Community resilience in post-socialist rural areas

Abstract

Resilience thinking has become an increasingly popular topic in both academic and policy-making circles due to its normative interpretation, which assumes that resilience is the opposite of vulnerability. Vulnerable groups, communities, settlements, regions and nations have a greater likelihood of facing more serious consequences in the event of unpredictable, negative shocks. Based on this view, in general, rural communities and regions can be considered more vulnerable and hence less resilient to unknown, negative events, as the subsistence of these communities is more closely linked to their environments rather than to people living in urban areas. This is further exacerbated by the path dependence of having a post-socialist past: the ‘legacy’ of socialism that, in many cases, includes a relatively disadvantageous position, backwardness and intensification of peripheralisation processes. While there is no consensus on the concept of resilience itself, there are several approaches and perspectives related to possibly detecting signs of its existence in rural communities. Our aim to present how the notion of resilience can be operationalised at the farm level in post-socialist contexts based on three different perspectives in order to contribute resilience thinking related to post-socialist discourses. We illustrate how rural community resilience may be conceptualised based on the example of the grape- and wine-producing communities of Soltvadkert, Hungary and the Minis-Maderat wine region, Romania. Based on our qualitative methodological results, it can be stated that the resilience of a community or group, its properties reflecting resilience can be interpreted in several ways, which is partly location-dependent, partly path-dependent, however, it is highly dependent not only on embedded structures but also on activities that are constantly reproduced by community members.