The Social Management of Rural Nature: Understanding Agrarian-Based Rural Development

Abstract

IntroductionThe governance and regulation of rural nature are reaching a point not just of crisis (associated with health issues, environmental loss, the control of epidemics, overproduction of low-quality products, and the failure of producers to manage to cut their costs and prices) but of entrenched divergence of purpose. There is a slowly developing failure of policymaking, and of the expertise (not least social science expertise) relevant to that policymaking. In studying these issues, we have to consider the contradictory ways in which rural nature is currently`socially managed'. That is, how the actions of the state, market, and civil society are grouped together in seemingly legitimate ways to create particular exploitation patterns of rural nature. This social management lies at the heart of sustainable development debates in that it demonstrates how the dominant approaches to rural nature can remain unsustainable for such long periods of time.In recent papers (Marsden, 1998; we have identified and counterpoised three differing but coexisting rural development models which have relevance in understanding this current crisis. Each of them has its own internal logic, ideology, scientific rationality, and regulatory arrangement. First and by far the most dominant is the agro-industrial logic. This model still defines rural nature largely as intensive productive space, and places the emphasis upon the continued rationalisation of production, for the purposes of generating food commodities which can compete on world markets. This is, we argue, essentially a`race to the bottom' logic in both economic and environmental terms for large sections of the farming population of most advanced nation-states. Major efforts by the state through the use of public funds, and by private capital, through the use of new technologies (not least genetic modification), are made to restrict the most harmful effects of this system. But, as Buttel (1997) and Drummond and Marsden (1999) have argued, these attempts, despite their massive public and private costs, are only palliative over time. Second, of growing ascendancy during the 1980s and 1990s has been the postproductivist dynamic. This has largely turned its back on agricultural justification and has celebrated the growth of the consumption countryside. The third dynamic örural developmentöis much more fledgling in that it emerges very much in opposition to the agro-industrial dynamic by trying to create Abstract. There is a growing realisation that agriculture is a central mechanism for delivering sustainable rural development in Europe. However, agro-industrial and postproductivist logics and dynamics have largely tended to marginalise its significance. In this paper we explore some of the conceptual parameters needed to develop the rural development dynamic. This is one which recentralises agriculture and farm-based activities and provides a basis for countering the growing crisis in rural and agricultural policymaking. In order to further embed the rural development dyna...

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