Reconstructing rurality and community: plantation forestry in Victoria, Australia

Changes in land use are a common response to deterioration in the economic viability of farming. While diversification into other agricultural land uses apparently takes place with little consternation or resistance, the development of plantation forestry on agricultural land is often accompanied by concern and controversy. What sets plantation forestry apart from agriculture is that it often involves new forms of ownership and control, it is accompanied by changes in population, and it transforms the production landscape. The development of plantation forestry has become increasingly commonplace in many parts of rural Australia, and it has been met with mixed reactions from rural communities. Our interest was to explore the outlook and perspectives on forestry within a rural locality—Branxholme in the State of Victoria—that is experiencing relatively rapid land-use change into planted forests. We provide a synopsis of community reactions to land-use change. The social construction of change is reported at one level in relation to well-established elements—population, service provision, and employment. Underlying our analysis, though, is an attempt to understand the social construction of change in relation to the higher-order concepts of rurality and community.     

Farm women in Canada,New Zealand and Australia redefine their rurality

This paper focuses on rural women's networks in Ontario, New Zealand and Australia. It investigates three issues: the social contexts in which farm women in Canada, Australia and New Zealand have developed new networks since the late 1970s; the responses of farm women in each country to the changes in the agricultural industry in the last two decades; and the way farm women's organisations are responding to contemporary changes in rural society. In the concluding section, the farm women's movement is interpreted in terms of agency and structure. It is suggested that the establishment of organisations that can speak for farm women at government levels has countered their deep sense of marginalisation and alienation within their industry. In keeping with the dynamic nature of contemporary society, farm women's organisations will need to be flexible and adaptable in order to facilitate quick responses to rapidly evolving economic an social issues.     

Beyond bifurcation: Examining the conventions of organic agriculture in New Zealand

The last 10 years have witnessed numerous attempts to evaluate the merits of new theoretical approaches – ranging from Actor Network Theory to ‘post-structural’ Political Economy and inhabiting a ‘post-Political Economy’ theoretical space – to the explanation of global agricultural change. This article examines Convention Theory (CT) as one such alternative approach, assessing its potential in the context of ongoing change within commercial organic agriculture in New Zealand. More specifically, CT is used to expose the insufficiency of recent ideas of conventionalisation and bifurcation, both reflecting more traditional Political Economic approaches, as explanatory concepts for the emerging condition of the New Zealand organic sector. In this paper, the concept of worlds of justification as developed in CT is utilised to address the emerging complexity of organic production. While farmers supplying a more diversified domestic market can be distinguished from those supplying export markets, an exclusive focus on such distinctions ignores the influential role of extra-economic factors on the viability of organic production systems. Thus, in addition to what are classified as market and industrial worlds in CT, the paper addresses aspects of civic, green, domestic, inspired and renown worlds. Producers' selections of organic certification organisations are used to demonstrate the interaction of these worlds in the development of the organic sector in New Zealand. The article concludes with the imperative to move ‘beyond bifurcation’ and acknowledge the greater complexity of negotiated outcomes that might be achieved from a CT perspective than from existing political economy-derived models like conventionalisation and bifurcation.     

Land Privatization and the Differentiation of the Peasantry: Nicaragua's Coffee Revolution, 1850–1920

Abstract The expansion of coffee cultivation in Nicaragua in the 1870s unleashed a social revolution. Previously most land was common property: by 1920 throughout the coffee districts land was privately owned. Influential historians of Nicaragua see this as the capitalist transition. This essay argues that instead of forging a rural proletariat, this social revolution created a differentiated peasantry whose access to land depended on relations of patronage. Peasant resistance to land privatization and the political, as opposed to economic, nature of the process are examined. The essay concludes that this revolution was more incongruent than congruent with a capitalist social order. The relevance of this history for contemporary political debates in Nicaragua is explored.     

The role of the forestry industry transactions in the rural economy

This paper assesses the economic contribution of forestry to the rural economy of Wales within an input–output modelling framework. This assessment is undertaken in the context of a need for improved economic information on forestry industry activities to inform policy directions in the new devolved political environment of Wales. Moreover, the analysis is undertaken at a time when the forestry industry is experiencing poor market conditions, and where a series of supply- and demand-side rigidities restrict opportunities for policy initiatives. The paper begins by summarising the scale and scope of the forestry industry in Wales, and examines the use of input–output modelling techniques in assessing forestry industry activity, and the specific methodological problems this creates. The paper uses Welsh input–output tables, augmented by survey data to analyse the dimensions of forestry industry activity. An evaluation of “within-industry” forestry transactions reveals the degree of inter-dependence between forestry sectors in the rural economy. The implications of the findings of the paper for the development of new policy are explored in the conclusions.     

“Do you guys hate Aucklanders too?” Youth: voicing difference from the rural heartland

This paper extends recent work in the geography of childhood and youth studies by examining the ways in which rural youth voice their understandings of what it means to be a young person at this historic moment (the end of the twentieth century) in New Zealand. Youth First¹ has been a nationwide project which has sought to privilege what young people 10–17 years say as a basis for evaluating the last 15 years of economic and cultural change in New Zealand. Over the course of 3 years a methodology was used to constitute spaces where youth voices would be heard. Focus Groups and “Youth Tribunals” have been conducted across New Zealand involving young people from diverse social and ethnic backgrounds. This methodology was supported by a development programme for beginning researchers also from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, and by the significant participation by young people in the design and conduct of the “Youth Tribunals”. Their participation has been critical to the power of the methodology to constitute spaces where rural youth have provided rich testimonies about their complex lives. While the voices of rural youth in the study resonate with national youth themes, including the theme of “not being listened to” they also speak to the nuances and differences in the lives of rural New Zealand youth. We would argue that in sharp contrast to the organizing concept of one “rural childhood” our research clearly shows that there are different possibilities in growing up rural. Maori and Pakeha² youth for example draw on different cultural and linguistic resources to voice their relationships to place and identity. Although vehemently clear about the ways in which they were excluded from participation in community life and their strategies of resistance, rural youth in this study also provided analyses which showed their commitment to positive possibilities which they saw as part of rural lives and communities.     

Who Benefits from Production Outcomes? Gendered Production Relations among Climate‐Smart Agriculture Technology Users in Rural Ethiopia

The use of agricultural technologies is generally expected to increase production and household incomes. Gendered disparities in making use of agricultural outcomes could result in inequitable agricultural development. However, too little is known about whether the use of agricultural technologies improves gendered production relations, particularly in the Global South. This study investigates the question of gender‐equitable production relations by drawing on empirical data from women and men smallholders involved in conservation agriculture and small‐scale irrigation schemes in three study areas in Ethiopia. Findings show that the use of agricultural technologies does not improve unequal gendered production relations; rather, gender norms that exist within patriarchal social structures continue to influence production relations in at least three ways. First, societal norms restrict women from asserting their self‐interest in gendered bargaining. Second, there is a customary law in all the study areas that allows men (but not women) to inherit land—thus providing men with better bargaining and decision‐making positions over production outcomes, as they bring land to the marriage. Third, the restricted access of women to rural institutional services further contributes to unequal gendered production relations, as these services support men more than women in the use of agricultural technologies for enhanced production.     

Regulating Land Development: Local Market Structures and Structured Markets

Current rounds of economic restructuring together with the changing priorities accorded to agricultural production are leading to significant shifts in rural property and tenure relations. This paper analyzes these processes with reference to rural Britain; it reports on empirical evidence collected in the county of Buckinghamshire in southeast England. Two significant types of new rural land development are considered—small-scale industrial units arising out of the conversion of agricultural buildings and golf course developments and their ancillary leisure-based activities. Post-war productionist forms of regulation and particularly established types of agricultural tenure are now being modified by farmers and nonagricultural interests committed to the development of rural land. New demands and market structures are requiring more diversity and flexibility by which land is owned, occupied, and used. These emergent, more flexible macro tenures are based on new sets of social and political alliances between farmers, developers, and local planning systems. Agricultural land is increasingly being viewed as a capital rather than as a productive asset associated with more volatile and regionally defined markets whose regulation is formative.     

Social Landscapes of the Inter‐Mountain West: A Comparison of ‘Old West’ and ‘New West’ Communities*

Abstract Rural communities have experienced dramatic demographic, social, and economic transformations over the past 30 years. Historically characterized by close links between natural resources and social, cultural, and economic structures, few of today's rural communities remain heavily dependent upon traditional extractive industries like ranching, forestry, and mining. New forms of development linked to natural and cultural amenities, including tourism and recreation, have evolved to sustain the link between community and resources. The Inter‐Mountain West region offers an excellent example of this distinction. Many of the region's rural communities have experienced substantial population growth resulting from the in‐migration of a new kind of rural resident. Their arrival, in a process some have associated with the emergence of a “New West,” has transformed rural places. However, amenity‐related social and economic structures have not occurred uniformly across space. This paper uses factor analysis and exploratory spatial data analysis to analyze demographic characteristics related to the “New West” phenomena in Inter‐Mountain West communities and the spatial patterns found in the degree of “New West‐ness” that each community exhibits.     

Towards an alternative logic of technological change: Insights from Corn Belt agriculture

Empirical evidence drawn from a Corn Belt case study is used to connect the environmental and socioeconomic contradictions of agricultural production in the region. The paper rests on several key arguments: First, a preliminary case is made for a more explicit recognition of the theoretical and empirical links between the socioeconomic problems of agricultural regions stemming from chronically low levels of producer surplus retention and similar problems of social welfare associated with reduced levels of remunerated labor in the industrial sector. Second, there is a parallel need for connecting the negative social and environmental costs of capitalist agriculture. The case study uses the evolving production process on individual farms as a means of exploring the causal relationship between the movement towards capitalist social relations and environmental degradation resulting from intensive patterns of synthetic chemical use. And third, the role of agency among family farmers faced with a regional economic crisis emerges from the case study analysis. In the 1980s, a small minority of Iowa farmers would adopt, perfect and disseminate a low-chemical input system of production attuned to the logic of family farm social relations. The contribution of the state-sponsored research institutions was notably absent. The case example highlights the process of technological change as a socially-constructed phenomenon subject to alternative forms of rationality that emerge from different syntheses of ecological conditions and social relations.     

Beyond Bluff oysters? Place identity and ethnicity in a peripheral coastal setting

Studies of culture and place form a long tradition in geography but, within rural studies, less attention has been given to the ways in which contrasting ethnicities intersect with specific places and landscapes. Recently, an increasing number of authors have noted how dominant Anglophone, western, ethnicities (frequently labelled ‘white’) have been privileged in British, Australian and New Zealand settings and this paper engages that literature. We use a detailed case study of place identity in Southern New Zealand to show how a composite appreciation of ethnicity provides a deeper understanding of place identity. As such we demonstrate how place and ethnicity intersect via diverse landscapes, social interaction sites and cultural practices.     

Why is there no agrarian capitalism in Nigeria?

Abstract It is widely assumed that the development of commodity production in agriculture will necessarily lead to the displacement of peasant producers by more strictly capitalist forms of production. I argue that no such transition can be assumed in general, nor can it be shown to be occurring in Nigeria. The first section identifies the various ways in which the peasantry are said to be transformed along capitalist lines. The second section examines conditions under which agrarian capitalism has been established, both in Europe and in Africa. It discusses attempts by governments and capitalists to subordinate peasant producers in Africa to their direction. The third section examines attempts to establish plantations, capitalist farms and state farms in Nigeria and considers what light evidence of inequalities among peasant households sheds on the possible emergence of capitalist producers from among the peasantry. It discusses whether rural development projects are likely to transform peasant production along capitalist lines and/or subordinate peasants to the requirements of capital and the state. I conclude that state support has provided niches for capitalist farming, but that Nigerian agriculture is not being transformed along capitalist lines and that both capital and the state have found it difficult to subordinate peasant producers to their direction     

Rural Azerbaijan through Quantitative and Qualitative Research Lenses: Debating the Transition to Small Farm Capitalism

This article examines agrarian relations in post‐Soviet Azerbaijan after redistributive land reforms. We argue that the reforms failed to establish small‐farm capitalism on former collective and state farm land. Commodity production in rural Azerbaijan is characterized by increasing concentration of land and capital, and the recipients of the privatized land shares procure livelihoods not through commercial farming, but through a combination of strategies—including wages, remittances from migrant relatives, and subsistence agriculture. This study is based on the combination of state statistics, government reports, and local ethnography—in‐depth interviews with land reform administrators and with rural residents in six diverse villages from two distinct regions of Azerbaijan. Previous studies of post‐Soviet transition in rural Azerbaijan reported different results of the land reforms. A quantitative account based on the state statistics reported a postreform countryside where small farmers, former collective and state laborers, live off their privatized land shares and increase agricultural productivity. A qualitative account based on local ethnography suggested that the privatized land shares play a marginal role in the livelihoods of local residents. We show how the discrepancy is illusory and stems from an erroneous, legal definition of “small farms” used in the state statistics, which conflates socially distinct categories of land use. When the statistical terms are put into their social context, the quantitative data confirm the qualitative findings.     

Rural change in Prince Edward Island,Canada: an interactive of directive economy?

Galeski's work on rural social change and organisation provides the framework for an examination of recent change in the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island. The Island is a classic rural community, with its agriculture dominated by the potato. A variety of forces are promoting rural change, particularly those of an economic, political and social nature. The processes of change common to all developed capitalist rural economies — urbanisation, autonomous change, and agribusiness — are present, but there is also the PEI Development Plan, a fifteen-year federal-provincial program for the comprehensive economic and social advancement of the Province. The Plan has highlighted the obstacles to rural change. The family farm is central to the traditional Island way of life, but it is seen as being threatened by the growth of agribusiness and the increasing land purchases by non-residents. Other threats to the Island way of life are seen in the growth of tourism and the centralised school system. Paralleling these changes is the increasing level of direction in the Island's economy, particularly from the federal government and agribusiness. The response is seen in political change at the Provincial level, opposition to the Plan, and the tightest restrictions on non-resident and corporate land ownership in Canada. Rural change per se is not opposed, but there is a growing desire to preserve what is best in PEI and its traditional way of life.     

Sideline and Lifeline: The Cultural Economy of Maple Syrup Production1

Abstract Why do people engage in economically minor resource production activities? This field study of Vermont and Quebec maple syrup producers and their households and enterprises examines the diversion of motivations and concerns m contemporary maple syrup production. Farmers, former farmers, and non-farmers all produce maple syrup. The concept of embeddedness provides a framework for understanding how producers understand their involvement with maple syrup, by highlighting the social and cultural context of economic action. An embeddedness perspective emphasizes how other work activities, household relations, the surrounding community, and the resource environment shape the possibilities for and understandings of minor resource production activities. Maple syrup generally only supplemented the household income of the 76 producers interviewed. Producers articulated a cultural economy of syrup production centered on its contribution to overall livelihood, cultural identity, and lifestyle. Reasons included managing risks, making seasonal use of land and labor resources, developing a retirement income, demonstrating a rural, agrarian identity, and strengthening family and community ties. Implications for policy include the place of minor resource production activities in securing rural livelihoods and providing cultural anchors in rural regions experiencing demographic and economic change.     

Participative public relations: Power to the people or legitimacy for government discourse?

This article adopts a Foucauldian lens to critique public relations practices that engage stakeholders in participative processes with predetermined outcomes. It contests the popular notion that the role of public relations is to minimize or diffuse conflict, arguing that such efforts are in fact manifestations of power designed to legitimate the discourses, power and positions of the dominant coalition. The analysis concentrates on attempts to transform a national economic discourse at the Catching the Knowledge Wave Conference, held in New Zealand. It illustrates how a government–university alliance deployed public relations to gain legitimacy for economic change with the business community and more generally, New Zealand citizens.     

Special needs versus the ‘level playing-field’: Recent developments in housing policy for indigenous people in New Zealand

In this paper we outline the development of the Papakainga Housing Scheme, which has been predominantly applied in rural regions of the North Island of New Zealand. The objective of this policy which was introduced in 1985 has been to remove legal impediments that have prevented Maori people building dwellings on collectively owned ancestral land. By 1992, a total of 901 loans had been approved, but the future of the programme is uncertain. We consider that the outcomes of this housing policy are, at best, ambiguous. The policy fits well with Maori concepts of land and home, and facilitates a return to tribal areas. However, designing special programmes for particular groups is as odds with current state policies that promote the ‘level playing-field’. In addition, the scheme will not achieve its full potential without the promotion of employment and other social services to create sustainable rural communities.     

On the moral economy of country life

The role that elite rural women play in the fields of community service and social networking ensures the creation and reproduction of cultural and symbolic capital. Their work, which contributes a necessary ‘service’ for the functioning of village life, also serves to enact women's positions in these fields. Through these strategies and distributions of capital one can see that the social world is mirrored in a homologous symbolic system which is organised according to a specific logic of differences specific to New Zealand rural communities. This paper focuses on how this moral economy of service structures a North Island hill country farming community.     

Intra-regional town—Country antagonism in Israel

The Israeli case of intra-regional spatial inequalities exhibits a paradoxical situation: the socialist rural society, in communal Kibbutzim and cooperative Moshavim, have become the capitalist class in their relations with the urban society in the neighbouring development towns. The present study analyses the emergence and development of this form of intra-regional town—country antagonism.Using the principles of location theory and analysis, in conjunction with recent conceptions of the working of the capitalist spatial economy, intra-regional town—country antagonism is shown as deriving from the very structure of Israeli society itself. The intra-regional case thus reflects the emergence and development of class relations in Israeli society as a whole.     

Original and Ongoing Dispossessions: Settler Capitalism and Indigenous Resistance in British Columbia

This paper draws on archival research and theoretical work to articulate the specific histories, processes, and structures of primitive accumulation in British Columbia. Such processes of accumulation appear differently here than in the comparably more well-theorized contexts of imperial colonialisms. As we highlight the agents and infrastructures of dispossession, our research also aims to foreground the importance of agents and infrastructures of resistance. Different dispossessions generate different antagonisms, and we argue that Indigenous subjects are situated antagonistically to capital not only as laborers partially or wholly subsumed into capitalist social relations, but as Indigenous peoples as such, whose Indigeneity has been ‘in the way’ of development from the 1850s onward. Private property requires before all else the deterritorialization of those whose relations with the land do not revolve around its commodification. Violence against Indigenous nations, and especially Indigenous women, is not incidental to capitalist development but is a prerequisite to capitalist subsumption in the settler-colonial context. In requiring the death of either Indigeneity or the person, capital constitutes Indigenous struggle as an antagonist, interrupting both the subsumption of labor and the circulation of capital (even as such struggles may also self-constitute themselves in a variety of ways).