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EMPOWERING RURAL CITIZENSHIP FOR DEMOCRATIC-PARTICIPATORY GOVERNANCE AND RESILIENCE

Paper presented to the General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR). From 3th to 6th September 2014, University of Glasgow (U. K.).

By

Francisco Entrena-Durán

University of Granada

Department of Sociology

Granada (Spain)

&

José Francisco Jiménez Díaz

Pablo de Olavide University

Department of Public Law

Sevilla (Spain)

Abstract

Many rural areas are currently ever more impacted by globalization dynamics, so that their citizenship is simultaneously glimpsing opportunities and suffering constrictions and/or socioeconomic precariousness. In these circumstances, those attitudes, policies and practices aimed to boost rural resilience reveal attempts of furthering the flexibility and/or adaptation of rural societies, which spread in line with the current neoliberal restrictions to public policies, one of whose outstanding examples are the CAP budget cuts. But, these flexibility and/or adaptation would be also opportunities to empower rural citizenship for a democratic-participatory governance aimed to face duly globalization challenges and by so working for resilience and sustainable development. Anyhow, those policies working for such empowerment should not forget that rural citizenship integrates a blurred amalgam of diverse social actors with very complex, heterogeneous and uneven situations and interests.

Key Words: Holistic and Integrated Approach, Citizenship, Civil Society, Democracy, Development, European Politics, Globalisation, Governance.

Introduction.-

In our days the evidence presented by the new ruralists shows that peasants

engage in multiple activities (i.e. pluriactivity and multifunctionality) such as

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agricultural and non-agricultural, on-farm and off-farm and are both producers and

wage laborers. In this regard, the rural areas are very different than a few decades ago.

The pressure of globalization processes and the local reactions of local-rural areas to

this pressure (the intensification of communication flows and the growing interchange

of goods and information among persons) have reduced the traditional isolation of the

rural areas in comparison with the urban.

As a result, peasants are consequently inserted into a variety of markets and have

multiple linkages to urban areas. The study of these transformations is not limited to the

economic sphere, although this is given priority, but also embraces changes in society,

particularly regarding the emergence of new social actors, new social movements and

innovative kinds of socio-political participation.

In this context, many of today's local-rural areas (above all in advanced

countries) are ever more inserted in globalization dynamics. Consequently, these areas

are increasingly glocalized. So that, their citizenship is at the same time glimpsing

opportunities and suffering constrictions and/or socioeconomic precariousness.

This involves constraints and opportunities for the development of rural

communities. Regarding the said constraints, many of rural areas face often precarious

situations and negative socio-economic conditions: unemployment, environmental

problems, demographic declines and aging, gender inequalities, sustainability crises and

so on.

These situations and conditions are caused, to a great extent, by far-reaching

worldwide forces ‘outside’ the control of the territorial-local spaces in which they

impact. A result of these forces is we are our days seeing what might be conceptualized

as a growing deterritorialization of the local-rural settings. So, in these settings people's

lives and their negative or positive socioeconomic conditions are ever more conditioned

by decisions and/or processes driven generally from very far away of their territories

and that, either they do not control, or they tend to feel a progressive reduction of their

control capacity.

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On rural resilience.-

In these circumstances, those attitudes, policies and practices aimed to boost

rural resilience reveal attempts of furthering the flexibility and/or adaptation of rural

societies, which spread in line with the current neoliberal restrictions to public policies.

As the rising glocalization of rural communities is giving rise that they are

declining or losing room for guaranteeing their self-sufficiency, the ideas or claims

suggesting they became resilient, and therefore empowered by themselves for getting

their own goals of both endogenous sustainability and development, are increasingly

strengthened.

This strengthening reveals a rising trend to load on the backs of rural

communities the responsibilities inherent in reaching their own endogenous

sustainability and/or development practically by only themselves.

The said trend is consistent with those aforesaid cuts back in investments and

funds to public policies which are so in vogue in today's neoliberal times, particularized

in the EU in the cuts back that the CAP is now suffering.

However, resilience also means the ability of rural communities for staying over

time despite the difficulties, negative socio-economic conditions, and uncertainties

brought about to them by their growing glocalization.

Decline in agriculture in many rural areas has happened hand in hand with their

frequent transit from production to consumption spaces. This means we are seeing

trends to the commoditization of some typical local-rural products (i.e. cheeses, wines,

crafts, etc.), tourist museums of tools for work or home uses, landscapes, architecture,

culture and so on.

Both the abovementioned transit and the subsequent commoditization occur in

chorus with the spread of the so named multi-functionality; that is, agriculture is no

longer the main activity, since it is combined with diverse others activities, among

which rural tourism and other tertiary occupations play a relevant role.

Multi-functionality makes possible diversified income streams and pluriactive

rural households. Nevertheless, a situation of multi-functionality not necessarily entails

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an elevated resilience. So, often (above all when it comes in the prevalent circumstances

of neoliberal globalization), the materialization of multi-functionality may create new

opportunities for profits and wealth for rural capitalists but, at the same time,

intensifying exploitation of rural workers and reproducing social exclusion or even

increasing it.

On the challenge of empowering rural citizenship for resilience.-

In the current situation, characterized by a progressive de-agrarianization and

rural diversification, a key challenge is to really empowering rural citizenship in order

to this is able of boosting and/or controlling the socioeconomic and demographic

reproduction of its communities.

Another major challenge is to boost the opportunities for empowering such

citizenship for democratic-participatory governance, and explore new forms of socio-

political participation, with the aim of facing duly globalization challenges and by so

working for resilience and sustainable development.

The said empowering intends to counteract the fact that the rising glocalization

of rural communities is just hindering more and more their possibilities for making

effective the abovementioned boosting and/or control.

It is essential to adopt realistic strategies of self-governed development. This

entails to recognize that rural citizenship do not constitutes a homogeneous whole, since

the overall of the social actors integrating it embraces a complex, heterogeneous,

diverse and uneven collective of persons, whose attitudes, behaviors, strategies and

interactions are dynamics and changeable. Those persons as a whole constitute a blurred

amalgam of diverse social actors with very different interests, and whose socioeconomic

situations, and political and cultural identifications, are significantly contradictory

and/or uneven.

To sum up, fostering resilience in rural communities is a long-term process that

requires a holistic and integrated approach to a highly complex and dynamic

phenomenon composed of multiple interrelated socioeconomic, political, cultural,

spatial and environmental dimensions.

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The expectations, views, challenges and interests of different collective actors

and/or persons, on resilience and/or on its implementation, are often notably dissimilar.

In any case, resilience has unavoidably to foster the ability of communities not only to

cope with their internal and external stresses and disturbances as result of social,

economic, political and environmental change in the current global age, but also to turn

these changing and often unforeseeable circumstances that many of them are facing to

advantages.

This requires that resilient communities are able of dealing with and adapting to

so changing conditions as those triggered by the present uncertain globalization

dynamics.

But resilience is not a fixed quantity within communities, where it can grow or

decline with the passage of time. For instance, resilience enlarges usually as the

capacity to mobilize intentionally people and resources to respond and to influence

social, economic and political change is enhanced.

Otherwise, resilience of rural communities enlarges also as it gets a suitable

balance between the economic, environmental and social needs of such communities.

An overriding aim is to find new ways of securing sustainable livelihoods for

peasants and rural workers, at the same time that to achieve the goals of equity, food

sovereignty, sustainability and empowerment.

Precisely is the combination of the three previous points what makes possible a

fruitful and effective way of resilience; namely, that rural communities are able to

weather successfully the vicissitudes of endogenous and exogenous socioeconomic,

political and environmental changes they have to face.

The role of public policies.-

Public policies and local institutions could have a crucial role in planning the

adaptation and guiding the implementation of measures to foster resilience. In this

regard, nowadays a basic challenge of such policies is to ensure the socioeconomic and

demographic reproduction of rural territories.

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Moreover, these policies have to be in accordance with the challenge of

empowering rural citizenship for democratic-participatory governance and resilience.

This in turn means the need of helping that citizenship to increase its capacities for

action; that is, this citizenship has the possibility to change their negative life conditions

and/ or precarious situations. Although, this help has to be provided with humility and

not with the arrogant attitude of those experts who think they know everything.

This humble attitude is based on the fact that different well-informed and

qualified researchers debate today on the character of the present global processes,

admitting that they do not yet fully understand what is happening in the global

economy. Therefore, how can we then expect the rural non-expert people get to

understand new global trends, respond to new challenges and tap opportunities?

In this regards, it is essential not only to design good policies to solve the

problems of people from a hierarchical position of power, knowledge and capability,

but also to involve people in defining problem areas and in the development of

alternatives that can be searched. Among these alternatives, devising innovative forms

of socio-political participation that allow citizens to participate through the new

information technologies is very important.

For these reasons, current rural policies have to be based on deep analysis about

the problems suffered by the communities where they are implemented. In fact, we need

today of profound studies aimed to critically analyze global processes from the point of

view of indigenous and endogenous knowledge systems, and ask whether local

knowledge systems and social systems can cope with ever-fast change.

Each community seeks democratic-participatory governance and resilience

differently.-

Each rural community has to face the challenge of being empowered for

democratic-participatory governance and resilience in a different way, according to its

specific vicissitudes, political and cultural identification and socioeconomic

circumstances. For instance, we mention here the Southern Spanish cases of El Ejido

town and La Alpujarra county, which are both two clearly glocalized territories.

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Firstly, regarding El Ejido, its growing glocalization or insertion in global

dynamics is the result of an intense process of greenhouses development that has given

rise to both worrying environmental problems and social latent tensions or conflicts

between farmers and foreign migrants.

Secondly, La Alpujarra is a territory every time more glocalized; that is,

increasingly inserted in globalization dynamics. This is so because the former agrarian

and demographic deterioration of such territory, caused by rural exodus of sixties and

seventies of twenty century, has been nowadays reversed in certain of its areas by a

global tourism coming from many different parts of the world and by the impacts of the

urban newcomers settled in the zone.

Dealing properly with their respective characteristics, backgrounds and

circumstances is a basic requirement to get that both, El Ejido and La Alpujarra, have

really democratic-participatory governance and they are resilient communities and run

as such.

El Ejido.-

El Ejido is a Southeastern town of Spain (specifically in the western coast of the

Almería’s province), which has passed from being small and scarcely populated at the

commencement of the seventies to have today, in 2014, more than 80.000 inhabitants

and a very dynamic society and agro-industrial economy.

MAP.- LOCATION OF EL EJIDO

Source: Authors.

The word Ejido is etymologically derived from the Latin ‘exitus’, which alludes

to a common countryside not worked and located in the surroundings of a village, where

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cattle is usually gathered and threshing floors are settled. This etymology reflects the

previous status of the newly constituted municipality of El Ejido.

The spectacular economic take-off of El Ejido has been boosted by the

introduction of intensive agricultural production methods, based on the adoption of the

leading-edge technology mainly developed in the local agro-industrial sector of this

town, where the greenhouse cultivation of fruit and vegetables is oriented for

international export, mainly to the European Union.

So huge changes have made possible the transit, from a subsistence farming

(genuinely rural-traditional) to the current agro-industrial circumstances, whose

intensive production is fully embedded in globalization dynamics.

This globalization brings with it demands for efficiency, competitiveness and

technological development. In turn, this will increasingly hinder the possibilities of

survival of small, individual farmers without solid, transparent, collective and

democratic cooperation among them.

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The Territory of El Ejido in 1974 (Photo obtained by Satellite)

Source: Reproduced in the Spanish Newspaper ‘El País’, Weekly Supplement, 2005-07-10, page

4, within the article "El Planeta Cambia de Cara", which means “The planet changes its face”.

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The Territory of El Ejido in 2011 (Photo obtained from Satellite)

Source: Google Earth. This photo and the previous obtained from the space shuttle.

The “Plastic Sea”: A panoramic View.

Source: Photo by Entrena-Duran, May 2004 (Obtained by author perched on the mountain).

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PAMPANEIRA (1ª), BUBIÓN (2ª) AND CAPILEIRA (3ª) IN LA ALPUJARRA

Last considerations.-

The three villages of the previous photo retain the best traditional architecture

and secular landscape of La Alpujarra. But, often they preserve only their outdoor

architectural image, since the interiors of building have been gutted, and the traditional

dwelling house now has electricity, running warm water, heating, new furniture and all

the other facilities that characterize modern homes. Tourists living in these houses now

have the possibility of enjoying a supposedly traditional and rustic home, without

having to renounce their accustomed practices their daily urban lives. They do not suffer

the limitations and shortages that previous inhabitants of these houses had to bear

regularly. What these rural tourists get is an imitation of the traditional home they

inhabit.

In this case, the same as in El Ejido, a key challenge for getting participatory and

democratic governance is to ensure the effective involvement of all the heterogeneous

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social sectors currently living and / or acting on this territory. However, in La Alpujarra

democratic participation must not be constructed in a context of growing inequality and

competitiveness brought about by globalization, as is the case of El Ejido. By contrast,

here we have a society with a more purely rural economy as well as an area with

significant environmental, architectural and cultural resources and/ or heritages. And,

this is the main reason, apart from its exoticism (related to its secular isolation) that

explains its growing glocalization, which is mainly materialized by means of appealing

to the Spanish and foreign tourists.

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