Service Provision and Rural Sustainability

Infrastructure and Innovation

Greg Halseth, Sean Markey, Laura Ryser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367583583
• eBook ISBN: 9781351054027
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Access to quality services and community infrastructure are vital parts of supporting sustainable and resilient rural and small town places. Renewing outdated infrastructure and supporting the delivery of services in rural communities present significant challenges from the constrained fiscal and policy realities of the 21st century.

Drawing upon contributors from five Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, this book describes innovative service delivery and community infrastructure models that are appropriate to the contemporary rural and resource-dependent regions of developed economies. The examples show that an entrepreneurial approach to service delivery and infrastructure provision by local organizations and governments is needed. Critical economic and community development supports are crucial to assist creative and innovative sets of solutions that work for small communities. Chapters in this book argue that community development foundations for resilient rural and small town communities and regions must be co-constructed and co-delivered in partnership by both local and senior government actors, in terms of both policy and committed resources.

This volume will be extremely valuable for students, scholars, and community development practitioners exploring policy-making, government initiatives, and community service provision in rural and small town places.

Part I

Introduction

1 Introduction

Greg Halseth, Sean Markey, and Laura Ryser

Introduction

Discussion and debate about the future of rural and small town places within developed economies have focused upon the need to create and support more sustainable economies and more resilient communities (Brown and Schafft, 2011; Halseth et al., 2010; Halseth and Ryser, 2018; Markey et al., 2012; OECD, 2010, 2014). In study after study, it is clear that rural and small town places have a promising future in the new global economy, but it is equally clear that poor public and private-sector policy choices, and the application of outdated program and funding solutions, are not supporting this transition to more sustainable economies and resilient communities. As a complement to the literatures on rural and small town transformation, this book devotes its attention to the delivery of needed human services and the infrastructure to support those services.

One of the longstanding and most critical elements to successful rural and small town communities is the availability of an appropriate suite of services and service infrastructure. This edited volume takes up the challenge of human services provision in rural and small town places in developed economies. It calls upon researchers from four OECD states who are experienced in rural and small town services/infrastructure provision and invites them to share critical stories, bound by common themes. The motivation for the volume concerns the continued viability of rural and small town places in a 21st-century political and economic context. The organizing premise is that older models of service delivery, and the supporting infrastructure for that service delivery, are not appropriate in a 21st-century context. As so often happened through the mid-20th century, individual services and the supporting infrastructure of buildings were created as single-purpose entities to deliver only that service in isolation from other services and community needs. Renewing and replacing outdated single-purpose infrastructure and supporting the human delivery of services in small places are significantly challenged by the fiscal and policy realities of the 21st century.

The chapters in this volume work to identify innovative and creative service delivery models that are appropriate to 21st-century rural and small town places. Each contribution highlights how the case studies advance our understanding of, and the potential for, rural service delivery (processes and/or products). The chapters note how different models and modes of service delivery have emerged out of the challenges confronting more traditional service models. In their case studies, authors share details about the impetus behind new service models or initiatives, as well as the factors that supported or hindered the implementation of the new models. They also discuss the transferability of new models and the roles of various levels of government.

Taken together, the opportunities and challenges of rural service provision within a policy framework marked by ‘reactionary incoherence’ raise important questions. Throughout this process we have challenged the authors in this volume to address important analytical questions and bring coherence, and a common foundation for discussion, to their contributions. They are also important for readers to keep in mind as they approach different parts of the book. These questions include

• What challenges are facing rural and small town services and service delivery?
• What are the key features that help to identify and define rural and small town services as being ‘innovative’ and ‘creative’?
• What aspects of rural and small town service provision are more suited and appropriate to the realities of the 21st century?
• What if renewed service delivery models are not delivered? What will rural look like then?
• Whose responsibility is it to push for, and then deliver, these new or innovative models of service delivery?
• What policies exist to support rural service provision?
• How transferable are the models being explored and shared in this book to other locations outside the case countries?

Rural places and rural services

As noted, one of the critical elements to successful rural and small town communities is the availability of an appropriate suite of human services and accompanying service infrastructure. While 20th-century models of service delivery supported post-war rural and small town places, including the expansion of many resource-dependent places along the development fringes of a number of OECD states, the social, political, and economic restructuring that emerged in waves after the early 1980s disrupted those older models. In this section, we outline two issues of context. The first concerns the different ways by which rural and small town places are defined across the case studies. The second concerns a generalized model for understanding the transformations that have impacted rural service provision over time.

Defining rural and small town

Definitions of rural and small town places vary considerably in the literature and between national contexts. In Canada, definitions build on the work of the national statistical agency – Statistics Canada – which has developed a wide range of definitions of different types and levels of geographic groupings of populations (du Plessis et al., 2004). Statistics Canada’s ‘census rural’ definition refers to individuals living in the countryside outside centres of 1,000 or more population. In turn, the ‘rural and small town’ definition refers to individuals in towns or municipalities outside the commuting zone of larger urban centres (those with 10,000 or more population). This would include those enumerated under the census rural definition. These rural and small town locations may also be disaggregated into ‘zones’ according to the degree of influence of a larger urban centre (MIZ or ‘metropolitan influenced zones’).

In other jurisdictions, the ‘numbers’ assigned to definitional categories differ according to the uniqueness of each national settlement context. In many contexts, rural areas are simply the ‘residual’ areas and populations not captured by more sharply defined ‘urban’ areas. For example, Statistics New Zealand identifies two non-urban categories: ‘rural centres’ and ‘other rural’. Of these two, only rural centres are defined. They are settlements ‘with a population of 300 to 999 in a reasonably compact area that services surrounding rural areas’ (Statistics New Zealand, 2017). Statistics New Zealand also incorporates measures of urban influence on those rural areas through a four-tier scale – high urban influence, moderate urban influence, low urban influence, and remote.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) also starts its ‘geography’ of population data with a defined set of urban categories and leaves ‘rural’ as the residual (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016). The ABS identifies ‘major urban’ centres with populations of 100,000 or more (transitioning in name to ‘significant urban area’), ‘other urban’ centres with populations between 1,000 and 99,999, ‘bounded localities’, and the ‘rural balance’, which represents the remainder of a state or territory. As part of recent changes, the classification ‘urban centres and localities’ is now in use and represents ‘areas of concentrated urban development with populations of 200 people or more … primarily identified using objective dwelling and population density criteria using data from the 2016 Census’.

In the UK, the separation of urban and rural begins with a much higher threshold – 10,000 people (UK Office of National Statistics, 2017). There are then six sub-categories of ‘rural’, including ‘town and fringe’, ‘town and fringe in a sparse setting’, ‘village’, ‘village in a sparse setting’, ‘hamlets and isolated dwellings’, and ‘hamlets and isolated dwellings in a sparse setting’.

Beyond strict statistical interpretations of rural and small town, researchers have presented a variety of alternative definitional frameworks that include community characteristics and perceptions of identity. For example, Cloke (1977) describes a settlement continuum with ‘rural’ at one end and ‘urban’ at the other. Similarly, du Plessis et al. (2004) present the concept of ‘degrees of rurality’, which nicely accommodates various interpretations of rural and allows for community identity to be mixed in with numerical population, distance, or density thresholds.

Interest, whether from research, applied, or policy directions, in how rural and small town communities are transitioning under social, political, and economic change has led to a search for broader and more inclusive understandings of places. There is, for example, a need to incorporate both the spatial setting and social behaviours within that setting. This links well with efforts by researchers such as Cloke (1989, p. 173), who bridges the empirical and social definitions by suggesting that ‘rural’ involves: a) extensive land uses, b) small and generally low-order settlements, and c) a way of life which recognizes ‘the environmental and behavioural qualities of living as part of an extensive landscape’.

From a policy perspective, definitions of rural and small town places carry political implications in the allocation of funding and responsibilities for services provision. Per-capita funding models or evaluation metrics especially affect decisions on a wide range of service delivery issues (Sullivan et al., 2014). Under urban-centric or neoliberal policy frameworks, the unique context and needs of rural and small town places can be lost. More broadly, the discourse that serves to define conceptualizations of rural is essential for understanding and wrestling with the nuances of place. This matters because without a nuanced understanding of rural or small town contexts, the design of programs, policies, and funding frameworks can easily miss the mark. Instead, research increasingly highlights how supports for rural and small town services must be developed within a place-based framework.

Rural and small town services

Most developed nations have followed a similar pattern with respect to the provision of rural and small town services (Halseth and Ryser, 2006). Prior to World War II, individual rural places were more or less on their own aside from major state or private infrastructure such as roads and rail lines. This resulted in a great deal of unevenness in service delivery and availability. Wealthier rural areas were able to support a wider range and a better quality of services – something that had recursive benefits as better quality health and education services created better community futures.

In contrast, the 30-year post-WWII period was characterized by extensive welfare state service investments (in, for example, health, wellness, education, transportation, communication, and recreation), which greatly expanded the range of services available in rural communities and regions. This acted to level the service ‘playing field’, as these investments also came with the expansion of national standards for the many different types of services being delivered to all state taxpayers. It was under this framework that many new resource-dependent towns were created in resource frontier settings. The central challenge embodied by this period of investment, however, was that each individual service was delivered separately – usually through completely separate infrastructure, and under separate government ministry or agency jurisdiction.

Since the 1980s, we have witnessed social, political, and economic restructuring under a neoliberal framework (characterized by market-oriented, deregulatory, and non-interventionist government – see below). This has included an aggressive roll-back of public services. For rural areas, the roll-back has been especially problematic. With the loss, closure, or regionalization of services, there have been losses in local jobs, human capital and expertise, and the spending or use that supported the local economy and other local services. These service changes have impacted the very viability of rural places as those who need access to services are forced to leave. These ‘eras’, and the interlinkages between them, have had profound impacts on the range and quality of services and infrastructure now available in rural and small town places.

Theoretical foundations and development eras

The theoretical foundations for this collection build upon the critical transformations in industrial and public policy approaches that have impacted rural and small town areas since the 1950s. The immediate post-WWII era was marked by Fordist industrial and Keynesian public-policy approaches. After the early 1980s, extensive restructuring resulted from the shift to flexible-accumulation industrial models and neoliberal public-policy approaches. More recently, economic collapse and the unevenness of globalization have created periods of reactionary incoherence in both industrial models and public-policy approaches. Under the auspices of neoliberalization, for example, we also find many significant cases of neo-Keynesian market interventions by the state. While this period of reactionary incoherence creates many contradictions and challenges for rural development through temporary and/or ill-conceived policy and program interventions, it also creates opportunity, as the recent era is also marked by an openness to, and willingness for, countenance, innovation, and experimentation. This edited volume seeks to bring some consolidation to this period of change/opportunity and highlight themes of convergence and coherence around the future of rural service delivery.

In the following section, we briefly outline three eras of rural development in the post-WWII period to the present. The regime eras are situated within a Western industrialized historical setting. While there is tremendous variability between regions, these phases are well documented in the literature to capture macro industrial and ideological shifts which impact conditions in rural regions. For each era, we provide a brief description and highlight characteristics of rural regional investment.

Era 1: staples-based Keynesian

The adoption of a Keynesian public-policy approach, especially its economic stimulus component, coincided in the immediate WWII period with the need to address two imperatives. The first was employment, and how to re-employ the millions of soldiers returning from the war effort – a great many of whom just six or seven years earlier were the unemployed masses of the Great Depression. The second was how to address the massive infrastructure deficits that would be required to allow the wartime experience of industrial production and global supply-and-distribution chains to transition into the efficient post-war production of consumer goods.

In Canada, senior governments during this period followed a public-policy approach based on a model of industrial resource development (Williston and Keller, 1997). This led to a 25–30-year period of rapid economic and community growth across the rural regions in the country (Halseth et al., 2004). High-quality local infrastructure was used to attract a stable workforce (and their families) to rural resource industry centres (Davis and Hutton, 1989; Horne and Penner, 1992). Similar policy actions during this era supporting the extension of industrial resource development into rural and hinterland regions are found across other OECD countries such as Australia (Argent, 2017), New Zealand (Connelly and Nel, 2017a; Nel, 2015), and Finland (Tykkyläinen et al., 2017).

Overall, the era became a directed enterprise with senior government policy goals aimed at nation building and reconstruction. In Canada, resource endowments were imagined as a foundation for rural (and metropolitan) prosperity. Regional development strategies, such as the proliferation of growth pole strategies, became common programmatic responses to address r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Introduction
• PART II: Shaping new service arrangements through government policies
• PART III: New service arrangements
• PART IV: New infrastructure arrangements
• PART V: Moving forward
• Index