Towards a Political Economy of Resource-dependent Regions

Greg Halseth, Laura Ryser

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367245290
• eBook ISBN: 9781351846455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Geografia

This book advances our understanding of resource-dependent regions in developed economies in the 21st Century. It explores how rural and small town places are working to find success in a new economy marked by demographic, economic, social, cultural, political, and environmental change. How are we to understand the changes and transformations working through communities and economies? Where are the trajectories of change leading these resource-dependent places and regions? Drawing upon examples from Canada, USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the Nordic countries, these and other questions are explored and addressed by constructing a critical political economy framework of resource hinterland transition.

Towards a Political Economy of Resource Dependent Regions is a key resource for students and researchers in geography, rural and industrial sociology, economics, environmental studies, political science, regional studies, and planning, as well as policy-makers, those in industry and the private sector, and local and regional development practitioners.

Part I

Introduction

Introduction

This book is interested in advancing an understanding of resource-dependent regions in developed economies at the opening of the 21st century. Resource production in remote, rural, and small town locations is certainly not new, and while change has always been a characteristic of these regions, the more rapid pace of transition and change for these regions and economies through the contemporary global economy has been well underway for more than 30 years. How are we to understand these regions? How are we to understand the changes and transformations working their way through communities and economies? What elements in these changes reflect emergence, what elements reflect transition, and what elements reflect continuity with the past? Where are the trajectories of change leading these remote, rural, and small town resource-dependent regions? It is to these questions that this book is addressed.

This introductory part of the book includes two chapters. Chapter 1 sets out our purpose and focus. Remote, rural, and small town resource-dependent regions in developed economies are continuing to change and transform. These changes and transformations are affecting the social, demographic, community, economic, and cultural structure of these places. To provide an ‘umbrella’ large enough to shelter an explanation for these varied issues, the book embarks on a search for a political economy of these regions. To ground and introduce that search, Chapter 2 provides thumbnail sketches of the intellectual traditions from which this search originates. As social geographers, there is first an introduction to the notion of geography as a perspective for understanding and making sense of the complex dynamic that is the world around us. The chapter then introduces the sub-discipline of social geography, followed by an introduction to the topic and framework of political economy. With an interest in the social, economic, and political dynamics of change, this framework provides the breadth to incorporate the many elements of change being experienced in resource-dependent regions.

By necessity, this book is written at a general level. The story is told with broad brush strokes and is highlighted with illustrations from many remote, rural, and small town resource-dependent regions from developed economies around the world. As will be described later, each place and region has a unique history and context, such that the general aspects of theory and explanation never fully replicate ‘on the ground’. It is to the general level of explanation that we are interested, all the while recognizing that readers will situate and interpret the arguments we make through the lens of the places with which they are most familiar.

1 Introduction

Introduction

This book is about creating a framework for understanding the broader and complex context of resource-dependent places and regions within developed economies. It is also about organizing a wide body of theoretical ideas within that framework. The goal is to provide a guide to the forces of change so that community residents and leaders, policy makers, students, and researchers can better understand, and thus make better choices, about how to support more resilient communities and more sustainable economies.

Accelerating change has been a defining attribute of rural and small town places around the world. Traditional responses to these accelerating processes of change have too often only exacerbated the negative impacts of population loss and environmental degradation. As the reader will have noted already, our focus is with developed economies; and in these settings resource-dependent rural and small town places continue to struggle to find success in a new economy marked by demographic, economic, social, cultural, political, and environmental change. Older resource producing economies are transitioning within a ‘hyper-connected’ and increasingly ‘commodified’ global economy. We need to find more appropriate frameworks for understanding what is taking place, so that we can better shape how to respond.

This book will address the need to better understand these changes by constructing a critical political economy framework for resource hinterland transition within developed economies at the start of the 21st century. The purpose is to explore: 1) how local, regional, and global inter-linkages are affecting rural and remote resource-dependent communities; 2) the processes affecting the local capacity to respond to these changes; and 3) the strategic options available in light of these changes.

We chose our focus on developed economies for a number of reasons. To start, this is the geographic context of where we ‘live’ – both physically and as researchers. It is the economic and community landscape that we understand best and where we most likely are to encounter the fewest ‘lost in translation’ problems. Second, these landscapes have been experiencing accelerating change since the early 1980s and thus attention to supporting new community development pathways and investments is not only a concern, but also an urgent subject to which our engaged scholarship can contribute. This does not mean that we ignore issues in other parts of the world – variously labelled over time as concerning ‘developing economies’, the ‘global south’ (which makes little sense, since Australia and New Zealand are quite clearly south of the equator), or with acronyms such as the ‘BRIC’ states (Brazil, Russia, India, China). The value and problems with these labels we leave to the rich literature from development studies and other scholars. We recognize the interconnectivity of the global economy, and that changes in one region impact other regions. We recognize that economic dominance has severely impacted and limited developing regions and that industrial resource exploitation in those developing regions has impacts on the competiveness of older industries in developed economies. While there is a large literature in development studies, we focus on the context we know best.

With our focus, this book situates a collected body of knowledge and research respecting remote, rural, and small town resource-dependent regions within a larger framework for conceptualizing change. New approaches to understanding rural change, and the deployment of development strategies in the new rural economy, focus on economic and community development that are defined by both external and internal factors. For increasingly complex and connected economies, current pressures and future developments will require the construction of an integrated critical political economy framework of rural and small town transition. Through this book, we explore emerging questions around these internal and external factors to inform a richer understanding of the dynamics of change and transition.

Resource-dependent places

As noted, we are interested in creating a broad portrait of the dynamics and trajectories of change looking forward into the first half of the 21st century. With this intent, we are interested in rural and small town settlements, where the economies are dominated by one or more resource industry activities, and where those industries are organized around the extraction and export of the raw commodity itself, without engaging in any significant upstream processing or manufacturing. As we shall see later in the book, this economic orientation leaves the local economy highly vulnerable to the demands and prices set for natural resource commodities in the global marketplace. It also leaves them vulnerable to the strategies of international capital and its investment choices around the world.

Existing definitional frameworks of resource-dependent places and regions might talk about how a certain percentage of the labour force is employed in a single economic sector, in a single industry, or even with a single resource company. Other definitional frameworks might focus upon the particular type of resource commodity being produced. These different definitional frameworks all have use and value depending upon the purpose to which they are to be put. However, statistical or numerical ‘breakpoints’ in data or statistics which are then used to categorize places or regions as being ‘in’ or ‘out’ of one or another definitional category too often miss the nuances that are most critical in constructing an understanding of the character of places and their economies.

In general, resource-dependent regions tend to be characterized by a relative remoteness from the political and economic decision-making centres of their respective states. They also tend to be far from metropolitan cores. In terms of settlement structure, these regions tend to be comprised of numbers of small places, each with limited population and economic bases. Their economies are focused upon some aspect of the resource exploitation activities needed to prepare the commodity for export. Commensurate with their small populations, these places also tend to have relatively limited business and service sectors outside of those needed for household reproduction or for support of the local / regional resource industry. In part due to their remoteness and in part due to the way few of these settlements have shown marked growth over the past couple of decades, it is common for these places to be lagging with respect to investments in new quality-of-life services as well as the infrastructure to support new information and communications technologies.

Resource extraction activities within developed economies have a long history. Our focus is upon the post-Second World War period. This is when an industrial resource-development model took hold across most western developed economies. Additionally, our focus is on natural resource commodities derived from mining, forestry, fishing, and energy production. While mentioned in some discussions, we do not focus significant attention upon agriculture. Much like the debate about whether to focus on developed and developing economies together, the rural studies literature has for generations been synonymous with agricultural studies. As a result, there are, and continue to be, high quality and extensive literatures focused specifically upon agricultural issues and the social, political, and economic restructuring occurring within agricultural regions. It is our hope that this book will complement that work by telling the story of other resource sector regions and communities.

Restructuring

Research on local, regional, and global inter-linkages includes economic (drawing heavily upon the well-developed resource economy literatures) and political (drawing upon the emerging literatures connected with Neoliberalism, as well as more established ‘new regional geography’ literatures) restructuring. While the notion of ‘restructuring’ emerged through theoretical debate around the changing nature of capitalism, we focus on the elements, components, and foundations now underscoring rural change. In some cases, these activities work themselves through the different mechanisms and structures governing rural change. Important foci of attention include the processes of industrial consolidation, the adoption of workplace flexibility and labour shedding technologies, studies of corporate strategies to improve efficiencies, the impacts of diseconomies of scale due to rising energy costs and longer distances to transport raw materials, the impacts of currency fluctuations, commodity prices, land prices, and the costs of raw materials and supplies, and the uncertainty surrounding international trade agreements (Prudham, 2008). Political restructuring has led to the closure of local services, the adoption of ‘enabling’ policy approaches by senior governments, and the application of private sector or market measures of effectiveness and efficiency in public programming and supports (Young and Matthews, 2007). These measures and approaches are not well suited to the community context of remote, rural, and small town places, and they often diminish the capacity of these places to successfully adjust to change (Troughton, 2005).

Community development, place-based development, and new regionalism

Understanding and evaluating the processes affecting community capacity and local responsiveness requires attention to governance and decision making (with attention to literatures on community governance and the structures of power and conflict), as well as community capacity building (with attention to literatures on community development, community economic development, human and social capital, leadership, services, and the voluntary sector). The following discussion provides thumbnail sketches of community development, place-based development, and new regionalism. While they will recur later in the book, it is important to set them out early to help ground our argument.

Community development

In resource-dependent regions, there is an inter-connectedness of human capital, social capital, natural capital, and community capacity in the creation of place-based resilience to economic transition. However, a significant challenge for remote, rural, and small town places is that human capital development is increasingly a local responsibility (Joshi et al., 2000). This is problematic as such places, due to their small size, are especially sensitive to the ‘leakage’ of human capital (Dewees et al., 2003). Increasing labour-force participation by women (Little, 2002), the emergence of the knowledge economy, new forms of mobile labour activity, and the shifting role of immigration all highlight the need for broader attention to building and maintaining human capital in non-metropolitan regions.

At its simplest, human capital refers to the skills, knowledge, educational background, etc. of individuals. Human capital can be built with both experience and investment in training or education. Assessments and evaluations of human capital can be undertaken at the individual level; however, it can also be undertaken at the place or regional level. A more complex understanding of human capital emerges when we link it with the economy and with concepts such as change. To start first with the economy, assessments of individual or collective human capital often focus upon the fit or lack of fit to the current economy. Do the job skills match those needed in local industry or businesses? Usually they do, since the local labour market and the local economy often grow and adjust together. But what about rapid change? New businesses or industries that require different skills sets may encounter a severe lack of fit with existing local human capital assets and as a result may need to turn, at least in the short term, to mobile labour in order to address skill or knowledge shortages. At a more general level, this also raises the question of whether the body of human capital is skilled in adaptation and whether it has the capacity to take advantage of new opportunities or adjust to rapidly changing circumstances. Literacy levels and ongoing measures of life-long learning are indicators of the resilience capacity that is needed within human capital.

Theoretical debate has used the concepts of social cohesion and social capital to understand how communal responses of shifting human capital work themselves out. Social cohesion is about the processes of relationships and interactions that build toward cohesive networks to support interaction. The products of these processes are the focus of social capital – the trust and bonds that develop from interactions in networks. While social cohesion can support opportunities for interaction through ‘well-worn pathways’ of collective action (Shortall, 2008), a lack of communication or the reorganization of social networks due to mobility and migration can limit its effectiveness. Although the literature is replete with interpretations, social capital can be operationalized in rural development research to refer to networks that produce the trust, reciprocity, and cooperation needed to mobilize in more locally appropriate and sustainable ways a host of social and economic resources (Kusakabe, 2012). Rural regions with strong internal and external networks are more likely to grow and support mechanisms for learning and innovation (Crowe, 2006). Bridging social capital (external links) is especially important in helping rural places acquire new forms of resources, information, advice, and training to support success in the emergent rural economy (Cawley and Nguyen, 2008).

Factors that support or impede social cohesion and social capital processes include the quality of networks and the dynamics of local actor cooperation. They also include the relative distribution of responsibilities, resources, or influences, and the openness of partnerships to creatively address local needs (Derkzen et al., 2008). Given the importance of local leadership (Bryant, 2010) in community development, we must pay attention to the increasing role played by the voluntary and non-profit sectors in rural and small town places, and the changing leadership (and the leadership mentoring) roles of local government and resource sector companies.

In numerous studies, processes of social cohesion and social capital have been shown as important in rural and regional development. They have been assessed as factors in development programming (Nardone et al., 2010), and they have been identified as important in supporting processes of innovation at local scales (Jakobsen and Lorentzen, 2015). Caution is needed, however, when interpreting concepts such as social capital and social cohesion. Too often, writers want to attach normative values such that social capital and social cohesion are interpreted as ‘good’ for community development. We caution against such normative valuations. In social capital and social cohesion, the issue is rather how they are deployed. If used to support participation, community engagement, access to information, etc., then the value might be clear. If, however, social capital and social cohesion are so strongly developed that communities close themselves off to new people and new ideas, then they may be counterproductive to community development.

Place-based development

Research on remote, rural, and small town restructuring has identified ‘place’ as a fundamental ingredient within the rural economy, where locale matters more than sector and competitive advantage more than comparative advantage. These arguments build from a recognition that within the global economy technology is shrinking the relevance of distance. As ‘space’ has become less of an issue in economic development, it is found that ‘place’ is becoming more important. Places are where the decisions, policies, and imperatives of regional, provincial, national, and international policies, investments, decisions, and activities act out.

Place-based economies recognize that the unique attributes and assets of individual places now determine their attractiveness for particular types of activities and investments (Woods, 2010), are more flexible and responsive to local needs, use local knowledge to enhance the appropriateness of initiatives (Courtney et al., 2006), and are more likely to focus upon the retention of benefits. To respond to the myriad of community, social, economic, cultural, and environmental changes, communities need to realistically consider and enumerate their place-based assets. Then they need to creatively re-imagine these assets, and re-bundle them to create new competitive advantages for their place and region. How they do this needs to be linked to their aspirations as a community vis-à-vis the type of place, society, and economy they wish to create.

Most place-based initiatives focus on product development (agriculture, tourism, etc.) and are undertaken to add value and gain market share or recognition. They may also support the creation of new place images or reinforce community cohesion by protecting or promoting local customs, languages, costumes, foods, crafts, festivals, traditions, and ways of life. Collectively, this is described as rural ‘place-making’ (Garrod et al., 2006). The fragmented nature of place-based initiatives may mean there are insufficient resources or limited capacity to address all development, planning, and implementation issues. As a result, there are concomitant needs for greater local and regional collaboration as well as supportive top-down policy and implementation support from senior governments (Connors, 2010).

Attention to the context and structure of places can also help address a range of challenges. Centralized public policy, especially with regard to m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Introduction
• PART II: Organizing structures
• PART III: Mobilizing through institutions
• PART IV: Change, power, and conflict in resource-dependent regions
• Bibliography
• Index