municipalities close to the Costa Brava, a Mediterranean coastal region with extensive tourism. The great beauty of the landscape and the existence of housing stock that is being abandoned but remains desirable have led to a population influx from Catalonia’s large urban areas, especially Barcelona, purchasing these homes as a primary or secondary residence.This has led to rehabilitation of the housing stock, but also to higher housing prices and the resulting exodus of the young local population that cannot afford them; a potential source of conflict between the local population and the newcomers. The study is based on census data and statistical records, as well as extensive fieldwork, including interviews with local residents, newcomers and key informants.     

Herders and hazards: covariate <Emphasis Type="Italic">dzud</Emphasis> risk and the cost of risk management strategies in a Mongolian subdistrict

Studies of mobile pastoralist livelihoods have shown that a variety of socio-technical practices have been developed to achieve reliable outputs from livestock in variable arid and semi-arid environments. This paper builds upon the concept of pastoralists as high-reliability seekers rather than risk-averse and makes a case for understanding Mongolian herders as well adapted to livestock production in highly variable climatic conditions within a certain threshold of risk and uncertainty. This system fails, however, during instances of high uncertainty and covariate risk such as in cases of the natural hazard dzud, which requires individual households to make significant cash investments in risk management. It forwards the idea that investing in local government—soum and bag level—administrative capacity and infrastructure is needed to build system resilience to covariate risk. Based on ethnographic research in rural Bayankhongor, this paper interrogates how dzud interfaces with socio-economic factors amongst pastoralists in central west Mongolia.     

Power,perception, and adaptation: Exploring gender and social–environmental risk perception in northern Guanajuato,Mexico

This paper examines how gender relations within rural communities in north-central Mexico affect women’s perceptions of and responses to environmental and social risks. Several studies currently exist which suggest various reasons as to how people especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change perceive their risks, and how this influences their responses. In this paper, I take a feminist approach to questions of social–environmental risks and adaptation to argue that risk perception is tightly linked to knowledge production, and knowledge production is a power-laden process involving the constant negotiation of resources, responsibilities and knowledge. I base this argument on the results of fieldwork conducted from September 2009 to May 2010 with women residents of two ejidos in northern Guanajuato, Mexico. In drawing from feminist political ecology studies, I intend to show how gender, environmental knowledge, risk perception and thus, adaptation are constituted by and embedded in social relations of power.     

From catfish to organic fish: making distinctions about nature as cultural economic practice

This paper addresses the cultural economy of nature and the material culture of economic practice. Attending to ways that cultural notions about the biophysical world play key roles in political economic conflicts, discussion centers on two recent debates involving the cultural economy of seafood production and trade. The first debate is over whether the label “catfish” should include catfish imported from Vietnam into the United States; the second deals with whether fish and shellfish should be eligible to be certified “organic” under new US regulations. Analysis reveals that the key dynamic in these debates is not necessarily how people think about “nature”, but instead is how people make distinctions about the world. Rather than focusing on what is natural or not, key actors make distinctions among both organisms and environments. The ways that different groups define and enclose the biophysical world works to distinguish places as either appropriate or not for certain kinds of production activities. The overall argument is that significance and meaning of the biophysical become implicated in economic geographies by making distinctions about the world that then become important for how economic activity can work. As such, cultural economic approaches should attend to the ways that the biophysical is involved in relations such as competition and international trade, while nature-society approaches should shift focus from Nature to specific aspects of the biophysical world.     

Struggles over family land? Tree crops,land and labour in Ghana’s Brong-Ahafo region

Agricultural land use in much of Brong-Ahafo region, Ghana has been shifting from the production of food crops towards increased cashew nut cultivation in recent years. This article explores everyday, less visible, gendered and generational struggles over family farms in West Africa, based on qualitative, participatory research in a rural community that is becoming increasingly integrated into the global capitalist system. As a tree crop, cashew was regarded as an individual man’s property to be passed on to his wife and children rather than to extended family members, which differed from the communal land tenure arrangements governing food crop cultivation. The tendency for land, cash crops and income to be controlled by men, despite women’s and young people’s significant labour contributions to family farms, and for women to rely on food crop production for their main source of income and for household food security, means that women and girls are more likely to lose out when cashew plantations are expanded to the detriment of land for food crops. Intergenerational tensions emerged when young people felt that their parents and elders were neglecting their views and concerns. The research provides important insights into gendered and generational power relations regarding land access, property rights and intra-household decision-making processes. Greater dialogue between genders and generations may help to tackle unequal power relations and lead to shared decision-making processes that build the resilience of rural communities.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">In situ</Emphasis> 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.     

The spatial organization of services in new land settlement: experiences and trends

Conclusion Despite its uniqueness, the vitality inherent in the rural structure of Israel is of particular interest to other developing regions with a predominant rural-agricultural population. Latin American countries, for example, are investing considerable resources in the development of new lands through construction of penetration roads and other infrastructure. Several countries have created regional development authorities; some have policies designed to attract private investments into virgin areas.¹³⁾ The general emphasis tends increasingly toward state-initiated and planned settlement, often in conjuction with agrarian reform programs — an approach dictated both by economic efficiency and welfare criteria.Past experience has shown that the rural population has to be organized in viable communities in order to become amenable to economic and cultural integration. Communities must likewise be spatially organized in an optimal way that will make it possible to provide them with amenities and so direct their production for the purpose of achieving economic status. At the same time, maximum flexibility must be preserved to fit varying developmental stages, since physical plans once carried into effect are extremely difficult to modify.In order to reduce the social and economic pull of existing urban centers it may be advisable to develop new settlement areas as self-sufficient enclaves, independent to some extent from the facilities existing in the region. The settlements would share the national infrastructure of communications and public services, but would gear their production to regional as well as extra-regional demand, bypassing the traditional local market place. Then, as the new communities consolidate as social and economic entities, the options for collaboration or competition with existing central places can be laid open on a more equitable basis.Admittedly such sheltered development may affect the role of the local intermediary and lessen the commercial activities of the urban sector, but it would also stimulate the development of an independent framework of handling, marketing, and an increasing degree of processing the settlements' produce. These complementary activities would help to retain part of the added value of the production and generate new sources of employment for successive village generations. The delay in the growth for the region's total output may well be worthwhile for achieving that social and economic transformation which in turn may lead to a more balance and sustained development of the entire region.¹⁴⁾     

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.     

浅谈耗散结构和非平衡态热力学

具体说明了几个耗散结构的实例,综合对比了耗散结构与平衡结构的异同,并概括介绍了耗散结构的概念以及其生成条件。由闭系平衡态的摘产生和熵生率入手,借助局域平衡假设,从开系的平衡态进入线性非平衡态,讨论了不可逆过程唯象定律Ｏｎｓａｇｅｒ倒易关系、熵生率最小原理及该原理作为稳定性判据的不足．最后,提到了一般演化判据和非线性非平衡态热力学中讨论系统稳定性的办法。     

The ‘leisuring’ of rural landscapes in Barbados: New spatialities and the implications for sustainability in small island states

The transformation of rural areas into up-scale leisure amenity landscapes has become a global phenomenon. Small islands, especially in tropical and subtropical regions, are particularly attractive magnets for this kind of development. Yet it involves land use changes that challenge the sustainability of small island development as set out in the United Nations program for Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States (SDIDS). Through a case study of Barbados this paper critically examines the ‘leisuring’ of rural landscapes on small islands. It ties together Lefebvrian concepts of the production of space with the perspective of political ecology to argue that the agendas of global capital impose new spatialities involving social constructions of space and socio-environmental transformations by an offshore elite who are insensitive to local interests as well as the smallness of small islands. This creates conflict between space and place - between the spaces produced by the global leisure economy and the places that have purpose and meaning for local people. It challenges the possibility of local, community-based development solutions and imposes serious constraints on the implementation of the SDIDS agenda. More research into the nature of the new leisure spaces and how they are perceived and experienced by local populations is needed.     

经济全球化下的区域经济空间结构演化研究评述

近50年以来,交通与通讯技术的迅猛发展使以往许多限制生产活动区位选择的本地化生产要素丧失了固有的垄断性,国际金融市场自由化降低了资本流通的障碍,标准化生产减少了对工人特殊技能的依赖,因此跨国公司可以在全球范围组织生产活动,但是技术创新和知识创新又极大地突出了地区企业集聚、地区创新环境的重要性。因此在经济全球化时期,生产活动的空间区位呈现出复杂的集聚或扩散趋势,区域经济空间结构表现为特殊的形式和规律。在最近20年的地理学研究中,出现了大量关于经济全球化时代区域空间结构的讨论。以跨国公司对生产活动空间区位的影响为主线,对近10年来国内外关于经济全球化时期区域空间结构研究的主要热点问题和观点予以综述。