Contextualising Challenges in Rural Development

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Contextualising Challenges in Rural Development

• A view from Social Research
• Alberto Arce
• Wageningen University
• (Rural Development Sociology)

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The Context of Challenges in Rural Development

• Challenges are conceptualised as
• I Events which are related to the contemporary
  intervals of connections and disconnections
  (flows) between
• a)local rural patterns of commoditisation and
• b)the changing nature of local social relations
• II These critical interconnections evolve between
  rural people and intervening parties often giving
  rise to strains, tensions or contradictions.
• III The outcome of this process can be the
  repositioning of rural livelihoods and the
  re-establishment of a new senses of community
  belonging.

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The scenario

• Globalisation processes are affecting local rural
  communities and livelihoods across the world.
• We are confronted with a confused scenario
  (foggy/ ambiguous) among academics and
  practitioners regarding what is really happening
  in the real world of rural development.

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The era of intangible resources

• I
• Is knowledge a resource for development?
• Knowledge is commonly identified as a
  strategic resource to achieve economic success in
  development processes(see World Bank report
  1988-99).
• II
• In social analysis knowledge and human agency are
  not just conceptualised as a strategic resource
  that experts can manipulate or use in their
  making capacity to achieve an objective or make a
  difference to a pre-existing state of affairs or
  course of action.

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The social understanding of knowledge

• In developmental sociology the notion of
  knowledge and human agency are considered from
  the distinctive dimension of social life and a
  focus on how actors experience the world and how
  these experiences become effective through human
  creative action.

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Creative action

• We have contextualised changes (rural
  restructuring and new ruralities) as events, and
  new rural situations, which establish themselves
  within and between existing practices and skills.
  
• Social researchers use this approach to refer to
  the general awareness that local actors have
  about a changing world and also to their ability
  and capacity to acknowledge their own creative
  action and innovations.

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Creative Action as the Context to Innovation

• The notion of creative action makes us to suggest
  that innovation is then a potential capacity that
  everyone possess and should not be associated
  just with science, technology and scientific
  experts. For local actors innovations are the
  result of the selective incorporation of
  experiences, ideas and beliefs, which are brought
  to bear on events and in new rural situation.

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External Innovations

• Any external innovation necessarily will enter
  the existing life-world of the individuals and
  groups affected and thus, as it were, come to
  form part of the resources and constrain of local
  people creative actions. In this way, so-called
  external innovations are internalised and may
  come to mean quite different things to different
  interest groups or actors.

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Innovation approaches

• Innovation approaches need to be combined with an
  understanding of wider global processes, since
  processes outside the immediate social site of
  interaction usually shape many of the choices
  perceived and actions pursued by the parties
  concerned.

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Three illustrative examples

• Transnational Migration (Peru)
• Property Rights and Biotechnology (Bolivia)
• Agro-Food Co-Innovation Network (Chile)

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Photos Gustavo Blanco, 2005
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Photos Gustavo Blanco, 2005
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The contextualising challenges in rural
development are influenced by

• 1 Transnational migration.
• 2 Property rights, biotechnology initiatives
  and the usefulness of genomics to revalorise
  native crops.
• 3 Agro-food innovation networks and the
  significance of clusters for rural repositioning
  and regional development

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Challenges in Rural Development

• How do we deal with innovations and technology
  that local people have established in their
  communities as a result of global transnational
  migration?
• Are these innovations potential platforms for
  strengthening links between local people and
  development practioners diffusing ICT in rural
  communities? Are these local self-organised
  innovations a solid base for rural communities to
  embrace the challenges of the information age?
  

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Challenges in Rural Development

• How can we demand international cooperation to
  mediate in issues of property rights and
  biotechnology?
• How can we generate global design driven
  cooperation and communication between rural
  farmers communities, scientists, social
  movements, business groups and policy makers to
  determine the nature of bio-technological
  innovations. But, also to contribute to move
  genomic pure science to the design of genomic
  based agricultural rural commodities to revalue
  native crops?

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Challenges in Rural Development

• We need to provide a perspective on the emerging
  experiences linking consumer, private business,
  state and regional development driven clusters.
  This institutional innovations that are
  repositioning agricultural activities, while
  mobilising the service and knowledge based
  sector. Connecting regional and global spaces.
  (like in the Chilean case).

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Challenges in Rural Development

• We need to close the distance between the social
  research, done by academics, and the applied work
  of international institutes and organisations,
  NGOs, civil society groups and private business.
  We need to formulate an agenda with social policy
  relevance on creative action and institutional
  innovations in rural development.
• The orientation of this agenda should be public
  service at a global level. The aim should be to
  reposition rural activities in an integrated
  knowledge-based, natural science and social
  research framework.
• To assemble a development policy strategy for a
  line of competitive commodity consumer-driven
  rural products and services across the globe, in
  order to achieve regional growth and reinforce
  the contemporary sense of belonging to local
  rural settlements.