Living and Dealing with Limited Opportunities: Social Disadvantage and Coping Strategies in Rural Peripheries

Abstract

In this article, manifestations of social disadvantage in peripheral rural settings in the Czech Republic are investigated. Based on the theory of local opportunity structures, the authors identify various aspects of the spatial context that intersect with individual handicaps of people and their households and contribute to poverty and social exclusion. Moreover, coping strategies of vulnerable rural inhabitants are investigated. The empirical analysis is based on qualitative interviews with people affected by various forms of disadvantage, living in three economically weak rural regions. Multiple intersections between individual and contextual factors of disadvantage were uncovered. Limited job opportunities and precarious labour conditions within the local labour market, and the absence and difficult accessibility of services, represent the most important restrictions. Households living in poverty, the unemployed, people with care duties and persons with disabilities have very limited possibilities of overcoming the restrictions of a meager local opportunity structure. Their main problem is their low spatial mobility and temporal flexibility. The result is multiplication of individual vulnerabilities in rural localities. Two types of coping strategies, locality-based and mobility-based, have been identified as partial compensation of the existing deficits.

Poverty and Social Exclusion in Diversified Rural Contexts

“…The shift from poverty studies to research on multi-dimensional and processual social exclusion can also be documented in a number of papers. Besides attention devoted to the socio-cultural and moral aspects of exclusion (Shubin 2010;Kay 2011;Milbourne 2014), housing availability (Gallent et al 2003;Sturzaker and Shucksmith 2011), job search constraints (Matthews et al 2009;Bernard et al 2016), wage inequalities and low pay (Bernard and Šafr 2019) and mobility constraints (Osti 2010;Noack 2011; Plazinic and Jovic 2014) have been investigated. Only very little attention has been devoted to the dynamic aspects of poverty and low pay in rural areas (Phimister et al 2006).…”

Ageing in the Changing Countryside: The Experience of Rural Czechs

“…The development of Czech post‐socialist rural landscapes represents the diversity of the post‐socialist European region in terms of the ageing rural population, with its exceptionally ‘high level of industrialisation and the limited role of agriculture in providing rural jobs’ (Bernard et al , p. 35), and a relatively low share of the rural population. In the Czech Republic, 67.3 per cent of the total population lives in settlements defined as urban municipalities with a population of 3,000 or more (Czech Statistical Office ), and 73 per cent resides in settlements larger than 2,000 people.…”

Rural Quality of Life – Poverty, Satisfaction and Opportunity Deprivation in Different Types of Rural Territories

“…Figures 1 and 2 display the spatial patterns of both spatial dimensions of disadvantage. 4 Defined as the share of persons with complete secondary education employed in occupations where secondary education is not commonly required 5 Accessibility index was calculated as a sum of sub-indices that reflect the travel accessibility of basic public services (different types of health services, secondary education), job opportunities and settlement centers (measured as the time required to overcome the specified distance by individual car transport. For this purpose, car accessibility was calculated from the core (largest) municipalities of all micro-regions to selected municipalities providing certain types of services or a specific number of job opportunities.…”

“…The main struggles faced by the inhabitants of peripheries have been described as a shortage of qualified employment opportunities, poor transport access, underdeveloped civic infrastructure, and declining civic life (Ouředníček et al 2011, Temelová et al 2011). Bernard et al (2016) uncovered cumulative causation of disadvantage in rural areas in which individual vulnerabilities intersect and multiplicate with poorly developed opportunity structures. Rather, quantitative analyses of the issue have been sparse.…”