Rethinking the European countryside—can we learn from the South?

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Journal of Rural Studies 22 (2006) 278–289 www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud

Rethinking the European countryside—can we learn from the South? Benedikt Korfa,, Elizabeth Oughtonb a

University of Liverpool, Department of Geography, Roxby Building, Liverpool, L69 7ZT, UK b University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Abstract A new paradigm of multi-dimensional rural development has emerged which advocates a broader conception of the rurality where the rural is no longer the monopoly of the farmer. This new, broader paradigm needs to be reflected in the methodology of social scientific research, both generic and applied. In this paper we are primarily concerned with transfer of research methodologies utilised in development studies in the South to explore their usefulness for rethinking the European countryside. Such a transfer of methodology may be helpful, because integrated rural development can build on a long legacy in the South, while it has only recently been advocated in the EU context. The paper reflects upon the application of two such analytical concepts originating from development studies, which we have applied for research on the rural geographies in the European countryside, namely Sen’s livelihood capabilities approach and Chambers’ concept of participatory rural appraisal (PRA). Having the sustainable livelihoods approach as overall framework, both methodologies are qualitative in nature and address people’s survival strategies and livelihood practices with a focus on micro-level analysis at individual, household (Sen) and community level (PRA), while reflecting their embeddedness in wider social, political and economic structures. Our comparative studies suggest that the prospects for bottom-up development, as orchestrated by PRA or similar approaches, is constrained by structural factors, which define the boundaries for local development. The capabilities approach is useful to detect the capabilities to act and be within which bottom-up approaches may take their—though limited—role in rural development. r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction: rethinking rural development in Europe With the introduction of the second pillar of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), a new paradigm of multi-dimensional rural development has emerged in Europe. Rural development is no longer the ‘‘monopoly of the farmers’’. In fact, in the CAP II initiative, also known as the rural development regulation (RDR), some keywords and phrases appear that seem to indicate that thinking on rural development in the EU is more in line with the approach that has been taken for quite a long time in development studies in the South,1 e.g. ‘‘yemphasis must be on participation and a ‘bottom up’ approach.’’ However, although the RDR talks about rural development in a broad sense virtually all the measures mentioned are directed at farming and encouraging restructuring and Corresponding author.

E-mail address: [email protected] (B. Korf). In this paper, we delineate ‘‘North’’ with industrialised, ‘‘developed’’ countries in Europe, North America, Australia and Japan and ‘‘South’’ with the so-called ‘‘developing’’ countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. 1

0743-0167/$ - see front matter r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2005.09.005

diversification. There is very little in the RDR, which is actually about encouraging integration with non-agricultural activities. Although financially much less significant than the CAP, the LEADER+programme of the EU is of particular interest because of the localised scale at which it works and the insistence that programmes are integrated. The LEADER+programme ‘ywill continue its role as a laboratory which aims to encourage the emergence and testing of new approaches to integrated and sustainable development that will influence, complete and/or reinforce rural development policy in the community’ (18.5.2000 official journal of the European Commission C 139/5). All these initiatives indicate that what the EU starts to understand as rural development mirrors those broader conceptions of regional rural development and integrated rural development that have been applied on a large scale in development cooperation in the South. If rural development is to be bottom up and integrated, that is, more participatory, democratic and to involve stakeholders, then the methodological and analytical approach must be bottom up and integrated as well. We argue here that in view of the much longer tradition in bottom-up

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approaches, interdisciplinary poverty studies and broader analytical concepts in development studies in the South, it may be useful to explore how appropriate such methods may be in studying and addressing similar issues in the North. In this paper we are therefore primarily concerned with transfer of research methodologies, not policies. In recent years, the sustainable livelihoods (SL) approach has become influential in re-conceptualising rural development in the South. It is considered for both, research and policy and has formed the conceptual basis to a number of other approaches, which have been developed in the South in the last 20 years. We explore the usefulness of these methodologies for rethinking the European countryside. We have selected two concepts with a close link to the SL approach, one with a focus on research and one with a stronger focus on policy and action. The first concept, Sen’s capabilities approach, focuses on the household level and is considered here for research on poverty and social exclusion. We explore its usefulness with reference to a case study of household livelihoods in micro-businesses in North England. The second concept is participatory rural appraisal (PRA). PRA is an action-research method considered for community development with a long-lasting legacy in the South, which has recently been applied in selected German communities as well. By selecting these two concepts with a link to the sustainable livelihoods frame, we cover two interrelated levels: first, we explore research as well as more actionoriented concepts within the SL frame. Second, we look at both the household and the community level. As such, we consider the two concepts as being complementary in providing an insight into the complexity of rural life and some of the pitfalls inherent in bottom-up initiatives in rural development. Sen’s capabilities approach helps understand how marginal households in the rural landscape cope with insecurity and limited economic opportunities and as such offers a useful framework for exploring these issues. The insights gained from this work demonstrate the limited scope of community development endeavours as they arise from bottom-up approaches, such as PRA, and help to clarify who may be able to participate in such community development processes and who may benefit or not. Our findings in the rural North with respect to PRA largely mirror experiences collected in the South, namely that bottom-up initiatives have only a very confined leverage power to affect rural development and that one needs to consider the ‘‘rural community’’ as a heterogeneous entity. 2. Can we learn from the South? There have been a limited number of attempts to explore what academic debates on development in the North and South may be able to tell each other. One important argument has been that, first, processes of (relative) underdevelopment and social exclusion may show simila-

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rities across geographical regions, and secondly, that causalities of poverty and social exclusion (PSE) may be linked between North and South. Maxwell (1998), focusing on the study of poverty and social exclusion, has summarised these concerns in three questions to be asked in comparing studies2 in North and South: First, are there new comparisons or lessons to be drawn across geographical boundaries, about the characteristics, causes and remedies of PSE [poverty and social exclusion]? Second, does the rapid increase in PSE in the North signal a new convergence between North and South? And third, are there theories to hand which expose connections between PSE in North and South? (1998, p. 20) Maxwell’s interest to detect the links between causal factors and processes of underdevelopment and social exclusion in a more globalised frame, were recently mirrored in a collection of papers edited by Mosley and Dowler (2003), which were combined by a common understanding that ‘‘there are a number of likenesses between the predicaments of North and South, and that these warrant further investigation and analysis’’. We would like to add a fourth question to the list: Are there methodological approaches to the analysis of rural poverty and social exclusion that have been developed from the long period of rural studies in the South that offer useful insights to our understanding of rural development in the North? Integrated rural development has a legacy of more than 20 years in international development cooperation in the South (Rauch, 1996). One may wonder what we can learn from research and practice in this field for rural development in the North, especially from the analytical frameworks employed and the research methodology. This exploration may be particularly worthwhile, for there is a long tradition in development studies that has looked at the rural using interdisciplinary approaches and micro-level analysis understanding households and the individuals within it as being embedded in a broader social, economic and political context. Many of these approaches—among others, agro-ecological research, farming systems analysis—have become influential from the 1970s onwards (Chambers, 1994) and have been consolidated in the sustainable livelihoods framework (Scoones, 1998). There have been explicit attempts to link different scales, the micro and the macro, explaining rural development from different perspectives and exploring the boundaries to what rural development policies can realistically achieve (Ashley and Maxwell, 2001). In contrast, there has been a tendency in the EU agricultural and rural policy debates prior to the CAP II process to treat the rural simply as an agricultural production site and thus experiences with more 2 The differences between poverty and social exclusion in rural areas has been discussed by a number of authors. See for example Shucksmith and Chapman (1998), Oughton et al. (2003) and Commins (2004). However Maxwell groups both under the acronym PSE.

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interdisciplinary approaches to rural development are newer in the EU context. The different concepts in development research have been consolidated in the sustainable (rural) livelihoods (SL) approach (DfID, 2000), which has emerged from different perspectives on poverty, participation and environmental concerns (Chambers and Conway, 1992; Carney, 1998; Scoones, 1998). The SL approach has informed both, research and policy. The SL framework was intended to improve understanding of the mechanisms of rural livelihoods and the impacts of policy measures upon them; it is an analytical framework for research and a tool to plan development interventions (Carney, 1998; Scoones, 1998). It signified a shift in policy from needs-based and resourcecentred concepts to a focus on people and their capacity to initiate and sustain positive change (Carney, 1998). As a concept, the SL frame aimed at providing a broader understanding of the complexities of living and surviving and livelihood diversity in marginal areas (Ellis, 2000) and promoted an understanding of poverty going beyond income, consumption and employment measures (De Haan and Maxwell, 1998; Hulme and Shepherd, 2003). A livelihood is commonly defined as ‘‘the means of gaining a living, including livelihood capabilities, tangible assets and intangible assets’’ (Chambers and Conway, 1992, p. 2). Livelihoods are considered sustainable if they ‘‘y can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks, maintain or enhance [their] capabilities and assets, while not undermining the natural resource base’’ (Scoones, 1998, p. 5). The SL framework is a multi-scale model, which does not perceive people as vulnerable and helpless victims, but looks at their capabilities to act, the space of freedom to do and be within externally imposed boundaries. This vulnerability context defines how macrostructures impinge social, economic and political risks, trends and shocks upon rural livelihoods. Within these boundaries, people (households, individuals) dispose of capital assets; these are action resources which people draw upon to make a living. These assets include social, financial, physical, natural and human assets combined in the asset pentagon. These assets are the building blocks for people’s livelihood strategies to achieve certain livelihood outcomes. Policies, institutions and processes shape the abilities of people to make use of their assets. For example, markets and legal restrictions have a profound influence on the extent to which one capital asset can be converted into other types of capital assets. The SL concept thus provides an analytical link of micro-level strategies with meso-level processes and macro-institutional contexts. Some scholars have raised concern that the SL frame may be applied in an essentialist, managerial modus within aid agencies and that it may not grasp the complexity and dynamics of local institutional practices and relationships (Cleaver, 2002; Murray, 2002). There seems to be a tendency to overemphasise ‘‘assets’’ as analytical category and the livelihood strategies to transform those (Brocklesby and Fisher, 2003). Indeed, what exactly makes ‘‘institu-

tions, polices and processes’’ and how these influence household’s choices and their capabilities remains often unclear (Bohle, 2001). The framework does not sufficiently reflect the effects of power and unequal bargaining resources of different actors within a household and of specific households within a community on livelihood opportunities (Korf, 2004a). Furthermore, livelihoods research is often conducted within the confines of a ‘‘community’’, using methods such as participatory research and household surveys, while influencing forces and actors may operate outside these confines (Murray, 2002). In view of these ambivalences of the SL frame, one needs to be careful in considering how the SL frame and related concepts can be useful to inform research and policy. First, attempts have recently been made to investigate the use of the SL framework in poverty and development studies in the UK. In June 2002, the Department for International Development (DfID) organised a seminar on Sustainable Livelihoods Approaches within a UK Context (DfID, 2002). The debates continued in a special issue of the Community Development Journal (38, 3), which was devoted entirely to an exploration of the SL approaches in community development projects, both in the North and the South. Interestingly, the views about the usefulness of the approach varied significantly across the different authors. Brocklesby and Fisher concluded in their introduction to the approach: More fundamentally, sustainable livelihoods approaches embody a technocratic development drive, which is at odds with the principles, ethos and values that underpin much community development work. (p. 185) Hinshelwood (2003, 243–354), studying the introduction of a community energy scheme in Wales, found that the ability of the sustainable livelihoods approach to untangle a very complex situation was, with some reservations, very useful. Similarly Hocking (2003, pp. 235–242), writing on Oxfam’s first steps to studying poverty in the UK finds that the SL approach revealed the different survival strategies of men and women in urban poverty. The journal has initiated not just a debate on SL and community development but raises interesting and relevant questions for the application of SL more generally in the UK and the North. It is in response both to the DfID seminar and the CDJ articles that we present our case studies here to contribute to the debates that they have started. The two concepts and their applications we study here, cover different aspects of the broader SL frame. The first case study is informed by Sen’s capabilities concept, which was instrumental for the formation of the SL approach. Sen’s distinction between endowments, capabilities and functionings is mirrored in the SL frame: assets (or endowments in Sen’s terminology) alone are not sufficient in explaining what an individual or a household can do or be. It is the social arrangements (or the ‘‘structures, institutions and policies’’ in the SL frame), which determine how endowments can be transformed into

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capabilities, which in turn delineates the potential choice set available to agents. We use Sen’s capabilities concept to explore coping strategies of rural micro-businesses in North England. The SL frame has also been influenced by the large body of practical academic work in community development. The second case study looks into the experiences with PRA and its application in community development. Interestingly, PRA has been applied a long time in the South and, more recently, also in the North. PRA is often considered as an instrument to improve those social arrangements, which help transform commodities into capabilities, mainly through collective action. PRA is thus, both, an analytical instrument for problem analysis as well as a planning tool to encourage social arrangements fostering collective action—what some scholars may call ‘‘social capital’’. 3. Rural development, insecurity and poverty in the North of England The sustainable livelihoods approach builds conceptually on Sen’s concept of capabilities, which has been very influential in development studies (Sen, 1999). Sen’s work has been much developed and highly discussed since he first introduced the concept of entitlements for the study of food supply and famine (Sen, 1981).3 Simplifying drastically Sen’s argument: the financial, social, natural and human capital assets available to the individual form their endowments. The ways in which the individual may make use of these endowments is mediated through the legal and social mores of her society. These are the entitlements of the individual, which provide him with livelihood capabilities: To quote Sen: ‘capability is thus a kind of freedom: the substantive freedom to achieve alternative functioning combinations (or less formally put, the freedom to achieve various lifestyles)’ (Sen, 1995, p. 75). In other words, the capability set is a set of real possibilities open to the individual/household, representing an opportunity for choice which may or may not be realized. The choices that are realized, the actual achievement ‘reflects the various things a person may value doing or being’ (Sen, 1995, p. 75). Sen calls this actual achievement the ‘chosen functioning vector’ (Sen, 1995, p. 76). In short, capabilities provide opportunities for valuable functionings’ (Oughton and Wheelock, 2003, p. 9) We used a modified version of Sen’s capabilities approach as an analytical tool to study the embeddedness of micro-businesses in the household economy of rural England. This study was informed by the recent policy shift under the CAP II–RDR initiative. The England rural development programme (ERDP), for example, has two main objectives of which one, ‘‘the creation of a productive and sustainable rural economy’’, was of particular interest 3 See for example Gore (1993), Gasper (1993), and more recently Robeyns (2000).

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for our study on rural development, insecurity and poverty in the North of England. Micro-business, either as a part of a portfolio of economic activities of the household, or as the single source of income is often proposed by governments as a route to economic development. But business enterprise thrives on risk and the entrepreneurial economy is one in which individuals may face a significant level of insecurity. This aspect of business is often overlooked by policy makers who see the business operating in an economic sphere separate from other household activities rather than embedded within a complex of economic and social relations. Risk and insecurity are different things: for the economist market risk is a source of opportunity for capital. But insecurity, the unpredictable risk inherent in the market may have a heavy toll on labour.4 Furthermore, we assume that economic development is a very limited way of conceptualising ‘development’ which we propose is better thought of as an improvement in well being. The degree of risk or insecurity that the household faces may well affect their perceived and actual well being. We considered the capabilities approach a good starting point for investigating these relationships. In our analysis we modified Sen’s framework (see Fig. 1). We conceived of endowments being transformed to entitlements and thus livelihood capabilities within an institutional environment. The institutional environment included markets, networks and insecurity. In our model two points of transformation can be observed: the first from endowments to livelihood capabilities (part (a) of our investigation); and second, from capabilities to observed functionings (part (b)). The transformation from capabilities to observed functionings involves choice but it will be a constrained choice (Fig. 2). In the discussion above we have referred either to the individual or the household assuming that the household behaves as an individual. However, within the household the entitlements of the individuals will differ and functioning will depend upon bargaining, negotiation and the use of power within the household. Thus the joint endowments of the household and the business will be affected by the institutions of regulation, power, norms and values. In our analysis we therefore looked not only at the institutions affecting transformations from endowments to capabilities to functioning which arose from outside the household, but also those that arose within. The relationships of the individuals to the household however do not just consist of a ‘simple’ summing of endowments and the individual’s ability to contribute to the provisioning of the household. Individuals may call on the resources of others within the household and also within the family and local community. The summing and transformation of these endowments (level 1) expands the ‘livelihood capability set’ 4

See for example, Vail et al. (1999).

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At this point it helps to refer back to the SL framework. The assets, or endowments, of the household and the business are intimately linked. In our study we considered human, financial, social and physical assets but it would be reasonable to include other forms such as political or civic assets as well.5 The relationship of the business to the household is important in understanding business behaviour at this point:

Institutional environment affecting entitlements Endowments

At lower levels of household endowments businesses are more vulnerable, and household provisioning becomes more problematic. Unsustainable or vulnerable household livelihoods will inevitably play a significant part in determining business behaviour. (Oughton and Wheelock, 2003, p. 9)

Livelihood capabilities

Observed functionings

Fig. 1. An adaptation of Sen’s framework as a model of household behaviour. Source: Oughton and Wheelock (2003).

C

1c B

4a

S

3

4b

M

2 1b

1a H F

S State M Market H Household F Wider family

Flows 1 2 3 4

Financial/human/social Labour markets Goods/services Policies: low-pay, small business.

C Local community Fig. 2. A simplified schema of the micro-business household. Source: Oughton and Wheelock (2003).

(level 2) because the household can combine individual endowments in different ways. Benefits in the use or exploitation of endowments may also arise through economies of scale, or sharing rights of ownership or use. So, for example, an inheritance of one member of the family may be used to underwrite a loan to another member of the household for her business. (Sen, 1995, p. 11)

The question then is how do different business households respond to insecurity and risk (a) with different levels of endowments and (b) with different conceptions of well being? It is the conceptualisation of these relationships and the analytical framework for this study that we wish to investigate here. Our model shows the business embedded within the household and both lying within the wider family and the local community. We have argued elsewhere (Wheelock and Oughton, 1996) that the household is an appropriate level for research. People’s needs and responsibilities for provisioning lay at the level of the household.6 Resource flows link the household, the business and the market through employment, the sale and the purchase of services. Similarly, the business and the household may receive resources from the state in the form of business subsidies or income support payments respectively. Flows between the business and the household may take the form of goods and services: financial, human or social. The business may also contribute to the local community in terms of employment and income earning opportunities. The business may be the only income generating activity of the household or it may form part of a jigsaw of income sources. Given that we are considering the household, which will often consist of more than one adult member it is not unusual to find a number of incomes and productive activities. Although, even in single adult households, there may well be more than one income, e.g. from a part-time job, temporary work of some sort and the business. We used this analytical model to investigate our empirical data. Our study was based in rural Northumberland in the North of England, the main objective of the research project to explore the role of micro-business in the economy of the household.7 Analyses were based upon 5 We did not include natural capital because we did not consider farming households or those making their main source of living from the land. However there is no reason why this should not be included if appropriate. 6 Of course ‘household’ may mean many different things in different cultures. We are concerned with the level rather than the unit of economic decision making and use the shorthand term household here as being appropriate to our culture. 7 The empirical material we used is discussed in more detail in Oughton et al. (2003). The empirical work was funded by the ESRC award number

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data collected through life history interviews with 28 selected households. A number of different elements of the behaviour of micro-business owners were investigated, including a comparison with a sample of similar households in Northern Norway, the ways in which the business was embedded within the economy of the household and the effects of insecurity upon the household. Our study in Northumberland produced strong evidence to support our argument that micro-businesses are not separate from but are embedded within the household. The resources available to the business were not therefore limited to the business economy nor were the objectives of the business limited to the profit maximising objectives of ‘‘the entrepreneur’’. In our view, Sen’s capabilities framework was a useful model in that we can see what people have achieved rather than imposing pre-determined outcomes. The choices made are contextualised within a complex social environment and structured by power relations, coloured by norms. We could see processes of social inclusion and exclusion in operation and found the assumptions that we made and that underlay Sen’s model far more realistic than those of current small business policy advocated in the UK. Furthermore, insecurity and risk may be a stimulus for the entrepreneur but for businesses embedded within the household, business risk is intimately linked to livelihood insecurity and can cause considerable changes in behaviour. The model allowed us to take into account the complex livelihood frameworks of different households. The model was particularly useful for highlighting sites for policy intervention for example, (a) by expanding the endowment vector e.g. through skills training for any member of the household, (b) we noted that the value of endowments can be expanded by policies affecting entitlements e.g. sickness benefits for business owners, and (c) meso- and macro-level policies may affect the transformation to functionings through mitigating the effects of insecurity. 4. Participatory rural appraisal (PRA) in Germany In this section, we explore a concept that is widely used to promote collective action and community development in rural areas. Promoting community development and the so-called bottom-up approaches is based on the presumption that promoting collective action in the community sphere may also enlarge the capability spaces for rural households. Sen’s capability frame and the empirical results from Northern England discussed in the previous section illustrate how complex and diverse household livelihood strategies may be in rural areas of Europe. From this arises our basic presumption that community development programmes need to take these complexities (footnote continued) R000238213 ‘Enterprising livelihoods in rural households: new and old ways of working’. We thank them for their support.

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into consideration and that any simplistic notion of community may fail to provide an adequate representation as the basis for rural development, in particular for enhancing capabilities of marginal households. We have selected the concept of PRA for our critical analysis. PRA is applied as an analytical instrument for problem analysis as well as a planning tool to bring social arrangements for collective action into being, which are supposed to enlarge the capability space of the rural poor. We consider here the ambivalent experiences of how PRA has been applied in the South and explore the first attempts to use PRA for community development in rural Germany.8 The concept of PRA is an influential tradition in rural development, which has inspired the focus on people’s perceptions and capabilities in the SL approach. Popularised by Robert Chambers (1994), PRA is a methodology that seeks to reverse rural development in the South by ‘‘putting farmers first’’ and ‘‘handing over the stick’’ to local communities. This new approach reflects the failure of traditional rural development programmes in the 1970s and 1980s that were unable to substantially improve the livelihoods of the rural populace in large parts of the South. The assumption is that top down planning without adequate involvement of the concerned stakeholders, in particular the local population, was one of the core reasons for the failure of these programmes. The PRA paradigm seeks to incorporate local communities in analysing, planning and implementing their own development programmes. Nowadays, PRA has become a standard tool for many development agencies that promote community development. When it is used as a planning method, PRA focuses on institutions, structures and processes and seeks to strengthen cooperative relationships within a community and strengthen ties with outside organisations. PRA can be combined with the SL framework to help the researcher identify assets and processes, which are not necessarily quantifiable—trying to understand how people see themselves within their livelihoods. The key to PRA, which Robert Chambers repeatedly emphasised, is that ‘‘experts’’ change their attitudes towards local people: Facilitators should act as convenors and catalysts without dominating local processes. PRA is not a strict method, but a family of approaches, methods and behaviours that enables people to express and analyse 8 Community development came into fashion in the 1950s already. The British colonial administration and the US government implemented ‘‘community development’’ programmes to stimulate self-help in the South. Since the programmes encountered a number of problems, they were abandoned in the late 1960s (Buller and Wright, 1990; Holdcroft, 1982). In particular, it seemed to be difficult to secure adequate participation of locals and processes were dominated by the more powerful, thus exacerbating existing social structures rather than overcoming them (Buller and Wright, 1990). The PRA ‘‘boom’’ in the 1980s and 1990s is a reprise of these earlier endeavours. While recognising that many of the problems, which we will subsequently identify in our analysis are similar to the ones encountered in these early community development experiences, we concentrate here on the literature with a focus on PRA as a method and concept.

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the realities of their lives and conditions, to plan themselves what action to take, and to monitor and evaluate the results (Chambers, 1994).9 PRA employs methods that hope to enable people to express and share information, and to stimulate discussion and analysis, in particular through visualisation that could enhance creativity, transparency and exchange of ideas. PRA is often conducted in workshops where large parts of a rural community meet in public forums or in smaller groups to discuss and exchange ideas under the facilitation of external moderators. Information is shared between insiders (the villagers) and outsiders (the planners). PRA is hence used in a pro-active manner that combines action research with planning practice. There have been a number of critical accounts of PRA and its application in the South, both theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, a number of scholars have challenged the underlying assumptions of the PRA concept, especially the concept of social learning (Leeuwis, 2000; Mosse, 2001) and of uncoerced communication in PRA (Kapoor, 2002; Leeuwis, 2000). In particular, there seems to be the assumption that lack of knowledge would impede local development and that, if local knowledge could be properly made use of, this would lead to more locally adapted solutions. The implicit assumption behind this conception seems to be that, genuine facilitators are creating a space, which could be subsumed to fall under the concept of a Habermasian ‘‘ideal speech’’ situation or deliberation. In such an ideal speech situation, a ‘‘community’’ analyses shared problems and needs and derives appropriate solutions through arguments and critical debate. Many authors have shattered this implicit or explicit assumption and contrasted it with the empirical dynamics of public debates. Instead, we suggest that participatory development should better be understood as a bargaining process where different interests are voiced, discussed and finally sorted out (Korf, 2004c; Leeuwis, 2000). This arena of negotiation is a contested space, where power differentials play a key role in various negotiation lines, within community, as well as between different agents in the community and outsiders (Nelson and Wright, 1995). Cooke and Kothari (2001) have identified three tyrannies of participation as they unfold in these negotiation arenas: first the tyranny of decision-making, second the tyranny of group and third the 9 It is important here how PRA developed out of a related method, rapid rural appraisal (RRA). RRA emerged as a method of data collection and analysis in rural development towards the end of the 1970s. RRA sought to challenge the validity of large-scale quantitative household surveys, which were often conducted as a threshold for top down planning of rural development in the South. RRA, in contrast, developed an action research approach to data collection, which was based on appropriate imprecision, involvement of the research ‘‘objects’’ in the analysis of their own situation and a sharing of these results between researchers and researched. It was logical to go a step further and base the overall planning process, not only data collection and analysis, on a participatory approach, which was how PRA emerged as a planning method (see, for more background on this, Chambers, 1994).

tyranny of method. They argue that PRA and other participatory development approaches have often been imposed from the outside and that facilitators have dominated the processes (first tyranny). Mosse (2001), for example, describes how development agency staff manages to keep obscure control over defining problems and processes in the ambiguous negotiations taking place between agencies and ‘‘people’’. PRA—or the discourse of participation—then often becomes a legitimising instrument for development agencies rather than a truly empowering planning tool (Cleaver, 2001; Mosse, 2001). These ambivalences are reflected in the debates among PRA practitioners. In their view, PRA faces many challenges the more it becomes incorporated into mainstream development practice. The broader its application the more difficult it is to inculcate the philosophy of PRA, hence the new roles for planners and experts as facilitators rather than experts. PRA is often mechanically applied to satisfy funding agencies without real engagement in empathising with the poor. Cooke and Kothari (2001) refer to this as the tyranny of method (their third tyranny). Institutionalising and ‘‘scaling up’’ PRA into mainstream government planning remains a difficult task, in particular since the logic of planning bureaucracies (of governments as much as of development agencies) often does not fit the flexibility that is needed in participatory planning processes (Alff et al., 1998; Pretty and Scoones, 1995). In addition, many development practitioners have shown a tendency to implicitly assume a kind of ‘‘community myth’’ (Guijt and Shah, 1998), that is, that local communities are homogeneous entities, which they are not (second tyranny). The community myth has overshadowed the nuanced ways in which local elites were able to appropriate control over ‘‘participatory’’ processes and making PRA their own instruments to keep control over fund flows. It was often the marginal groups of local societies, which could not effectively voice their needs and concerns. Agarwal (2001) calls this ‘‘participatory exclusion’’, which hits specifically female and low caste members of ‘‘the community’’ (see also, Mosse, 1994, 2001). Furthermore, PRA as development tool pertaining to specific localities supports a specific understanding of the community as a place where all problems of underdevelopment could be resolved. Such localism surely overlooks how local underdevelopment is made through socio-economic processes reaching far beyond the local boundaries of the community (Cleaver, 2001; Mohan and Mohan, 2002), and those impediments to rural development cannot be solved within the community alone. Even further, Chambers’ concern about ethical probity and reflexive learning among development practitioners may have been far away from the realities of organisational rationalities and their egoisms, especially in the larger development agencies, but also within local, national and international NGOs. Chambers’ emphasis on practitioners’ ethics, though important, purports a view of development, which tends to depoliticise the development agenda and

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which does not sufficiently take account of the role of broader socio-economic structures and processes for local development. Furthermore, the question is how legitimate it is to induce participatory processes largely from the outside (Korf, 2004c). Arguably, there is no simple pathway from project-induced PRA-based participation towards deeper democratization of rural societies (Mohan and Stokke, 2000). These are serious concerns about the appropriateness of PRA as a tool to promote rural development. Nevertheless, even though the experiences in the South have been at the least ambivalent, it was argued that in the European context, PRA could be an innovative instrument to overcome rural agonies and initiate a new spirit of civic engagement and ‘‘community’’ feeling in rural areas that experience a relative social and economic decline. In this role PRA has recently been promoted in selected Swiss and German villages for community development planning and action research (Connold, 1999; Currle and Delius, 1998; Friedrich and Ku¨gler, 2001; Hu¨rlimann and Jufer, 1995; Koch, 1996; Korf, 2001; Michaelis, 1998; Sto¨ber, 2005).10 PRA became part of a sort of communitarian endeavour inspired by the recent debates on social capital, especially the work of Putnam (1993). Putnam’s influential study on voluntary associations and their role in explaining differences in regional economic growth and prosperity has served as an important legitimation for bottom-up programmes (Shortall, 2004): Bottom-up is then mostly referred to as some kind of process where ‘‘a local community’’ initiates or is supported in initiating its own (community) development.11 More specifically, PRA used in community development was expected to contribute to revive social capital, understood as intra-community ties, in marginalised rural communities by





strengthening communication links within rural communities and to encourage more people to engage in their own affairs, thus fostering ‘‘social ties’’ that stimulate collective action, creating local ownership for local projects and initiatives and for a local kind of citizenship, thus ensuring the sustainability of a project’s lifetime,

10 In November 1999, the Landwirtschaftliche Beratungszentrale Lindau (LBL), Switzerland organised a workshop to share experiences with PRA approaches in Europe: First European Experience Sharing on Participatory Learning and Action. This workshop reflected the increasing interest in PRA and similar techniques for rural development in Europe. The workshop report is available from the LBL. 11 The link between the social capital debate and participatory development as localism and depoliticised development has gained a great deal of attention. Especially influential have been the critiques of Fine (1999, 2001) and Harriss (2002) on Putnam’s work and how it has been appropriated within the World Bank. Although both authors have the World Bank and their policies as a prime target, their criticism that the social capital debate leads to a depoliticisation of development processes and tends to construct too intimate a picture of rural communities also applies to community development and studies on social capital in the North.



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narrowing the gap between citizens, local government administration and local politics by increasing the citizens’ direct involvement in specific political issues, thus supporting an active citizenship and ‘‘responsive’’ government.

Many protagonists of PRA in the North tend to stylise PRA as an approach, which can contribute to solving many problems of rural underdevelopment and marginalisation if only communitarian principles and local collective action could be revived. Rural underdevelopment is then understood, in Putnam’s tradition, as an expression of missing social capital. Community development and bottom-up processes could, in these accounts, counter those changes, which seem to alienate rural people from their own roots, such as the individualisation of life perspectives and the relative decline of agriculture as social and economic pillar of rural communities. One can observe here a tendency, which these advocates share with early protagonists of PRA in the South, namely an uncritical enthusiasm about what PRA can achieve in the betterment of the life perspectives of the poor and of marginalised rural communities. In particular, PRA practitioners in the North tend to debate details of PRA techniques and how they be adjusted to the circumstances of the North, while neglecting an examination of the institutional power of discourses of participation. A recent test PRA conducted in a village in Niedersachsen in the North of Germany (Korf, 2001; Po¨lking, 2000, 2002) may illustrate some of the features of uncritical application of methods. The village was situated in an area dominated by industrialised livestock farming—often called the ‘‘Vechtaer Schweinegu¨rtel’’ (‘‘porc belt’’ of Vechta). Farmers have been accused of causing considerable environmental degradation. The PRA workshop was initiated by a larger action research programme to explore bottom-up approaches to tackle the challenge of maintaining agricultural production while improving its environmental record. Interestingly, the PRA was only considered after other forms of stakeholder dialogue on a regional level had not brought the expected results. A consultant company was contracted to carry out the PRA workshop with the help of a number of voluntary facilitators. The objective of the workshop—as defined by the commissioning party—was to gain an insight into the perceptions of the rural population about environmental and other problems relating to agriculture. After some preparatory meetings with key informants and representatives of the local administration, the core of the PRA workshop was conducted within one week consisting of a number of tools common to PRA, but partly adapted to suit the specific conditions of Germany. Transect walks and in-depth interviews were carried out together with approx. 20 key informants. ‘‘Kitchen table talks’’ were conducted with randomly selected households (50): These talks were to gain an understanding of what citizens perceived as strengths and weaknesses in their

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community life, what people liked and disliked in their community and what they would suggest to change if possible. In addition, focused group discussions were held with farmers, young mothers, immigrants, youth and elderly respectively. Some of these groups conducted a SWOT analysis (strengths, weakness, opportunities, threats), others prepared mental maps of their environment and some just talked about their problems. The results of this one-week exercise were presented and discussed in a community meeting at the end of the week, where also representatives of local political parties and of the local administration participated. The detailed process and results of this workshop are documented in Po¨lking (2000, 2002). Overall, however, the PRA did not meet the expectations, neither of the PRA team nor the local community. In our view, the PRA workshop repeated a number of common mistakes outlined in the critical literature on PRA in the South. In the PRA workshop, the initiative for ‘‘participation’’ came largely from the outsiders without proper embeddedness in the formal institutions of local governance (urban council, mayor) or local initiatives. The PRA workshop lacked an adequate process of preparation and follow-up and thus deteriorated into a one-shot event without initiating local collective action. Furthermore, it proved to be difficult to encourage marginal social groups, such as immigrants, ‘‘new citizens’’, to participate in the activities of the PRA process. What one could observe was a ‘‘middle class’’ effect, the very poor or marginal individuals and very rich ones would not participate—a phenomenon which Weinberger (2000) also observed in studies in the South. Ironically, the village would probably have performed well on Putnam’s social capital ladder with most villagers being engaged in local sport clubs, the Catholic parish and other civic organisations. However,

these provided social capital only to a core of the village while excluding newcomers and ethnic minorities. Furthermore, this core of social capital profiteers was eager to downplay environmental problems caused by agriculture— the traditional backbone of social and economic life. Mentioning these in public would be considered as troublemaking and as disturbing the social (capital) equilibrium. Arguably then, PRA did not seem to be an adequate instrument to forge constructive solutions to the most urgent problems of the locality, such as environmental degradation, land use conflicts, social exclusion of minorities. This is largely due to three reasons: (1) these problems are rooted in structural causes that have their origin at a higher level than the community (e.g. unemployment, agricultural pollution). (2) PRA did not prove to be an adequate forum for the solution of some of the problems (social exclusion of certain groups), because these problems would require a more long-term approach of social engagement. In addition, (3) conflictive issues are difficult to handle in public forums (in this case: land use conflicts between residents and farmers) and require a lowprofile mediation approach rather than a publicised discussion of the issue. The experience of Mu¨hlen and experiences of other PRA workshops in Germany (Michaelis, 1998; Koch, 1996; Sto¨ber, 2005) indicates that much of the criticism of the PRA discourse in development studies and the ‘‘early’’ mistakes in its application in the South have been repeated in the North (Table 1; Korf, 2002, 2004b). Table 1 outlines some of the apparent parallels between PRA applications in North and South. In particular, PRA workshops are often run as ‘‘stand alone’’ activities, without proper institutional embeddedness, and PRA processes often appear to help the more established members of a community more than the vulnerable

Table 1 A Comparison of PRA Applications in North and South South

North

Practical challenges: Mechanical application of tools, Elite capture of community processes, No follow up activities conducted, Bureaucratisation of processes, ‘‘Stand alone’’ application.

Practical challenges: Uncritical application, No institutional embeddedness, Often initiated by ‘‘benevolent outsiders’’, No follow-up ensured, ‘‘Middle-class effect’’, PRA cannot solve structural problems and dilemmas of rural areas in the periphery, Overemphasis on local agency disregards the embeddedness of local communities in regional, national and global socio-economic processes.

Conceptual challenges Power or learning? (Leeuwis, 2000), ‘‘Community myth’’ (Guijt and Shah, 1998), ‘‘The new tyranny?’’ (Cooke and Kothari, 2001), Participatory exclusions (Agarwal, 2001; Mosse, 2001), Disregard of class and caste differences (e.g. Mosse, 1994), ‘‘Localism’’ disregards how local problems are embedded in supralocal socio-economic processes (Mohan and Stokke, 2000).

Source: North: Koch (1996), Korf (2001, 2002, 2004b), Michaelis (1998), Sto¨ber (2005). South: Alff et al. (1999), Nelson and Wright (1995), Cooke and Kothari (2001), Guijt and Shah (1998), Leeuwis (2000), Mohan and Stokke (2001), Mosse (1994, 2001), Pretty and Scoones (1995).

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members. Overall, current PRA practice in the North tends to propagate the depoliticised activism and localism, which has been subjected to critical debate in the South for some time. PRA or similar participatory approaches for rural development are often utilised as legitimising instrument for channelling rural development funds, often EU money and for promoting localised rural development as an excuse for lacking overall policy concepts to overcome structural inequalities between and within regions and localities. In view of the apparent similarities in the challenges to PRA in the South and the North, a more theoretically refined and critical debate is, in our view, overdue with regard to PRA applications in the North.

5. Conclusions: what have we learned from studies in the North? In this paper, we have presented two experiences in transferring methodological frameworks for research and policy developed for rural development in the South to the study of rurality in the North. The two studies focused on different levels of analysis, the first on the level of households and individuals within them and the second on community development and participation as instrument to strengthen social arrangements that bring about collective action and capability enhancement on a local level. Both analytical levels, we would argue, are closely intertwined. For example, a household’s capabilities are not only important for its economic survival, but will both influence its ability and willingness to participate in community processes and be influenced by those processes. As an analytical or conceptual framework, the capabilities approach was found to be stimulating and valuable. It provides insights into the role of individuals within the household as well as demonstrating how household livelihoods are embedded in a broader socio-economic context. The capabilities approach is a useful entry-point to analyse the multiple linkages across geographical scales and the scope of local agency, both on household and community level, within the structural conditions and the institutional context, which set the boundaries for regional rural development. The capabilities approach may, indeed, be instrumental in delineating what can be put on offer by agencies orchestrating PRA and what not. Capabilities analysis might look at insecurity for rural households, micro-businesses and the impact of structural processes on well-being. Examining household capabilities may identify the dummy variables of what may not be influenced through PRA and community-level development. In particular, capability analyses are instrumental for understanding the variety of different livelihood strategies pertaining among households in rural areas taking the household as a threshold for analysis rather than atomistic individuals. Capability analyses show the complex networks of relations, not only within the community, or the immediate region, but their embeddedness in socio-

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economic processes of capitalism and globalisation, which cannot be detached from local livelihoods. In our analysis of PRA application, we have shown that the problem of development localism and of community myths, which largely blur the manifestation of power relations in participatory processes and the dependence of local development with broader socio-economic processes, has been widely debated in the development literature, much less so, however, in the debates on PRA in the North. The latter seems to be, at least implicitly, influenced by the social capital debate and communitarian thinking, which tends to downplay internal contradictions in rural societies (Shortall, 2004).12 In particular Putnam’s interest in social ties as a trigger of regional economic development has focussed on aggregate levels of social capital, a grid through which the poor easily fall. We would argue that the social capital concept, which has informed research in both, North and South, may not be that helpful to understand social deprivation in the rural countryside and may be counter-productive when it influences thinking on community development understood as the repair shop for global neo-liberalism (Mayer and Rankin, 2002). Furthermore, the experiences with PRA in Germany have confirmed that PRA—and possibly other bottom-up approaches as well—are not very helpful in overcoming structural constraints to regional development in the rural peripheries, which are rooted in macro-conditions of global neo-liberalism. When PRA comes up with ‘‘nothing can be done’’, it may actually leave the community or some members of the community feeling much worse off. Do participatory planning processes change the basic livelihood insecurity and well-being of vulnerable families, the problems of relative social deprivation and environmental concerns? PRA is useful for understanding local perceptions of problems, but it is not sufficient to formulate responses beyond the local. One needs to be careful not to overemphasise what can be achieved through local agency. The PRA legacy from South and North clearly indicates that ‘‘bottom up’’ or participation per se is not the key to solving rural problems, because they are not confined to the local, but linked to the structural processes on broader geographical scales than the local. Therefore, integrating and linking different institutions and organisations in rural planning as suggested by the Haskins report (2003) for the UK are necessary, but not sufficient to address problems of rural underdevelopment. Relating these propositions back to the current processes in CAP II and LEADER+, we would argue that more attention needs to be given to the fact that ‘‘bottom up’’ 12 This is to some extent surprising, because there is also a growing literature on community development more broadly defined in the North, which critically examines some of the impediments of bottom-up initiatives and participation in rural development, in particular as it is practised in EU funded regional development programmes (see, e.g. Shortall, 1994; Shortall and Shucksmith, 2001). Apparently, even this literature seems to be overlooked by the early enthusiasts of PRA in the North.

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can only operate within a limited scope of action and may not help solve structural causes of rural underdevelopment. The livelihoods framework and the capabilities approach can provide a basis for research and policy on rural development in the European countryside that is to encourage a much broader understanding of micro-level economic activities and how these are integrated into a whole set of livelihood strategies of households. In addition, the experience with PRA has underlined the importance to understand the ‘‘village community’’ not as a holistic entity, but a locality with a diverse number of actors and interests which are also interwoven with broader processes of economic change, governance and globalisation. Rural development understood in a broader sense should therefore recognise this complexity of the rural landscape and its linkage with structural processes beyond the rural confines instead of promoting simplified notions of ‘‘bottom up’’ and ‘‘the local’’. One could reverse the above argument from North to South again: if even in the more developed rural areas in the North, bottom–up approaches do not help much in overcoming structural deficits imposed by global market forces, what would you expect the impacts to be in those less developed countries and their rural areas? In this paper, we have sought to illustrate why, in our view, rethinking rurality also means that rural studies in North and South listen more carefully to each other. Acknowledgments This is a revised version of a paper presented at the 20th Congress of the European Society for Rural Sociology in Sligo, Ireland from 18 to 22 August 2003 and the Xth International Geographical Congress in Glasgow, 16–20 August 2004. Critical comments and suggestions from Jane Wheelock, from conference participants and from three anonymous referees are gratefully acknowledged. References Agarwal, B., 2001. Participatory exclusions, community forestry and gender: an analysis for South Asia and a conceptual framework. World Development 29, 1623–1648. Alff, U., Ay, P., Bauer, E., 1998. Partizipation—Mit offizieller Anerkennung ins Abseits. Peripherie 72, 71–81. Ashley, C., Maxwell, S., 2001. Rethinking rural development. Development Policy Review 19, 395–425. Bohle, H.-G., 2001. Neue Ansa¨tze der geographischen Risikoforschung: Ein Analyserahmen zur Bestimmung nachhaltiger Lebenssicherung von Armutsgruppen. Die Erde 132, 119–140. Brocklesby, M.A., Fisher, E., 2003. Community development in sustainable livelihood approaches—an introduction. Community Development Journal 38, 185–198. Buller, H., Wright, S. (Eds.), 1990. Rural Development: Problems and Practices. Avebury, Aldershot. Carney, D., 1998. Sustainable Rural Livelihoods—What Contribution Can We Make? Department for International Development (DFID), London. Chambers, R., 1994. The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development 22, 953–969.

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