Partnerships in place: Facilitating rural local government entrepreneurialism in Newfoundland and Labrador

Rural local governments across Canada, including those in Newfoundland and Labrador, struggle with many of their day-to-day operational activities, including providing appropriate drinking water, wastewater, and garbage collection services, among other essential services, and rarely have capacity to facilitate local economic development activities. In recent times, entrepreneurialism has been noted as having potential for rural local governments, yet little research has been completed to determine its presence and relevance for municipalities in Newfoundland and Labrador. In response, we examined eight case study local governments in Newfoundland and Labrador to determine if, and how, entrepreneurialism was present in municipal efforts to increase economic prosperity in their communities. Findings suggest that while rural local governments continue to face challenges due to declining support for rural development from provincial and federal governments and increased downloading of responsibilities, some communities have established ways to remain resilient through partnerships and building on place-based assets. This exploratory study provides a basis for further in-depth research to determine the extent and approaches to entrepreneurialism in local government in rural Newfoundland and Labrador.     

Participatory Watershed Development in India: Can it Sustain Rural Livelihoods?

The purpose of this article is to assess the impact of policy interventions through watershed development (WD) on the livelihoods of the rural communities. This is done by assessing the programme in the context of a sustainable rural livelihoods framework, that is, looking at its impact on the five types of capital assets and strategies required for the means of living. The article also examines the vulnerability and stability of these capital assets, as well as analysing which people participate in the programme and enhance their livelihoods through sharing its benefits. In the light of the analysis, it is argued that watershed development holds the potential for enhanced livelihood security even in geo‐climatic conditions where the watershed cannot bring direct irrigation benefits on a large scale. In such fragile environments, however, watershed development is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for sustaining rural livelihoods. While the focus of watershed development is primarily on strengthening the ecological base such as water bodies (including traditional tanks), grazing lands and wastelands, it should be complemented with other programmes which focus on landless poor households in order to make it pro‐poor. In the context of low rainfall regions where improvement in irrigation facilities is slow, agriculture alone cannot support the communities. Policies and programmes should aim at creating an environment for diverse livelihood activities, which are the choice of the household rather than distress activities.     

Making and Breaking the Aboriginal Remote: Realities,Languages, Tomorrows (A Commentary)

The concept of ‘remote’ has intensified a fundamental misunderstanding of widespread rural Aboriginal situations. More, it has served to mask the causality for current problems, which will remain intractable until causality is effectively addressed. This commentary re‐examines how ‘remote’ is produced, both by and within the dominant state and society and, by means of a reconsideration of demand sharing and long‐distance travel, from and within Aboriginal communities. On that basis new kinds of confrontational engagements with the production of remote are suggested.     

Gendered water spaces: a study of the transition from wells to handpumps in Mozambique

In many parts of rural Africa, women and children spend a lot of time collecting water. In the development literature, the water collection task is portrayed as oppressive, arduous, and disliked by women. Eliminating this activity from women's lives is believed to empower them, yet there has been little research investigating what actually happens at the water source or how women themselves perceive the time spent there. This research is based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in five rural communities in the northern province of Nampula, Mozambique. Over this year, handpumps were constructed in communities where people previously collected water from distant shallow wells and rivers. This article compares the social interactions and activities between the customary water sites and the handpump through the lens of gendered space. The customary water sites are controlled by women and highly valued for their social attributes. While clean water is more accessible at the handpumps, men often regulate access to the technology and social activities are limited. This article contributes to feminist geography and political ecology by showing how differences in the materiality of water spaces interact with local norms to shape social interactions and gendered subjectivities, and how, in turn, men and women contribute to the production and meaning of these spaces. I argue that the handpumps open up new spaces for men and women to negotiate gender roles and (re)define their associations with modernity and development.     

Prehispanic water pressure: A New World first

Ancient cultures have a wide range of water control management techniques, each associated with a particular purpose, including water for consumption, agriculture, flood control, drought relief, and rituals (Scarborough, 2003). One technique that has received limited archaeological attention is the purposeful creation of water pressure to perform useful work. Perhaps the earliest such example was found on the island of Crete in a Minoan palace and dates as early as 1400 BC. Terracotta pipe segments with graded diameter reductions were used to create fountains (Evans, 1921–1935). Although gravity and the weight of water are the most efficient means of generating water pressure in a closed conduit, natural conditions (climate, geology, topographic slope, etc.) that might lead to the construction of water pressure systems are less clear. Here we show that the Classic Maya (AD 250–600) constructed a water pressure system with the potential to control the flow of water within an urban area. By burying a conduit along a steep ephemeral channel passing through a residential group, upland springs could be diverted to build pressure in the conduit to provide a dry-season supply of water. Up to 6 m of hydraulic head could have been recovered to lift water from the pressurized conduit to a point of use. Water pressure systems were previously thought to have entered the New World with the arrival of the Spanish. Yet, archaeological data, seasonal climate conditions, geomorphic setting, and simple hydraulic theory clearly show that the Maya of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico had empirical knowledge of closed channel water pressure predating the arrival of Europeans.     

‘Nature makes people happy,that’s what it sort of means:’ children’s definitions and perceptions of nature in rural Northwestern Ontario

ABSTRACT

Nature exposure positively impacts children’s physical, socio-emotional, and cognitive health and development. We know less about how children perceive their connection with nature and what nature means to them. This study uses focus groups to understand how rural Canadian children define, experience, and perceive benefits of nature. Using thematic analysis, we identified three primary themes. First, while children associate nature with specific activities, natural elements, and locations, they also conceptualize nature as ‘a whole community.’ Second, children experienced nature through doing, highlighting how activities connected them with nature while recognizing constraints on those engagements. Finally, children demonstrated agency in accessing nature to improve their emotional states. These findings indicate that from children’s views, nature is more than just space with natural elements. Children are also knowledgeable about the health benefits of nature, and capitalize on this knowledge. These findings can inform interventions to increase children’s interactions with outdoor environments.     

Fording differences? Conditions mitigating water insecurity in the Niger River Basin

River basins are an extremely important source of freshwater for Africa and the impact of climate change on these communities constitutes an important question worth studying. Among these basins, the Niger River Basin is an ideal candidate for meso-level theory testing of climate change-induced political violence because of its importance as one of the largest sources of freshwater in Africa, its high vulnerability to climate change, and its location in a politically unstable region. This paper utilizes the benefits of GIS to test whether effects of water insecurity on the various incidences of political violence are conditional on economic, geographic, and social means of connectivity. Our analysis uses the density of secondary road networks, the geographic distance to the Niger River, and a shared co-ethnicity with one's head-of-state to evaluate the impact of hydrological stress and its subsequent risk for political violence across nine West African countries from 1997 to 2012. Using climatological data and an econometric de-trending method, we measure the separate, substantive impact that individualized changes in precipitation trend and precipitation variability have for the incidence of ACLED's political violence events, conditional on local economic, geographic, and social factors. Our results reveal a complicated web of circumstances under which certain forms of political violence are more/less likely to be observed. The implications of this analysis serve as a call for a closer inspection of the micro-channels by which climate stress impacts heterogeneous communities in the developing world.     

Disastrous hydropower,uneven regional development,and decolonization in India's Eastern Himalayan borderlands

Sikkim, a small Eastern Himalayan state in India has twenty-seven hydropower projects proposed under the Indian Power Ministry's hydropower initiative that envisions the Himalayan region as the country's "future powerhouse" (Dharamadhikary 2008; Kohli, 2011). In 2011, a 6.9 magnitude earthquake rocked Sikkim, the epicenter of which was located eerily close to two under construction dams and the Dzongu reserve, revered as sacred by Sikkim's Indigenous minority Lepchas. Drawing on interviews with Lepcha residents of Dzongu, and state geologists and disaster management officials, I center my analysis on their encounters with disasters and hydropower infrastructure. Building on decolonial theorizations and scholarship on Himalayan borderlands, I argue that disastrous hydropower forms on historical terrains shaped not only by geophysical conditions but also generations of uneven regional development, and the racialized colonial and postcolonial governance of the Eastern Himalayan frontier. In placing ‘disastrous’ as a prefix to hydropower, I follow my interlocutors who implicate state and private developers in producing disaster conditions in Sikkim even as they evade culpability by discursively shifting blame onto the region's “inhospitable terrain” (GoI 2008: 27). I demonstrate that despite key differences in their relation to state power both Dzongu Lepchas and Sikkimese technocrats, forward a materialist, place-based understanding of precarity, differential vulnerability, and uneven regional development. Centering Indigenous and regionalist critiques, I argue that the recent entry of hydropower development in the Eastern Himalayas, conceptualized by colonial authorities as India's “Mongolian Fringe” (Baruah, 2013), requires a closer attention to the entanglements of frontier-making and racialization in India. More broadly, I demonstrate how disastrous hydropower development in a racialized frontier region offers a productive entry into decolonial theorizing in the Indian context.     

The greying of resource communities in northern British Columbia: implications for health care delivery in already-underserviced communities

The delivery of 'rural' health care services has long confronted the geographic problems of distance, low user densities, low-order facilities and caregiver shortages. As a result, rural and remote communities across Canada have struggled with health care delivery. For rural and remote communities in resource hinterlands, population ageing driven by industrial restructuring presents a significant departure from past experience. Drawing on examples from northern British Columbia (BC), this paper examines this context of ageing in rural and remote locations with the purpose of highlighting impending challenges for health care service provision. In the first part of this paper, we provide a demographic overview of population change and ageing in northern BC. In the second part, we present data on the availability of services throughout the region to support seniors who age-in-place. Population ageing, in areas that have never dealt with this issue before, highlights not only important servicing questions but also important policy questions about how to provide for needs that the policy and community context are not presently equipped to meet.     

Indicators of community economic development through mural-based tourism

Community Economic Development (CED) has become a recognised form of economic development, despite contention regarding its definition and applications. It is acknowledged that development planning benefits from a more holistic approach with a focus on community participation. The objective of this paper was to explore the process and selected indicators of CED success through an examination of five Saskatchewan communities that have made the conscious decision to develop tourism through the use of wall murals on the exteriors of buildings. Extensive in-person interviews were conducted with stakeholders in each of these communities. Generally, this research has found that both the CED process undertaken and the measurement of success are dependent upon the desired outcomes of mural development. For example, in communities that created murals-as-community-beautification, the process was less formalised and success was measured more qualitatively, for example in increased community pride and the development of social relationships. For those communities where murals were developed as part of an explicit economic development strategy, the process was more formalised and the outcomes measured more quantitatively, including the numbers of visitors, employment and businesses created. This research also indicates that particular attributes of rural places play a critical role in how CED is understood, defined and carried out, and how successes, both tangible and intangible, are measured.     

Municipalities as Governance Network Actors in Rural Communities

The concept of rural network governance can include different practices, and it is important to gain insight into governance role formation processes. The ability of rural municipalities to effectively perform their role as governance network actors is significantly influenced by municipal organization and norms. Small differences can have big consequences and lead municipalities into different types of governance network roles. This is important to consider in situations where rural communities are facing imbalances and the municipalities increasingly are expected to engage in new roles and take more responsibility for local development. Effective strategies for using local network structures can help rural communities achieve sustainable development. We develop four different governance network models and discuss how the municipal authorities and citizen groups in two rural communities in Setesdal, Norway, perceive the current governance role of the municipality as well as their views on how this role ideally should be performed. We conclude that explanations for the different strategies relate mainly to norms and processes that are endogenous to the communities, which may indicate that rural municipalities have a great deal of autonomy in deciding how to use local network resources.     

怒江大峡谷旅游扶贫研究

旅游扶贫是解决旅游资源丰富型地区贫困问题的有效途径。怒江峡谷区是个区域性的特困少数民族地区,山高坡陡、生态环境脆弱的地理环境决定传统的农业难以改变其贫困面貌。而其丰富的民族文化资源、生物多样性资源和独特的峡谷自然景观等旅游资源,使怒江旅游扶贫成为可能。文章分析了怒江峡谷旅游扶贫的优势、劣势资源和机遇,提出怒江旅游发展应以乡村生态旅游为目标,开发特色旅游扶贫产品,发挥政府引导和扶持作用。     

Understanding local innovation systems in peripheral tourism destinations

Tourism destinations in peripheral areas are often large regions established by centralised government agencies to encourage collaboration between dispersed communities and foster innovation. Relatively little research attention has been paid to the impact that centrally defined destination boundaries have on whether and how small communities contribute to innovation at a regional level. This paper examines the case of Burra, a small town in rural South Australia. It analyses the networking, collaboration and knowledge exchange behaviour of tourism stakeholders in the context of the state-government-defined ‘Clare Valley’ tourism region. Data were drawn from a web-based social network analysis, in-depth interviews, historic document analysis and field observations. The study found that the local tourism system had limited aspirations and capabilities to collaborate with other towns in the region. Lack of regional engagement was only partially due to intra-regional competition and resistance to regional boundaries. More significant barriers included a local culture of operating in isolation, an embedded reliance on public sector leadership to manage systemic interactions, an aging system with limited ambition to change and an inability to harness in-migrants and externally based stakeholders to stimulate knowledge transfer. Changing the imposed destination boundaries would have limited impact on the operation of the local system. The paper concludes that effective regional destination development in peripheral areas needs to be better informed by more detailed understandings of local tourism systems and their capacities to engage.     

THE IMPACT OF REMITTANCES ON REGIONAL CONSUMPTION AND INVESTMENT

This paper examines the effects of international remittances on regional economic development using spatial data from an original household survey carried out in the Republic of Moldova. I analyze remittance flows with a model that estimates regional (urban and rural) budget shares of consumption and investment expenditure categories for rural and urban households. An important contribution of the paper is that it analyzes the effect of remittances in the regions where spending takes place, which is not necessarily the same as the region where the households originating this spending reside. Using the multinomial logit approach, I control for potential selectivity and endogeneity biases of remittances. The results show that remittances lead to significantly increasing marginal productive investments in urban regions at the expense of rural regions. The fundamental finding of the study is that remittances influence the flight of productive capital out of rural areas into urban regions (a pattern similar to the crowding‐out effect of the Dutch Disease). The analysis carried out in this paper can be applied to other temporary income transfers and exogenous spending injected in the region that affect households' regional expenditure patterns.     

中国农村社区研究进展及展望

农村社区作为推进城乡一体化以及实施乡村振兴战略的重要节点,是统筹城乡发展,推进新型城镇化的有机载体.本文梳理了近年来我国农村社区研究的热点领域及相关成果,基于CiteSpace分析了该领域的主要进展及存在的问题,并提出了今后研究的方向与重点.农村社区研究在理论构建、治理体系、建设模式、规划策略及研究方法等方面均取得了一...     

Discipline and Devolution: Constructions of Poverty, Race, and Criminality in the Politics of Rural Prison Development

Abstract:  The soaring expansion of the US prison population is transforming the geographies of both urban and rural landscapes. As the trend in mass incarceration persists, depressed rural spaces are increasingly associated with rising prison development and the increasing criminalization of rural communities of disadvantage. Drawing on in-depth archival and interview research in rural communities in the Northwestern states of Idaho and Montana, this paper explores how cultural productions of poverty and exclusion intersect with rural prison development. I examine how representations of poverty and criminality are entangled with processes of economic restructuring and the localization of economic development and social welfare. I explore the ways in which the rural prison geography of the Northwest is linked to the material and discursive construction of those in poverty and how these narratives are produced through local relations of race, ethnicity, and class. I suggest that the mobilization of these constructions legitimates rural prison expansion, increasingly punitive social and criminal justice policies, and the retrenchment of racialized and classed inequality. Further, I argue that these discursive imaginations of the poor work to obscure the central dynamics producing poverty under the neoliberal restructuring of rural economies and governance.     

Going Bush: the Implications of Urban‐Rural Migration

Traditionally, migration away from urban centres by those seeking lifestyle changes has been towards beach environments. More recently though, there have been small movements of people to rural environments seeking similar lifestyle changes. These movements to rural locales have been popularly referred to as treechange. Previous research on exurban migration has primarily focused on quantifying the migration process and attributes of the migrators. In contrast, this paper presents some preliminary findings on the impact of urban‐rural migration on a small, semi‐rural receiving area north of Melbourne. More specifically, it explores the impact that exurban migration has on local housing markets such as increases in house prices, decreases in affordability and declines in rental stock. The research also illustrates the divisions that appear in local communities between traditional residents and ‘newcomers’ over amenity issues and economic development.     

Troubled water? Acquiescence,conflict, and the politics of place in watershed management

Controversy surrounds proposed revisions in access and recreation policy at central Massachusetts' Wachusett Reservoir, a crucial source of drinking water for metropolitan Boston. This policy conflict illuminates a broader tension between rural and exurban resource-supply areas and metropolitan areas that are committed to resource extraction and urban growth. Boston dominates the reservoir region and extracts its resources, while less powerful local residents disagree with and sometimes protest against policies detrimental or perceived to be detrimental to their interests. Despite this tension, data gathered from surveys at the reservoir, supplementary interviews, archival research, and attendance at public meetings reveal that many potential sites of acrimony are characterized by positive attempts to reclaim place rather than direct opposition to outside domination. Findings suggest that residents in the reservoir region have attached their own values to the reservoir, including both rational valuation of specific non-drinking-water benefits and non-instrumental valuation of the reservoir as an integral part of residents' lifeworlds. Although tensions persist between Boston and the Wachusett region, area residents' complex valuation of the reservoir as a space of utility and a place of everyday life suggests opportunities for consensual resource coalitions and initiatives.     

The shifting regional geopolitics of Mekong dams

The Mekong is a region whose geopolitics are shifting in complex ways. They are shifting with the post-Cold War reconfiguration of ideological as well as strategic power deployments. They are also shifting with rapid economic development and associated regional integration. This paper employs these various dimensions of shifting geopolitics to explore and partially explain the (re)emergence of hydropower development in the Mekong. It does so by outlining both the shifting geopolitics of river and region, and showing how the Mekong as metaphor extends to much more than the materiality of the river from which the multiply constructed region derives its name. It suggests that the regional geopolitics produced by these shifts is key to the re-emergence of mainstream hydropower.