Rural Community Development

Community development has evolved over the past fifty years to include a wide variety of activities, including local economic development, political empowerment, service provision, and especially housing programs. But it is possible to think of community development more broadly. At its core, community development aims to make residents capable of improving their quality of life. (In this context quality of life typically involves improvements in human, financial, physical, social, and environmental resources.)

A basic premise of community development is that the public should participate in the decisions affecting their locality, as well as in the implementation of strategies or programs intended to improve their quality of life. There are other benefits to public participation, above promoting democracy and empowerment of local citizens. Involving residents in decisions about quality of life encourages sustainable development, as local residents are more likely than regional or national bureaucrats to understand the trade-offs between economic development, environmental quality, and social justice. Residents also have local knowledge of networks, informal resources, and institutions that will contribute to the success of programs. Finally, public participation helps identify the social needs and preferences of local residents, although it is not a guarantee that the programs will necessary reflect those needs and preferences. For public participation to be effective, it must not be merely pseudoparticipation—in which, for example, residents are given an opportunity to participate but not to make the actual decisions.

The concept of development is often considered synonymous with growth, but the two are actually quite different. Growth simply refers to increased quantities of something, such as jobs, income, or population. Development involves structural and institutional changes that enable the community to better manage resources and markets and to satisfy local needs. Thus, it may be possible that a community is growing in terms of the number of people or jobs, but the growth occurs at the expense of the environment, or the jobs created are low-wage, low-skilled jobs with very few opportunities for advancement. That situation would clearly not constitute development.

Rural is equally difficult to define. It is usually defined by at least one of the following attributes: demographic characteristics (small size and low density), economic [Page 1181]structure (dependence on natural resource industries and occupations), or sociocultural features (primary relationships with strong bonds). Community development efforts in rural contexts may address all or some of these attributes, or other aspects of community life. Rural community development, for example, may focus on strategies for overcoming the small size and low density, such as multicommunity collaboration or regional approaches to sharing resources and providing services and intercommunity and intracommunity networks to facilitate collective action. Similarly, many rural community development efforts focus on diversifying local economies and reducing their dependence on a few employers (especially external owners) and traditional extractive industries.

Implicit in this definition of rural community development is the assumption that the discussion is limited to communities of place and does not include communities of interest. The emphasis on place is somewhat problematic in rural areas. There may be multiple communities for rural residents, and the territory defined as community increases as rural residents become more mobile and willing to commute long distances to work and to consume. For example, residents may live in a school district, a municipality, a watershed, a labor market area, and a trade area, none of which may overlap. The coincidence of interests is much more likely to occur in urban areas where there is more overlap between these different communities of place. But even in urban areas, someone may live in one neighborhood, send their children to school in another neighborhood, and work or shop in another neighborhood. They probably do all of this, however, in the same metropolitan region.

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