Policies and Plans for Rural People (Routledge Revivals)

An International Perspective

Paul Cloke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134694631
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Rural Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection, first published in 1988, was the first title to bring international perspectives into the field of rural planning. Using a comparative approach and a broad range of case studies, including Britain, Scandinavia, the U.S.S.R. and New Zealand, the authors review the major problems faced within rural areas, and policy responses to these problems. Each study deals with the political and institutional frameworks involved in the management of rural areas and the means by which policies have been implemented. With an introduction from Paul Cloke that places rural policies and plans within the context of the state, this reissue will be of great value to any students with an interest in the planning and organisation of rural communities across the world.

1 Introduction: Planning, policy making and state intervention in rural areas

PAUL CLOKE

Introduction

Planning … is an extremely ambiguous and difficult word to define. Planners of all kinds think that they know what it means; it refers to the work they do. The difficulty is that they do all sorts of different things, and so they mean different things by the word; planning seems to be all things to all men. (Hall 1974: 3)

Other than its failure to recognize the broader gender relations within planning and amongst planners, Peter Hall's description of planning as ‘all things to all men’ provides a very accurate commentary on the contemporary analysis of planning and policy making in rural areas. The chequered present stems directly from a chequered past. Historically, most nations have viewed planning problems as specifically urban phenomena, and whether for reasons of reparation of war damage, or of the sheer political need to cope with the demands of expanding yet decaying cities, planning has been developed as a response to conflict in these urban environments.

The ability of rural interests to attract attention in the political planning arena has therefore depended on the availability of high-profile political issues from which to develop wider mechanisms of planning and policy making. In densely populated nations, planning focus on urban expansion has inevitably led to consideration of rural land-use issues, even if ‘rural’ in this case could roughly be translated as green spaces on maps into which urban centres could expand. Equally important in the portfolio of rural interests is the question of agricultural production. If governments seek to subsidize agriculture so as to ensure security of production, they are likely to underwrite such policies by giving the protection of agricultural land central importance in rural planning strategies. Thus the preservation of the agricultural land base has in many nations become the fundamental premise of planning for rural areas.

In other, less densely populated nations, this convergence of policies for urban expansion and policies for rural land budgets is less direct and occurs over a longer term. The work of Bill Lassey (1977) and others in the USA has shown that the size and scale of rural territory have served to soak up pressures of urbanization such that their impacts are politically diffuse even if locally their importance can be severe. In such situations, rural planning has been brought onto the political agenda more because of the growing importance of environmentalism at the national scale than any political perception of the needs of rural people.

Planning and policy making have thus evolved for different stated reasons and over different scales of time and space in different nations. Yet these are by no means the only criteria which account for the variegation of planning and policy mechanisms throughout the developed world. As Gordon Cherry (1982: 109) has pointed out:

planning is grounded in socio-economic, cultural and political contexts; its legitimacy springs from society and is fixed in political and institutional frameworks.

It is therefore reasonable to suppose that an understanding of rural planning and policy making based on the intensive study of one socio-economic, cultural and political context and fixed in one political and institutional framework would greatly benefit from comparable research in other contexts and within other frameworks.

The breakdown of academic parochialism has been one of the central reasons for the development of the Journal of Rural Studies as an international and multidisciplinary forum for rural research. It is this same attack on parochialism which has led to the development of two collections of essays which focus on rural planning from an international perspective. This, the first collection, deals with policies and plans for rural people, and the second book will concentrate on rural land and landscape. It is freely admitted that this represents a rather artificial division of rural planning matters. Clearly, policies which aim to support agricultural production will impact upon both rural land and rural farm populations. Nevertheless, it is hoped that by bringing together a wide-ranging body of information and reflection from human and environmental perspectives a full appreciation of rural interdependency will emerge at a level which would not be permitted by a single collection of inevitably sketchy overviews of all rural policies and planning mechanisms in a particular nation.

As it is, authors have been presented with a most difficult task of providing informative and incisive commentaries within tight confines of length. This being so, they have been asked to concentrate their approach on specific and common issues: particular problems experienced by rural people, the relationship between rural people and the distribution of political power, the availability of planning and policy-making mechanisms, the implementing agencies concerned, and the nature of central-local state relations. Underlying this common agenda is a wish to illustrate from a wide variety of socio-economic and cultural contexts and political and institutional frameworks:

(a) any communality of problems experienced by particular fractions of the rural population;

(b) any comparability in the planning and policy mechanisms which are developed in response to these problems;

(c) any supportive evidence of contemporary concepts of the rôle of planning within the form, function and apparatus of the state.

These issues are reviewed in the final chapter of this book.

Problems and Rural People

It would be predictable and maybe even expected at this point that the thorny issue of defining ‘rural people’ should be raised. After all, two clearly diverging schools of thought have emerged on this issue in recent years. There are those who would point out that in most developed nations all people are culturally if not physically urbanized, and that the underlying causes of the social and economic problems faced by people living outside cities are exactly the same as those experienced by urban dwellers; namely, powerlessness, exploitation, uneven distribution, inequality and so on. According to this viewpoint, there is little to be gained from the categorization ‘rural’ which indeed induces the negative tendency of ascribing spatial explanations to social phenomena. From the opposite corner it is stressed that rural land use, landscape and settlements are patently different from their urban equivalents by dint of scale, density, remoteness, and predominant forms of economic production, especially agriculture. This being so, people who are constrained to live in these areas, or who choose to do so, reflect these inevitable differences in their living environment.

It is not the intention here further to describe or fuel this debate, especially as detailed discussion is available elsewhere (Cloke 1985a, 1988, Cloke & Park 1985). The point surely is not that there is no difference between urban and rural environments, because there patently is, but that the understanding and explanation of social and economic problems encountered in those environments should not be constrained by factors of rurality, marginality, peripherality or any other ‘spatiality’. Rather, the very fruitful explanatory areas of social composition, structure and relations should be allied to a view of planning and policy making activities as an integral part of the overall rôle played by the state to form a fundamentally non-rural, indeed aspatial, portfolio of conceptual tools for understanding what goes on in these areas we call rural. Because social relations exist in spatial arenas (Massey 1985) it appears legitimate to make use of pragmatic spatial divisions such as ‘rural’ to study both the changing composition of society and structuring of the economy as driven by the engine of capitalism, and the activities of the state to regulate these changes through its planning functions.

Part of the chequered history and indeed contemporary state of rural planning and policy making as presented by its analysts and commentators stems directly from the fact that different perceptions of rural problems can and do lead to different planning ‘responses’. Put bluntly this means that a spatially conceived problem will generate a spatially conceived prescription for response. For example, the socio-economic problems of many remote rural areas in developed countries in the mid 20th century were reflected by trends of depopulation. Following the spatial model, these problems became characterized as ‘small town’ problems, and indeed a great deal of useful empirical work has been produced which illustrates the changing living conditions experienced by people living in small towns (see, e.g., Swanson et al. 1979, Hodge & Qadeer 1983, Johanssen & Fuguitt 1984. However, the perception of the problem has structured the response. The small town problem has tended to be converted into the response of how to provide facilities in small towns (not, more specifically, to small-towners).

Throughout the developed world (as illustrated by the following chapters) rural growth centres have been planned at various scales and with varying degrees of success as spatial responses to the social problems in depopulating communities. It is therefore understandable and inevitable that when a reversal of population trends in rural areas is detected as is now the case with the counterurbanization (or counterdepopulation – see Cloke 1985b) phenomenon governments will not only proclaim the success of their planning policies but also, more importantly, withdraw from the need to plan because rural problems have somehow been ‘solved’.

As studies of the problems experienced by rural people have become more sophisticated, welfare-oriented concepts of deprivation and disadvantage have assumed greater importance. Even so, these essentially social and economic problems have tended to have been imbued by the same spatial planning culture as described above. McLaughlin (1986) suggests that deprivation can be explained in two very different ways:

(a) A sociological model, which identifies the root causes of deprivation within the structure of society. From this perspective deprivation is derived from inequalities in the distribution of social status and of political and economic power. Moreover, the influx of adventitious and affluent middle-class newcomers within rural communities has heightened the relative deprivation of non-propertied households, whether relativity is recorded in subjective or objective terms. Social change in turn impacts upon resource allocations of goods and services in both the public and private sectors. Thus social differentiation and stratification are viewed as causes of rural deprivation (Newby et al. 1978).

(b) A planning or services model, which focuses on the decline in quality and quantity of rural services in rural areas as the major key to the understanding of rural deprivation. The impact of service losses is experienced disproportionately by non-mobile and other disadvantaged groups, although attention has been paid to place-related provision of access and service opportunities as the principal planned palliative (Moseley 1979, Shaw 1979).

These categories (along with the work from which they are derived) have been criticized by Lowe et al. (1986). Both models are seen as demonstrating ‘crucial weaknesses’. In terms of the sociological model:

The emphasis on social conflict, adopted by Newby and his colleagues as the key to rural power structures, contradicts the idea of a communitarian rural idyll. Even so, the authors of the sociological theory do not assess the rôle of state interventions in contributing to the political and economic subordination of the rural working class. Whilst it would be wrong to criticize this research for not directly addressing the relationship between social deprivation and state action since a study of deprivation was never part of the authors’ brief, the lack of attention paid to state mediations of power, property and social control is curious. (pp. 20–1)

The point being made is a simple one, yet the rôle of state intervention on behalf of capital inte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• 1 Introduction: Planning, policy making and state intervention in rural areas
• 2 Britain
• 3 The Netherlands
• 4 Scandinavia
• 5 France
• 6 The USSR
• 7 The USA
• 8 Canada
• 9 Australia
• 10 New Zealand
• 11 Conclusions: Rural policies – responses to problems or problematic responses?
• Index