Place-Based Rural Development and Resilience: A Lesson from a Small Community

Abstract

Community resilience is central to reshaping the role and functions of rural areas; and development has increasingly come about via the capacity of communities to be resilient in the face of challenges. When policies designed and adopted in rural areas are place-based; these policies should rely on resilient actors; belonging to resilient communities. The aim of this article is to focus on factors that can trigger or re-activate mechanisms that help to actively build resilience in areas that are heavily economically and socially impoverished using as a case study a very active and dynamic rural community. From the case study; three aspects emerge; all of which are closely interrelated; as having been particularly significant for building community resilience. The first was the rebuilding of previously frayed social ties within the community (growth of social capital and increased trust). The second was the 'cascade effect' of the first project started in the community; which led to the creation of many other initiatives. The third was the adoption of a systemic approach; able to bring together areas and sectors that had previously been disconnected (breaking down technical-legislative barriers).

Economic Resilience of German Lignite Regions in Transition

“…This approach is widely used in the study of regions [7,8,[26][27][28]. Boschma [26] proposes an evolutionary approach to regional resilience, where regions are resilient when they are able to overcome a trade-off between adaptation and adaptability in a situation of structural change.…”

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“…Although the research work has been specifically focused on Italian small villages, the outlined methodological path could be adapted to different contexts, providing an effective tool to better steer on-going strategies to counterbalance the depopulation of European rural and mountainous villages and assess their effectiveness. As clearly noted by the Cork Declaration (EU, 2016), this issue represents a priority in Europe as small villages are a key part of European culture; and the need for place-based policies, capable of increasing their resilience to hazard factors while enabling participatory and inclusive development strategies, is nowadays largely agreed (Salvia and Quaranta, 2017).…”

“…The potential of a resilience-based approach to support place-based strategies, capable of framing a participatory and inclusive development of rural and mountain marginalised villages, is nowadays largely agreed (Salvia and Quaranta, 2017). However, despite its largely recognised importance, the resilience concept has so far merely been used as a fashionable umbrella concept or, as remarked by Weichselgartner and Kelman (2015), as "an all-encompassing, multi-interpretable idiom", capable of attracting wide scientific interest and a large amount of funds.…”

Community, Natural Resources, and Sustainability: Overview of an Interdisciplinary and International Literature

“…The other four Special Issue papers address relevant community resilience and development issues in various settings. Salvia and Quaranta [35] use a mixed method research approach to examine the importance of place-based development and resilience for local development in impoverished areas. The authors seek to understand local factors that can trigger or re-activate mechanisms that leads to resilience, particularly focusing on the southern Italian rural community of Caggiano, which has experienced a combination of economic depression and economic restructuring.…”