Introduction
Across most developed economies, single-industry and resource-dependent rural and small town regions are changing rapidly as a result of social, political, and economic restructuring. Collectively, they face numbers of challenges as well as new opportunities. This international collaborative book takes a critical political economy approach to understanding the transitions being experienced in these rural and small town regions. The book builds upon an international comparative perspective and includes university-based research teams contributing original work from Australia, Canada, Finland, and New Zealand. The focus is upon the processes and implications of economic restructuring within each case study region’s historic resource base.
The book makes several contributions. At a general level, it describes the multifaceted process of transition and change in resource-dependent rural and small town regions since the end of World War Two. The book incorporates international cases with the express purpose of highlighting similarities and differences in patterns and practices in each country. Each research team provides state-of-the-art summaries of their national research literature to bring concise summaries to an international audience. As well, the individual chapters contribute original research gathered through field investigations in rural and small town regions experiencing transition. The goal is to support a better understanding of the key external and internal processes contributing to change in rural and small town regions.
Book Structure
The overall structure of the book is relatively straightforward. Following this introductory chapter, there are three substantive parts. The first part is entitled “Global-Local Perspectives on Restructuring.” This part includes a specific interest in industrial development and corporate restructuring over time. It includes coverage of the strategies used by firms, the organization of the economy within a global context, changes in products, markets, and trading relationships, and the pace of change over time driven by economic restructuring.
The second part is entitled “Labor and Employment Perspectives on Restructuring.” This part includes reviews and discussions of labor force transitions in the highlighted rural regions and their resource industries. This includes transitions in the amount and type of employment, implications for the labor force, and the structures or organizations that support labor and labor force transition.
The third part is entitled “Community Implications.” This part covers the types of approaches that rural communities and regions have used to cope with, or adapt to, the wider restructuring of the economy. General trends include the evolution from local economic development approaches to community economic development approaches, and now to place-based community development approaches.
The book wraps up with a concluding chapter, together with an index. The concluding chapter not only provides summary comments and observations linked to the major themes of the book, but it also provides forward looking comments with respect to the trajectories of change in rural and small town regions as well as the critical issues that need attention from research, policy, economic development, and community development interests.
National Contributions
This edited collection includes contributions from four countries. These are Australia, Canada, Finland, and New Zealand. The notes below describe the contributions from each of the national research teams.
Australia—Neil Argent and Anthony Sorensen
Following each part’s introduction, the various sections of this book begin with a chapter drawn from the Northern Tablelands region of New South Wales, Australia. The region has a historic economic dependence upon agriculture, especially export-oriented pastoral production in lamb and beef, and fine wools, together with field crops such as wheat, barley, oilseeds, and cotton. Much of this agricultural production developed in response to local climatic and topographic conditions, and within the preferential trade environment of the British Empire.
The first of the Australia chapters about global-local connections is written by Neil Argent. The chapter’s theoretical framework is drawn from Innis’ Staples Theory and the elements of geography, institutions, and technology. Geography and technology are closely intertwined over time through the development of transportation infrastructure managed by various state agencies. To this foundation, Argent incorporates Evolutionary Economic Geography and its interest in how changes in geographic, institutional, and technological circumstances can support economic shifts over time.
Argent also notes that, as a settler landscape, change has been a dominant theme in the Northern Tablelands. Path- and place-dependent agricultural development characterized the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for this region as early settler homesteads were replaced with state-sponsored settlement and the expansion of agriculture. This productivist economy was jarred into transition beginning in the 1970s by the deregulation of the Australian economy that opened up protected industries to international competition, and by the removal of state-sponsored supportive policies and programs that had buoyed agricultural sectors.
The second Australian chapter is also by Neil Argent. With a focus upon labor issues, Argent traces the early growth of labor needs within a number of expanding agricultural sectors, through later processes of transition, contraction, and rationalization that actively reduced demand for farm labor, through to current challenges within a number of agricultural sectors for access to temporary and low-cost sources of farm labor. In doing so, Argent also traces the shifts from regional population growth via local labor pools to the current expansion of various immigrant labor programs.
Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a great deal of attention was given in Australia to the quality of working conditions, the expansion of wages and benefits, and more generally to the quality of working people’s lives. A strong labor movement protected workers—although as Argent points out it was focused primarily on white, Anglo-Saxon men. A strong set of both institutions and institutional practices pervaded Australian labor relations generally, and the agricultural sector was no exception. While always an economic challenge for agricultural producers, the protected nature of the pre-1970s agricultural industry helped somewhat to mitigate these challenges.
But economic restructuring was especially hard on agriculture. With reductions in employment came sets of migration trends, including youth out-migration from rural regions. The seasonal nature of labor demand by agriculture, together with the loss of the regional reserve army of labor via these national migration trends, has led to increasing attention being given to international migration as a tool for meeting seasonal agricultural labor needs. Argent describes numbers of these migrant labor programs, and how increasingly large agricultural producers are able to use such worker schemes to address the structural crisis in seasonal rural labor.
The third Australian chapter is by Anthony Sorensen. Drawing upon the same region of New South Wales, Australia, the chapter focuses specifically upon the regional service center of Armidale. Building from the earlier chapters, this contribution specifically explores community responses and strategies as a regional agricultural service center adjusts to change over time. The chapter includes a review of some of the typical approaches to economic transition, as well as some of the opportunities and challenges posed to such approaches via concomitant changes in state policy, program focus, and capacity.
The theoretical focus of the chapter is on processes of technological change. As Armidale is also home to the University of New England, the chapter spends time considering the processes central to developing creative communities and economies. The discussion includes various types of indices that have been used to support creative economies, including such topics as funding, talent, support, mindset, and capacity to set trends. The chapter also evaluates a suite of regional performance indicators that are helpful to decision-makers in focusing upon potential areas of opportunity.
The case study work in the chapter focuses upon a suite of tactics and strategies being employed in Armidale. These include a Digital Economy Taskforce and the connected Digital Economy Implementation Group. The chapter also touches upon some of the international activities of these two initiatives. The success of such work, as Sorensen suggests, is not via the application of ‘cookie-cutter’ approaches, but rather ones that rely upon local assets such as the human, social, physical, financial, and built capitals available for supporting regional development.
British Columbia—Greg Halseth, Laura Ryser, and Sean Markey
The book also includes three chapters drawn from the experience of resource industry restructuring in British Columbia, Canada. The chapters, written by Greg Halseth, Laura Ryser, and Sean Markey, draw on the case of the forest industry and focus on the experiences of the central interior region of the province. Specific case study detail is drawn from the forest-industry dependent town of Mackenzie.
The first of the British Colombia chapters explores industrial, specifically corporate, restructuring. Building from a historical overview of the development trajectories within British Columbia’s forest industry, the chapter details the changing corporate structure of the industry over time. In recent years, this story has been one of decreasing international investment together with increasing corporate consolidation. A most recent change has been that the now large British Columbia-based firms are investing aggressively in forest product companies in the United States. This investment is especially focused in the southeastern United States, with an interest in plantations of the fast-growing Southern Yellow Pine.
The second part of the industry-focused chapter concentrates on the dramatic shifts that have occurred in the market, and the impacts of these shifts on industry behavior. Especially important in recent years have been various trade and tariff debates with British Columbia’s largest forest product market—the United States. Also important have been efforts to reorient the industry to new markets, especially the Asian markets of China and India. While there has been growth in these markets, that growth has largely been in terms of traditional forest products and the challenge for the future is getting more value, rather than volume, out of British Columbia’s increasingly limited forest resource base.
The second of the British Colombia chapters examines the implications of industrial and corporate restructuring on the labor force. The first part of this chapter looks specifically at patterns of job losses over time. While production efficiencies and the adoption of new equipment or new processes that could reduce the number of workers needed is an old story in the forest industry, changes after the global economic recession of the early 1980s greatly accelerated job losses. The second part of the labor chapter then explores the implications of job losses and corporate consolidation on the structure of union representation for workers.
The final part of the labor chapter focuses on a particular labor dispute at one company’s operations in Mackenzie. Taken at face value, the story is one of a contract negotiation dispute over company plans to implement greater job flexibility through the collective agreement. The story covers the events before, during, and after a significant strike that occurred in the community. Beneath the surface, however, the story is more complex and is linked to the increasingly mobile nature of capital versus the relative rootedness of labor.
The third British Columbia chapter looks at local responses to industrial restructuring and the pressures that come from declining local employment. The focus is on how small forest-dependent communities have responded to the sweep of changes occurring in their key local economic sector. At the conceptual core of the chapter is the changing set of expectations for how local governments work, namely they are set within the transformation and reorientation of local government operations from ‘managerialism’ to ‘entrepreneurialism.’
Following a review of local initiatives designed to help broaden the economic foundations of the community, attention is also turned to the transformation of approaches from economic development to a broader-based community development approach. Among the challenges for continuing with an economic-only focused approach is that numbers of critical supports for local transformation have been successively removed or downsized by senior governments. As a result, local government not only has to be entrepreneurial in seeking out new economic options, but it also has to build those vital community supports necessary for not only attracting businesses and labor, but also retaining the existing businesses and labor.
In looking at the options for economic renewal, as with other chapters in this book, a place-based approach is seen as a fruitful option for moving forward. The chapter highlights that some of the challenges or influencing factors around the place-based approach include levels of local capacity, experience with collaboration, the need for leadership, use of available social capital, the availability of public policy supports, the geographic variables of location and accessibility, and the need for local innovation.
Taken together, the British Columbia chapters highlight that while corporate interests have quite deliberately recognized the changing competitive environment of the global economy, and have made decisive moves to reposition themselves to be more competitive in that environment, public policy and local community efforts have not been as transformative. While senior government has instructed communities to be more entrepreneurial in searching for economic opportunities and attracting new business ventures, it has at the same time removed many of the critical supports necessary to help communities secure those new economic activities or businesses. At the same time, local government has, at times, struggled with the transformation from managerialism to entrepreneurialism. For some, there is a desire to return to the halcyon days of the 1970s when big industry brought large numbers of jobs and significant local tax revenue such that local government really had little to do beyond managing basic infrastructure maintenance. Today the circumstances are more dynamic and complex.
Finland—Maija Halonen, Juha Kotilainen, Markku Tykkyläinen, and Eero Vatanen
The three chapters drawing on the example of Finland take a long-term perspective to questions of rural development. Markku Tykkyläinen, Maija Halonen, Juha Kotilainen, and Eero Vatanen deploy this long-term perspective through their case study of the resource town of Lieksa. Located in the Finnish borderlands region of Karelia, the town has experienced the booms and busts of a resource-dependent econ...