The community and the problems of rural society

This dissertation is concerned with how to foster positive developments in declining European rural regions through local residents and communities instigating innovative initiatives. It frames these issues within the conceptualisation of “social innovation”, which encapsulates notions such as empowerment and emancipation by means of innovations in societal relations and practices to fulfil unmet local needs. Through three analyses of local development approaches in the Austrian region of Mühlviertel, the research project identifies how new initiatives to combat rural decline are instigated and evolve at the level of local communities as well as within the greater multi-level governance system. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias, the dissertation project gives a relational and processual account of the contingent historical and regional processes that have led to the institutionalisation of communities and region building within the EU’s LEADER programme for rural development. While this framework is deemed successful in instigating local actions, it is advanced that the interdependencies and community relations that are fostered through this propagate predominately traditional and standardised projects with, for example, agricultural and economic focuses. However, as intra-regional networks foster new learning processes and citizen consultation processes that engage local actors in developing regional visions and agendas, the impetus is created for pioneering discourses promoting solidary and communal aims. Here, it is shown that transformative changes in bottom-up approaches to rural development result from discursive and figurational changes among local actors propagated by iterative and interlinked incremental and radical social innovations, which together create the impetus for regional movements and social change towards social solidarity. This dissertation thereby contributes to the debate on rural development and social innovation by explicating how contemporary local social innovations are the outcome of historical processes situated within macro- level structures and movements at the meso- and micro-level.

Author dc:creator

• Stoustrup, Sune Wiingaard

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Baur, Nina
• Christmann, Gabriela

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Identifier URI

https://doi.org/10.14279/depositonce-17097

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:depositonce.tu-berlin.de:11303/18936