![]()
Part I
Introduction
![]()
1 Introduction to the concept of this book
This book presents a much needed critical conceptual reflection and policy-relevant interrogation of current developments of the rural studies and policies within the European Union (EU hereafter) during the Period 4.0. The authors identify and examine inconsistencies and contradictions in the design and implementation of EU rural development policy, which largely driven by intensifying neo-productivist pressures. The analysis of the trajectory taken by EU policy, as well as the above-mentioned inconsistencies and contradictions are of general academic interest. In fact, they are particularly pertinent to ongoing practice and policy debates relating to the perceived needs to create a complex EU Rural Policy which recognises, but is not solely driven by, the increasingly dominant neo-productivist agricultural paradigm.
The importance and novelty of our line of argument lies in drawing the outlines, and critically examining the territorial impacts, of neo-productivism as an ideology, a practice and a set of policy imperatives during Period 4.0 (which is the EU’s 2014–2020 programming period). The authors adopt a position that is critical and, therefore, less frequently encountered – namely, that such a paradigm shift in the EU’s rural policy design may reduce its effectiveness and ability to achieve predefined goals relating to balanced territorial development and cohesion.
On offer is an analysis of the nature, contradictory and complex drivers, and multiple impacts of Period 4.0 policy within the specific territorial context of its implementation. It is commonly agreed within academic and policy circles that the contexts, trends, drivers and impacts which are currently morphing have the potential to determine the nature and boundaries of rural areas in the longer term. In spite of such an agreement, examination of key contexts, trends, drivers and impacts during the current Period 4.0 are largely missing – both from theoretical-intellectual and pragmatic-policy perspectives. It is, therefore, necessary to problematise the concepts underlying the proposed book: Period 4.0 and rural development, territorial drivers of Period 4.0 rural development, design of the EU’s Rural Policy in the context of the neo-productivist paradigm, and methodological evaluations of agricultural and non-agricultural rural policy tools. Compared to currently available publications on ‘rural development’, our discussion significantly deepens the analysis of the neo-productivist ‘innovations’ relating to rural development in Period 4.0. With intellectual and policy analyses that are largely missing, we are seeking to address an intellectual imperative that relates to problematic but real, material consequences and such an intellectual imperative which, therefore, would require addressing. Importantly, the proposed book is not solely an intellectual project but seeks to inform practice constituencies (managers, analysts, and policy-makers among others) regarding policy-making and neo-productivist EU rural development policy.
Rural development in the digital age and Period 4.0
The digital age and Period 4.0 are interconnected, due to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Interconnected trends, as with the above, mark an intensified use of information and communication technologies (ICT) not only in industrial production, but also across sectors and spheres of everyday life, referred to as the Internet of things (IoT) (Helbing 2016; Sendler 2018) or simply smart (i.e. smartphone, smart development, smart city, smart village, etc.). These drivers distinguish the current age from previous forms of social organisation (e.g. hunter-gatherers, pre-industrial, industrial, etc.). Their association with knowledge, information and digital technologies explains the application of the term ‘Society 4.0’ (see e.g. Haupt 2018; Kruliš et al. 2018) – a trajectory which is likely to be marked by an exponential growth. The Government of Japan (2014) envisages the gradual interconnection of advanced cyberspace (i.e. the use of Artificial Intelligence, big data, sensor information) with physical space in the coming decades – marking the transition to the next phase or Society 5.0. The latter remark on physical space and its connection with new possibilities that are associated with the digital age is a fundamental change in understanding ‘territory’ and, therefore, understanding development opportunities for rural areas – an issue which deserves addressing, not only within the scholarly area of rural studies, but also in terms of rural policy-making. Unfortunately, this is not the case; there are several reasons for this.
One of the main problems is the long-term characteristics of rural areas, especially the high degree of heterogeneity, which hinders efforts to unambiguously define them (McAreavey 2009; McDonagh 2012; Pělucha et al. 2012). The need to typify rural areas and to identify various types of problems or potentials for development represents further complicating factors which negatively impact on long-term spatial trends (i.e. urban-sprawl, suburbanisation, counter-urbanisation). Regarding the above argument, one must add the general scepticism of the very need to discuss rural space (e.g. Hoggart 1990; Cloke, Crang, and Goodwin 2005; Friedland 2010), with urban-rural linkages reducing long-standing differences between the two. Last but not least, the digital age has brought along specific, multiple changes to the countryside of the early 2000s, when compared with the situation at the end of the twentieth century, with significant differences between urban and rural areas, though, persisting under the guise of the ‘urban-rural digital divide’ (Townsend et al. 2013; Salemink et al. 2017).
Existing academic debates focus either on the binary concept of Internet availability across territories or on identifying users vs. non-users. Although there is a significant improvement in Internet coverage of territories, including across rural areas, the quality of connectivity and the speed and stability of digital services remain problematic. Rural areas remain disadvantaged in this respect, compared to urban regions. Current trends in deepening disparities between rural and urban areas are further accentuated by the widening disparities among rural areas (OECD 2013). These trends have accelerated since 2000 and they are being driven by technological change, globalisation and localisation (Johnson 2001). Technological changes have a strong selective territorial impact. Outlying rural areas have limited access to a diverse range of production factors and knowledge economy resources (Warlow and Kasabov 2014; Kasabov 2016). Dominant functions of cities and urban areas are derived from their contribution to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) across service sectors, computer technology, telecommunications and high-tech industries (Abel and Gabe 2011). This marks the deepening polarisation of economic growth (Smetkowski et al. 2011), and anticipates a crucial role for ICT infrastructure and its use in future remote rural development (Hudson 2011).
However, the differences are not limited to the aforementioned factors because the divide is actually a complex social phenomenon (Erdiaw-Kwasie and Alam 2016) encompassing ICT infrastructure alongside demographic characteristics of the population in a territory, with implications for its ability to use and be involved in the digital world (Alam and Imran 2015). Although urban digital connectivity is significantly faster and more reliable than across rural areas, exceptions are found across Belgium, Israel, Luxemburg and the United Kingdom where rural areas benefit from a higher percentage of households with Internet connectivity (OECD 2018). The main factors include population distribution (density and dispersion), landscape character (terrain complexity) and legislative environment for ICT infrastructure. Therefore, it is necessary to explain the digital divide, not only in terms of territoriality (accessibility of ICT infrastructure), but also in terms of actual use (digital skills and digital inclusion).
Globalisation and neoliberalism (Tilzey and Potter 2008; Pělucha et al. 2012) are additional factors that have long influenced the shape and direction of the digital era. From a rural study perspective, there is a warning that globalisation has left many rural communities unsure of their best strategies. Moreover, in the last two to three decades, neoliberalism has favoured multifunctional agriculture (Dibden et al. 2009) and, under the motto of greening agriculture, there is a clear move towards promoting ecosystem services within EU Rural Policy (Pelucha and Kveton 2017). According to Dwyer (2016), macroeconomic trends that are of immediate relevance to rural regions will continue to be very closely monitored, with future developments that are marked by uncertainty and which will demand the adaptability, flexibility and overall resilience of rural areas. For this reason, and in order to exploit the potential of globalisation and neoliberalism, it is necessary to adapt relevant policies, allowing citizens and regions to benefit from these trends by achieving sustained competitiveness and resilience, while also questioning the nature, and challenging the effect of, these two developments, when it is necessary to do so. From a different perspective, there is a context of localisation which is also discussed and this has increased in importance, mainly because of the aforementioned technological changes (Johnson 2001; Sugden and Wilson 2003). From such a perspective, the best competitive position is currently occupied by functional regions (especially in terms or urban-rural relations).
The above factors and development trends have driven changes in theorisations of the rural concept. The OECD (2006) identifies a shifting paradigm, one that is removed from being a top-down approach to a much wider policy design, marking an emphasis on factors that are influencing endogenous development. Ten years later, the OECD (2016) presented a minor revision of the above approach, referring to Rural Policy 3.0 and thus merely specifying implementation of this new paradigm. The only significant shift within this 2016 ‘revision’ lies in the emphasis that is placed on ‘functional regions’, which are relevant for delimiting rural areas. Therefore, it is necessary to critically interrogate the fundamentals of the emphasis on endogenous development factors which failed the rural, peripheral and deprived regions – marking the conceptual complexity and intricacy of rural development within a new environment, which is the environment of the digital age.
Rural development under pressure from neo-productivism
Rural areas face a wide range of factors that influence their development. The role of public policies should be to help, or to at least partially contribute to solving the aforementioned problems. Therefore, we offer critical perspectives of current inconsistencies in the implementation of rural development policy by the EU. Contradictions reduce the effectiveness of this policy, particularly with regard to the ability to achieve predefined goals that are related to balanced territorial development and territorial cohesion. Contradictions often grow out of misunderstanding the nature of the rural development, by prioritising neo-productivist pressures instead. Within this general framework, it is necessary to examine the position of the EU’s rural development policy in the context of key neo-productivist drivers (see Wilson and Burton 2015). Existing academic debates focus mainly on ‘neo-productivist agriculture’ and agricultural change, while attending less to implications for rural development policy-making and especially in the context of the neo-productivism and the challenges associated with the arrival of the digital era.
The establishment of a separate EU rural development policy was supposed to represent the birth of a comprehensive approach to rural areas in the 2007–2013 programming period. Yet, two divergent views co-exist regarding this genesis (see Wilson 2007): the first traces a linear transition towards post-productivism with multifunctional agriculture and with rural space. From this perspective, reforming the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is framed within the shift from productivism to post-productivism (Marsden 2003; Marsden and Sonino 2008; Hermans et al. 2010). Illustrative of this is Marsden’s (2003) assumption of a gradual shift from agro-industrial to post-productivist policy, leading to comprehensive rural development. This old, binary reflection of ‘productivism’ versus ‘post-productivism’ is simplistic and insufficient in explaining the principal dynamic of CAP reforms (Wilson 2007, 2010). A second view places an emphasis on a dominant shift in the regime of accumulation from political productivism (Fordism) to neoliberal market productivism (post-Fordism, or more precisely ‘embedded’ neoliberalism) (see Tilzey and Potter 2008). Post-productivism is assumed to play a minor role in this policy shift. Academic debates, though, offer less in the way of a critical analysis of the processes that are driving policy changes.
The European Commission (EC) (European Communities 2006) presented the rural development policy in the form of the second pillar of the CAP which, however, was not as financially significant compared to the first pillar containing direct subsidies to farmers. The main focus of rural development policy gradually focused mainly on support for multifunctional agriculture, and a lesser focus on non-agricultural activities. The increased prioritisation of agriculture and the promotion of agricultural fundamentalism has been critiqued by various commentators (see Potter 2006). To McAreavey (2009), the second pillar of the CAP is not significantly interested in resolving socio-economic problems of rural communities. It has also been described as a conspiracy towards the public and the World Trade Organization in order to preserve agricultural subsidies (Pělucha et al. 2013).
The end of the first decade of the new millennium was marked by the financial-economic crisis, with its consequences impacting on the formulation of the Europe 2020 strategy, as well as the definition of the “socio-ecological production model” (see European Commission 2009). Efforts to strengthen economic growth according to Porter’s hypothesis of environmentally dynamic competitiveness (Porter and Linde 1995), have come to mark the new economic policies, including the ‘fight’ against climate change (OECD 2013; European Commission 2012, 2014). The agricultural sector h...
