Disintegrated Rural Development?
Neo-endogenous rural development in an uncertain world
Mark Shucksmith
University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
m.shucksmith@ncl.ac.uk
1. Introduction
A central question for rural policy is how state, civil society and markets can work together
towards the economic, social, cultural and environmental health of rural places. Ten or twenty
years ago, any discussion of this would have alluded to the concept of Integrated Rural
Development (IRD), a model which emphasised coordinating at local level the various sectoral
actions of the state. Changing economic functions and a diversity of rural experiences across
Europe have been a catalyst for re-thinking rural development at both European and national
political levels. Many commentators have argued that for policies to meet diverse needs and
circumstances there has to be a mobilisation of local actors, supported by partnership structures
and arrangements. Today the concept of governance is widely used to address such questions
(eg. Goodwin 2003, Lawrence 2004), reflecting a recognition of the changing role of the state
(at all levels) and the greater propensity for public, private and voluntary sectors to work
together in a ‘nobody-in-charge world’ (Murdoch and Abram 1998). In this paper I ask whether
the concept of Integrated Rural Development still has any meaning in the context of the new
rural governance, and I begin to link this to re-theorisations of the concept of spatial planning.
2. Integrated Rural Development – a brief history
The term Integrated Rural Development (IRD) originated in developing countries in the 1960s
and 1970s (see Morris 1981), and was introduced into Europe during the 1980s. Thus it was in
1982 that the EU launched its Integrated Development Programme (IDP), under which the
Western Isles of Scotland and nine other rural areas of Europe were designated as pilot projects
for a new IRD approach. As Ward (2002) has noted, “the mid-1980s saw increasing interest at
the European level in the need to develop a new model of rural development support” as
agricultural surpluses and growing environmental concerns challenged the identity of the rural
with the agricultural (EU Commission 1988). In direct opposition to the sectoral basis of rural
policy, Integrated Rural Development was presented as essentially territorial and “became
fashionable in the early 1980s in European countries such as the UK as part of the struggles to
reform discredited support policies” (Ward 2002, 2).
From 1989, the EU’s structural funds were able to target particular rural regions in the ‘most
need’ of policy help (Ray 1996, 30) and development of these was pursued through a territorial
approach, involving partnership both between sectors and between the levels of government.
These funds are administered through a programming approach in which the EU Commission,
Member States and other regional and local actors identify the problems and potential of the
area and propose a strategy in the form of a Single Programming Document. Unusually, actors
and organisations from the target areas themselves were invited to contribute to the design of
the strategy, and towards its implementation. The EU Commission (1988, 62) argued that this
incorporation of local knowledge would avoid “errors of diagnosis” and also would create a
network of rural development agents which could “play a stimulating, mobilising and
coordinating role.” In practice, local interests complained of a ‘top-down’ approach in which
central government set the parameters too tightly and exercised control (Ward and McNicholas
1997; UK Objective 5b Partnership 1995).
The IRD approach in EU policy, for many, is exemplified by the LEADER Community
Initiative. The EU’s declared objective for LEADER was for local actors to work together to
find innovative solutions to rural problems which could reflect what is best suited to their areas
and could also serve as models for developing rural areas elsewhere. Ray (1999c) identifies
three aspects to this approach: a territorial basis (as opposed to sectoral); the use of local
resources; and local contextualisation through active public participation. The approach held
out the prospect of “local areas assuming greater control of development by reorienting
development around local resources and by setting up structures to sustain the local
development momentum after the initial 'official' intervention” (Ray 1999c). In the LEADER
model, then, IRD is not only a territorial alternative to sectoral policies, but is also seen to
promote endogenous development as a means of building the capacity of people in rural
localities to resist broader forces of global competition, fiscal crisis or social exclusion (see
Kearney et al 1994; Ray 1998, 1999a, 1999b; Shucksmith 2000). This is pursued below.
Most recently, the term Rural Development has acquired a new, and highly contested, meaning
in EU parlance through the establishment of the CAP’s second pillar – the Rural Development
Regulation (RDR). While this derives again from attempts to reform the CAP from a sectoral
policy towards a more territorial IRD policy (Ward 2002), in this context the term ‘rural
development’ has become a site for symbolic and material struggle between agricultural and
other interests. Dwyer et al (2002, 13) observe that as the menu of instruments in the RDR was
agreed and as the implementation of the RDR through Rural Development Plans in each
country has progressed, “the rhetoric of broad, integrated rural development seems to have been
refined by a pragmatic view that the RDR, as part of the CAP, remains primarily a structural
adjustment policy for agriculture.” After all, as Jacques Chirac is reputed to have said, is the
CAP for farmers or for hairdressers? From the perspective of those who advocate IRD, “the
profound weakness of the new Rural Development Regulation becomes immediately apparent
when the scope of its menu of eligible measures is compared with what needs to be addressed if
failing rural areas are to be turned around economically and demographically” (Bryden and
Hart 2004, 342). Notwithstanding this, Member States have recently agreed to incorporate
LEADER-type measures (and hence IRD) into Pillar 2 of the CAP from 2007-13, albeit as a
very small element – indeed as a delivery mechanism for the principal measures, rather than as
a measure in itself. This tiny programme has acquired great symbolic importance, and has
offered many hopeful lessons, but it is far from earlier ambitions of a fully comprehensive
integration and coordination of policies, programmes and actions among the various arms of the
state and its partners and stakeholders. Partly this may be because the world has changed.
3. The New Rural Governance
Indeed, the term “Integrated Rural Development” is called into question by a widespread
recognition of a shift from government (state sponsorship of economic and social programmes)
towards governance. As we have seen, IRD originated in attempts to coordinate at municipal
level the different sectors of government funding, provision and direction. Governance, on the
other hand, “refers to the development of governing styles in which boundaries between and
within public and private sectors have become blurred.” (Stoker 1996, 2) It is generally
understood to imply a shift from state sponsorship of economic and social programmes and
projects, as in the original IRD model, towards the delivery of these through partnerships
involving both governmental and non-governmental organisations and perhaps other actors.
According to Goodwin (2003, 2), the increasing use of this term “indicates a significant change
in the processes by which rural society is governed and rural policy is delivered.” Features of
this style include a new role for the state as coordinator, manager or enabler rather than as
provider and director; the formation of tangled hierarchies, flexible alliances and networks
through which to govern (often to the confusion of most citizens); the inclusion of new
partners, notably from the private and voluntary sectors; and indeed ‘governing through
community’ or ‘government at a distance’. As Murdoch and Abram (1998) have put it, these
are the elements of “managing a nobody-in-charge world”.
A number of authors have developed Foucauldian perspectives in researching the emergence
and operation of governance in rural places (Herbert-Cheshire 2003; Higgins 2002; Lawrence
2004). Mackinnon’s work in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (2002, 321), for example,
has demonstrated that a ‘governmentality’ approach “provides a framework for connecting
notions of community-led rural development to a broader shift in the dominant mode of state
intervention, away from welfarism and social democracy to a more selective and indirect
emphasis on ‘governing through community’.” What might IRD mean in these circumstances?
One reason which has been put forward for these developments is the argument that the modern
state can no longer govern national spaces in an all-inclusive fashion, but since it does not wish
to be seen as exclusionary it has been forced to promote self-government instead. On the one
hand this may be seen positively as an opportunity for participation and empowerment, leading
to capacity-building. But equally this may be seen as an abdication of the state’s role and
responsibilities, and even as an extension of flexibilisation and casualisation to government
itself. Often there is a tension between the concern to promote local participation and ‘civic
renewal’ and the reliance on a set of managerial technologies such as targeting, auditing and
financial control which are deployed to ensure that local institutions are accountable to (central)
government (Mackinnon 2002). Critical questions emerge both over the effectiveness of these
new styles of governance, and also over who has been involved, who has not, and why (see
Ellis 2003; Shortall 2004). Moreover, how has the political landscape been affected? In terms
of policy relations, well-established ‘policy communities’ with distinctive discourses and
practices related to the different sectors, such as agriculture, have retained power and influence,
perhaps trapping governments “in modes of thinking and acting which lack the flexibility to
respond to new ways of living, new ways of doing business in a globalising context and new
cultural awareness of the significance of environment and place qualities” (Healey et al, 2000).
As Goodwin (1998) has pointed out, this leads us quickly into issues of power relations in rural
societies. From the governance perspective, power is reconceptualised as being a matter of
social production rather than of social control, that is with ‘power to’ rather than ‘power over’,
although the managerial technologies mentioned above clearly still exert ‘power over’.
Nevertheless, “what is at issue is not so much domination and subordination, as a capacity to
act and accomplish goals” (Stone 1989, 229), referred to in terms of capacity-building.
Essentially, local actors are cast as the catalysts for change through collective, neo-endogenous
action (see for example Ward and Ray 2004). These approaches rely upon resources and actors
being mobilised to re-assert the identity of place and self. While not exclusive to rural policy,
this approach does build upon the notion of co-operative social relations (gemeinschaft),
frequently associated with rural areas Through the frameworks and arenas of the new rural
governance, individuals and institutions may thus attempt to gain a greater capacity to act
through coming together in new forms (partnerships, alliances, networks, social movements) so
exhibiting agency, reflexivity and resistance. Frequently this involves the imaginative
reorganisation of market, bureaucratic, associative and communal relations (Reimer 2004) as
manifested in the interaction of political power, economic power and civil society in different
ways in different rural localities.
The tendency towards new styles of governance and towards collaborative planning (see below)
has relied upon partnerships as a central component, along with advocacy of citizen
participation and stakeholder involvement, even if these have been unevenly realised in
practice. The Cork Declaration, for example, asserted that rural policy “must be as
decentralised as possible and based on partnership and co-operation between all levels
concerned.” Goodwin (2003) cites the examples of schemes such as LEADER in Europe,
Landcare in Australia, the Vermont Environmental Partnerships in Communities program in the
USA (Edwards 1998; Ray 2000; Sobels et al. 2001; J. Richardson 2000) and the French
intercommunalité system of horizontal inter-governmental partnerships at the local scale which
assist smaller rural authorities in service delivery and economic development (Michels 1998).
Often such attempts to build partnerships for IRD involve the construction of a shared strategic
document or plan (eg. a Single Programming Document, or a business plan). Of course, as the
OECD point out in their “New Rural Paradigm” report (OECD 2005), horizontal integration is
not sufficient: vertical integration is also essential if multi-scalar governance is to support the
empowerment of rural communities.
4. Spatial Planning and Integrated Rural Development
In many people’s minds, the activity of planning – in the broadest sense - has come to
exemplify government, and indeed one recent UK commentator argued that the system of
development plans and development control referred to as “town and country planning”
remains the last vestige of the 1940s top-down approach to government intervention and
direction. In Allmendinger’s (date) view, it continued to represent “a modernist project in postmodern times.” However, with the shift towards new styles of governance, the concept of
spatial planning1 has been contested, refreshed and reinvented in recent years, and this process
of contestation and reconstruction has relevance to rural development.
Through its focus on the qualities of place and territory, planning is often advocated as having a
role in integrating and joining up diverse government and private initiatives. Healey (2005a, 1)
suggests that planning is proposed as integrative in several respects:
 as linking diverse policy objectives (eg. economic, social and environmental);
 as connecting issues as they play out spatially (eg. housing and transport);
 as linking different types of government intervention;
 as overcoming the fragmentation of area- and development-based policy initiatives and
the competition between individual projects;
 as linking policy with implementation;
 as increasing the connections between levels of government;
 and linking multiple stakeholders in pursuit of an agreed framework or strategy.
As a result, “the urban and regional governance landscape is spattered with an array of regional
and urban agencies and partnerships, charged with developing strategies on various topics and
encouraged to ‘integrate’ around new foci of attention and to develop policy frames in new
multi-agency groups” (Healey 2005a, 3). Meanwhile, planning in practice became increasingly
focused on land use regulation. This presents the planning system with a dilemma – “on the one
hand, it is presented as a key site for ‘integrating’ disparate policies and strategies around a
place focus,” while on the other “the practices of the system had become deeply embedded in
an increasingly legalised conflict resolution process.”
Healey (2004, 46) understands strategic spatial planning as “self-conscious collective efforts to
re-imagine a city, urban region or wider territory and to translate the result into priorities for
area investment, conservation measures, strategic infrastructure investments and principles of
land use regulation.” The activity of planning highlights the connection between the past and
the future, focusing on how action now can shape future socio-spatial relations. But in the
context of new modes of governance, she argues, this activity must more than ever be reorganised around deliberative processes and collective action – a far cry from the centralised or
top-down practices of planning as land use regulation. Indeed, some have criticised this faith in
deliberative democracy as idealistic, if not utopian (Allmendinger and Twedwr-Jones date), and
certainly it is necessary to be realistic about the unequal power relations involved.
1
A term which Healey (2004) notes does not easily translate between European languages
Nevertheless, this paradigmatic shift in planning theory is now widely recognised. Healey
(2004) argues that mid-twentieth century ‘Euclidian’ concepts of planning have been
challenged by a relational conception of spatial planning which understands place as a social
construct, continually co-produced and contested; views connections between territories in
terms of ‘relational reach’ rather than proximity; sees development as multiple, non-linear,
continually emergent trajectories; and recognises the changed context of a network society and
multi-scalar governance. Under this paradigm, the function of strategic plans is no longer to
direct the state’s investment, using authoritative power, but to exercise generative power to
stimulate action, innovation, struggle and resistance. In her words “to release potentialities and
to innovate, and perhaps even to generate new struggles and a different level of politics.”
Two key issues she identifies once planning is reconceived in these ways are:
(1) how to mobilise actors to develop strategic agendas in ‘diffused power’ contexts; and
(2) how to employ concepts of ‘place’ and ‘space’ in this process.
These are familiar concerns for rural sociologists and other researchers concerned with rural
governance and rural development.
A feature of this paradigmatic shift in planning, and in governance more generally, is that
change and development are no longer seen as linear, directed or predictable, as in the
development plans or strategic plans of earlier years. On the contrary, development is nonlinear, complex and continually emergent, popping up in unexpected ways from a variety of
actors: most surprisingly, this is to be encouraged as fundamental to the generative approach,
even though there are inherent tensions between the state’s role as entrepreneurial enabler and
facilitator and its equally legitimate regulatory role in protecting the public interest2. “The
contribution of the spatial planning movement and the planning policy community is not, as
imagined in the past, to produce a ‘comprehensive’ strategy for the evolution of a place or
territory. Instead, much greater attention is needed to feeding debates and building
connectivities… This kind of strategic practice acknowledges that what is identified as
important in policy terms about place and territory is an emergent property of multiple
imaginative efforts mobilised through political processes of coalition building and discourse
formation. It is political mobilisation not planning technique which will have the power to carry
the place-focused decentralisation movement into the remoulding of the landscape of urban and
regional governance” (Healey 2005a, 19).
Of course, this poses a huge cultural challenge for all those who operate in the planning arena –
not only civil servants, local authority officials and politicians, but also the lobby groups,
environmental activists, developers, landowners, local businesses, community development
workers and indeed all stakeholders in a rural locality. Despite a history in many European
countries of strong centralism and sectoralism, such a change “implies the emergence of
powerful policy discourses and arenas focused around regional and local coalitions, to
challenge and reconstruct the overall policy landscape in more decentralised and territoriallyfocused ways” (Healey 2005a, 12). It is in this political and cultural context that the LEADER
experiment can be seen as so significant, even though it has been marginal in budgetary terms.
2
In practice, spatial planning reflects these paradigmatic tensions. Healey (2004) shows, for example how the
European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) promotes the newer discourse, at least to some degree, but that
this is then translated into older physical planning discourses in policy concepts and implementation. Thus, in the
Netherlands, a relational analysis is reinterpreted as ‘the compact city’ through a ‘red’ and ‘green’ distinction
which defines areas which cannot be built on unless demand cannot otherwise be satisfied (Healey 2004, 58). Thus
urban and rural areas remain separate domains. Similarly, in Northern Ireland’s regional development strategy,
compact development is proposed through corridors and ‘a polycentric network of hubs/clusters’ of small towns
which will act as growth poles. More fundamentally, the ESDP treats rural areas (1) as residual areas between the
(dynamic) urban nodes of growth and competitiveness, rather than as areas with endogenous potentialities; and (2)
as hinterlands which, through the magical device of ‘urban-rural partnerships’, benefit from urban containment and
a presumption against development (Shucksmith, Thomson and Roberts 2005). However, a rural critique of the
ESDP is a matter for another paper.
A crucial element, both of LEADER and of the collaborative planning project which Healey
has proposed, is capacity-building. Shucksmith (2000) has discussed what capacity-building
might mean in the context of LEADER, and attempted to relate this to theories of social capital.
He argued that “attempts to address inequality and social exclusion must seek both to alter the
structures which constrain individuals’ actions and also to build the capacity to act of those
actors with the least power and opportunities. Arguably these are both core concerns of
development even though this was not made explicit in the UK LEADER programme in 1991,”
and indeed, most LEADER groups across Europe have pursued job creation and other similar
outputs and only a few have emphasised process goals.
Healey et al (2000) have taken the idea of capacity-building further in developing a relational
concept of institutional capacity and applying this to a study of Newcastle city in the UK. In
their work they draw upon interpretive approaches in policy analysis and communicative
planning theory to suggest that institutional capacity-building in local governance may be
analysed in terms of:
 knowledge resources (intellectual capital)
 relational resources (trust and social understanding built up through interaction)
 mobilisation capabilities (the capacity to act collectively).
In their empirical application, therefore, they investigate how “knowledge resources and
relational resources are mobilised; how this affects the frames of reference or discourses
through which meanings are arrived at and mobilised; the processes by which meanings are
disseminated; and the relation between such discourses and the practices through which
material actions are accomplished.” This allows the researchers to analyse, at one level, the
institutional capacities drawn upon and developed in and around the initiative, while at another
level asking how far wider discourses which structure policy agendas and routinised practices
were reinforced or transformed.
5. Land Reform and Community Empowerment in Scotland
Examples of attempts at neo-endogenous rural development are now numerous, partly as a
result of the EU LEADER programme in which, as noted above, local actors were intended to
work together in a community-based approach to find innovative solutions to rural problems
which could reflect what is best suited to their areas, could build upon local resources and
could also serve as models for developing rural areas elsewhere. However, it is rare for this
communitarian logic to have been extended to the passing of individual resources and
property rights into community ownership. Yet, as Bryden and Geisler (2004) have argued,
“devolution of responsibility and stewardship without entitlement is a contradiction. It is
symbolic devolution at best, and is likely to be dysfunctional…”
In this respect, one of the most ambitious - if not unique - attempts at empowering
communities to develop and implement their own strategies for their futures has been the
community-based land reform enacted in Scotland in 2003. This is therefore discussed briefly
to illustrate the potential of this approach, and some of the issues arising.
While still a taboo subject in England, political agitation for land reform in the Highlands of
Scotland has continued for more than a century since the people who worked the land were
forcibly dispossessed during the notorious Clearances (Hunter 1976; Devine 1994; Mackenzie
1998). Many were sent overseas, to Canada or America, while others were allowed tiny plots
on poor land of no value to capitalist agriculture. In 1886 these ‘crofters’ won rights to
security of tenure, fair rents etc on these small-holdings, which have been closely regulated
ever since. As a result of these Clearances, Scotland has the highest level of concentration of
land ownership anywhere in Europe, with 1200 landowners owning two-thirds of Scotland’s
land (Wightman 1999). Often absentee landlords have obstructed attempts at community and
regional development and managed their land against the broader community interest (see eg.
HIDB 1979; Wightman 1996). But in recent years a growing community movement has
developed a shared vision of community ownership of land (see Bryden and Geisler 2004),
not only to address historical grievances but primarily to remove landlord obstructionism as
an obstacle to rural development. Then in 1997 a new Labour government was elected with a
manifesto commitment to enact land reform in Scotland.
In essence, the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 gave communities a first option to purchase
feudal estates of which they were a part (The ‘Community Right To Buy’). Beyond this,
crofting communities were given the power to exercise a pre-emptive, or hostile, right-to-buy
the landlord’s interest in land under crofting tenure, where a majority of both crofters and the
broader community are in favour and where this promotes sustainable rural development (The
‘Crofting Community Right To Buy’). A Community Land Unit was established by the
regional development agency, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, to assist communities in
drawing up their plans and in the purchase and management of land; and a Scottish Land
Fund (initially of £10m, later increased to £15m) was set up with UK Lottery Money to assist
rural communities to acquire and develop land and buildings. Communities typically establish
a democratic and locally controlled body (usually a company limited by guarantee) to acquire
the land, draw up a business plan, and raise funding from gifts and loans to buy the land.
This illustrates many of the themes developed above. Central government and its agencies act
to build the generative power of communities to imagine and realise their own futures.
According to Bryden and Geisler (2004), the Community Land Unit and Scottish Land Fund
have been “vital tools for community empowerment and enterprise in fragile rural areas of
Scotland – for example, since acquisition about 13 new enterprises have started on Gigha and
the number of families and children on the island has increased significantly. A small local
housing enterprise has started, and housing improvements in the existing housing stock are
under way.” Now, three wind turbines produce electricity which is sold by the Gigha
community to the national grid. Such wind-farms are becoming a common community
enterprise on such estates, offering hope of sustainable rural development in several senses.
More than half the land area of the Western Isles is now in community ownership, with the
majority of those islands’ residents having come together in their communities to debate the
merits of community ownership, and then to develop strategic plans for the development of
their communities – including, of course, how to pay back the loans. This has given people a
new confidence in their abilities and potential, while at the same time requiring them to take
responsibility for the future of their communities – with crucial help from a mostly supportive
governance framework.
Mackenzie (2006) sees this community-centred land reform not only as a movement towards
collective ownership with strong historical resonances but also as the removal of land from
circuits of global capital, in turn permitting a re-visioning of the political possibilities of place
and a commitment to social justice and sustainability. While the move towards collective
ownership is borne out of historical (genealogical) claims to the land, she argues, rights are now
defined in terms of the community of place rather than a genealogical community: “genealogy
is ‘denaturalised’ as a marker of belonging now defined in terms of place-based residence.”
This re-definition of community rights to land thus opens up rights to those who previously had
none and so is inclusionary. Moreover, she argues, people are “written into the land” through
the reconstitution of nature as well as by the exercise of collective rights. Colonising discourses
of wilderness, serving the sporting interests of a landed class or the environmental designations
of non-local conservationists, are disputed and overturned through the performance of
community stewardship and dismantling the class-basis of stalking, for example. And
community wind-farms also re-produce nature as a worked landscape, while their inescapable
complicity with capitalism is “mediated through a local and collective rather than global and
corporate or private ethic” such that the wind’s commodification becomes part and parcel of the
community’s rights to the land and of their post-colonial resistance. As Mackenzie (2006, 396)
concludes, “the wind becomes the means through which the ‘local’ – place – is not set in
opposition to the ‘global’, but through which ‘the very mechanisms of the global’ are altered. It
becomes a key means through which the potential for collective rights to land to contribute to
the sustainability of local livelihoods may be realised.”
This is not to claim that community-based land reform in Scotland is without difficulties. There
are divisions within communities which make it unlikely that these communities could agree on
imagined and desired futures, or take advantage of the community right-to-buy, at least in the
short term. Many communities lack the institutional capacity, particularly in terms of the
relational resources and mobilisation capabilities, and this raises important questions of how to
build these capacities. Even where community buy-outs have proceeded, not all branches of the
state may act supportively: for example, the government’s environmental agency, Scottish
Natural Heritage, objected to a proposal from the North Harris Trust for a small wind-farm
which is supported by all the other statutory bodies, leading to much criticism of SNH as a
colonial actor lacking local legitimacy, very much as portrayed by Mackenzie above.
Nevertheless, these examples of empowering and supporting communities do illustrate the
efficacy of neo-endogenous rural development and the potential of this approach.
6. Conclusion
Returning to the question with which this paper began, how can state, civil society and markets
work together effectively in an increasingly globalised context to contribute towards the
economic, social, cultural and environmental health of rural places – promoting continuity and
change, diversity and cohesion? Despite calls for more integration and ‘joining-up’ of policy, it
is unlikely that this can be achieved through Integrated Rural Development in the sense either
of the 1980s model of local action to coordinate sectoral, state-sponsored programmes or in the
sense of any template to direct the actions of the state and its partner agencies.
Instead, the literatures on spatial planning and rural governance, and the example of
community-based land reform in Scotland, hold out the hope for Dis-integrated Rural
Development by which the state exercises generative power to stimulate action, innovation,
struggle and resistance, to release potentialities, to generate new struggles and to transform
governance itself. While this should be founded upon deliberative processes and collective
action, the mobilisation of actors (especially the least powerful) to develop strategic agendas in
such a context of diffused power and ‘nobody-in-charge’ will be a crucial challenge. And
strategies, once agreed, must welcome and foster the unexpected: for innovation to be
successful, it is likely to be multiple, non-linear, complex and continually emergent rather than
conforming to a rigid development plan. This will present a huge challenge of cultural change
to actors in rural development, and its realisation will depend partly on the institutional capacity
of these actors in terms of knowledge resources, relational resources and mobilising
capabilities. This analytical framework, derived from spatial planning literatures, offers
promise for research yielding new insights into rural governance and the processes of change
and rural transformation.
In several of the senses outlined by Healey such an approach may well be integrative, while
nevertheless being dis-integrated in deriving from multiple authors and being continually
contested. It is likely to play on a dialectic between continuity and change, and will be a
process of negotiation (or an arena for struggle) between maintaining valued aspects of society,
economy and environment, and fostering and embracing new approaches to them. In this
respect, negotiating rurality(ies) will be at the heart of Disintegrated Rural Development.
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