The Village of the Year Competition Constructing an Ideal Model of a Rural Community in Finland

Abstract

The Village Action Association of Finland (SYTY) organizes the Village of the Year competition annually to award active rural communities. The competition has taken place since 1985, but after the village action movement was integrated into Finnish rural policy networks in the 1990s, it also became a part of rural policy instruments. The competition can be considered a governing technique that constructs norms and an ideal model for rural communities to pursue. In this article, I study the representation of an ideal rural community by analysing the criteria of the competition. I also look for changes to see whether the integration of the village action movement into rural policy is reflected in the norms and representations of ideal rural communities. The results show that an ideal rural community consists of five characteristics: strategic planning, development projects, responsibility for local welfare, cherishing cultural heritage, and village spirit. They also reveal that the requirements for active villages have expanded, which reflects the increasing responsibility of communities for service provision and local development in rural areas.

How Do Community Development Activities Affect the Construction of Rural Places? A Case Study from Finland

“…Development‐oriented rural communities can be regarded as an example of neoliberal governing where responsibilities are transferred to individual citizens and local communities (Rose ; Marinetto ; Kumpulainen ). In Finland, the rationality of community development has been widely adopted as the norm to ‘save’ the villages in rural areas.…”

“…The rural communities in the study have received awards for their work in the provincial Village of the Year competition (in the years 2005, 2006, 2007), which means that they have been recognised as active community developers. These villages can be considered to represent ideal rural communities, setting an example for how to promote local development practices (Kumpulainen ) but also serving as ‘policy laboratories’ – places to study the effects of rural policy objectives compared to the majority of Finnish villages, as these ‘policy laboratories’ are more actively adopting community development practices as instruments to promote local development.…”

“…For example, money is not important in itself but as an instrument to support the village and promote more important objectives, for example organising leisure activities for local children or cherishing the local cultural heritage. It is not so much the case that the chairpersons of village associations have adopted an entrepreneurial identity, but rather that the new calculative orientation is connected to the traditional peasant attitude, the proud of being independent and achieving things through hard work and community effort (Kumpulainen ).

Village action develops and activates the countryside, although it has always been active. But the activeness is different.

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“…The increased role of rural communities also creates regional inequality, since some communities can take advantage of community‐led strategies better than others (Herbert‐Cheshire and Higgins ; Eversole ). The activation of communities can also be seen as part of the politics of active citizenship, in which the state and society are released from responsibilities that are then assigned to individual citizens and communities instead (Rose ; Marinetto ; Kumpulainen ). While the challenges related to the more formalised community actions have been addressed, their spatial, social and structural consequences have received less attention.…”

Rural community development through competitions, prizes, and campaigns: The villagers’ perspective

“…A 2015 study on village competitions in the Czech Republic (Pospech et al 2015) found that the national village of the year contest favoured representations and images of 'the good village' centred around everyday life and social activities of the inhabitants and thus produced a specific type of rural idyll (p. 68). A study from Finland (Kumpulainen, 2016) reviewed the criteria for a national village of the year competition in which strategic planning, development projects, self-responsibility for local welfare, and a focus on cultural heritage and community spirit were core elements in line with the neoliberal approach. Kumpulainen found that the community's internal factors had become the key to success or the cause of decline (p. 61) and concluded by saying that the 'competition can be considered a governing technique that constructs norms and an ideal for rural communities to pursue' (p. 55).…”