Rural geography III: Rural
futures and the future of rural
geography
Michael Woods
Aberystwyth University, UK
Corresponding author:
Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth
University, Aberystwyth SY23 3DB, UK
Email: m.woods@aber.ac.uk
Progress in Human Geography 1–10 ª The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav 10.1177/0309132510393135
Abstract
Global concerns such as climate change and food security have focused renewed attention on the future of rural space. Although the direct engagement of rural geographers with climate change and food security has been limited to date, recent research in rural geography holds a number of lessons on these issues, highlighting, for example, spatial and social differentiation in the development of alternative food networks and the challenge of contested discourses of rurality to technocratic solutions to both food security and climate change. Through such perspectives, rural geography has a strong and distinctive contribution to make to research on both issues.
Keywords climate change, food networks, food security, rural futures, rural geography, sustainability
I Introduction
The development of rural geography over the four decades since its emergence as a distinctive subdiscipline has been enacted against the consistent background of social and economic restructuring that has radically altered the future prospects of rural communities. In mapping and describing processes and experiences of agricultural modernization, industrialization and deindustrialization, depopulation and counterurbanization, service rationalization and the commodification of rural landscapes and traditions for tourism, rural geography has identified trajectories of change, examined their impacts on rural areas, and explored the responses of rural actors. Yet, rural geography has maintained a primarily present-tense focus, and only rarely have rural geographers directly engaged in projecting or modelling the future. In part this reflects the epistemological character of rural geography – despite a youthful dalliance with agricultural economics, rural geography has not been a field in which modelling has featured strongly, and the influence of the ‘cultural turn’ in the 1990s led many rural geographers to eschew the positivist and normative approaches that modelling implied. However, it also reflects a wider cultural discourse that associates futurism with the urban and positions rural areas as marginal to exercises in futurology
It is therefore noteworthy that several studies exploring possible ‘rural futures’ have appeared over the last decade, primarily in Europe, and often funded by the European Union (for example, BioScene, FARO, MULTIFOR, RUFUS)1
or by national governments (see Lowe and Ward, 2009; Verburg et al., 2010; Westhoek et al., 2006). These studies have formed part of the re-evaluation of rural policy, with some expressly testing scenarios based on different policy options (Solvia et al., 2008; Verburg et al., 2010; Westhoek et al., 2006). As such, they have adopted the methodology of ‘scenario analysis’ from future studies, often combined with GIS and visualization technologies, and in some cases introducing a geographical sensitivity to spatial variation. Lowe and Ward (2009), in particular, note criticisms of previous exercises for producing scenarios that were arbitrary, implausible or non-specific, and argue for a more systematic and conceptually informed approach to generating alternative futures. In their own work, Lowe and Ward draw on the concept of the ‘differentiated countryside’ (Murdoch et al., 2003) to analyse how different social and economic drivers of change might impact on different types of rural areas in England, producing three alternative scenarios centred on increased consumption and amenity migration, heightened controls on land-use change and population growth, and the prioritization of economic growth over economic protection, respectively
While Lowe and Ward’s analysis focuses on the social and economic character of rural areas, other future-gazing exercises have concentrated on landscape and environmental management outcomes (Elands and Praestholm, 2008; Reed et al., 2009; Soliva et al., 2008; Swanwick, 2009; Verburg et al., 2010). These envisage divergent scenarios ranging from the intensification of land use for food production, forestry or bioenergy to agricultural abandonment, to management for biodiversity, to re-wilding. The drivers of change considered in the models include the extension of existing processes such as the growth of the rural consumption economy and the scaling back of agricultural subsidies, but also engage with newer global concerns including climate change and global food shortages with potentially dramatic consequences for rural areas of both the global north and the global south.
Indeed, the increasing (geo)political significance of issues such as climate change, food security, energy security and biodiversity arguably relocates the development of rural areas from the margins of future-planning to its centre. Not only will these global challenges impact on the economies, societies and environments of rural regions, but finding solutions to the problems they present will also involve decisions about how rural land is used and managed. Scenario-analysis can help to project and test the possible impacts on rural areas (see particularly Reed et al., 2009; Verburg et al., 2010), but it is only part of the potential contribution of rural geography to understanding and addressing these global issues. Recent research in rural geography and allied disciplines on subjects including conventional and alternative food networks, responses to climate changes and extreme weather events, the politics of renewable energy developments, ecosystem services and intentional communities presents numerous lessons about how ‘global’ concerns such as climate change and food security are grounded, reproduced and contested in rural localities, as the remainder of this progress report discusses
II Food security and rural futures
The challenge of feeding a rapidly expanding world population is widely recognized as one of the key global issues of the 21st century. As the website for an interdisciplinary research programme on global food security in the UK puts it, ‘an increasing population wants a more varied diet, but is trying to grow more food on less land with limited access to water, all the time facing increased costs for fertilizer and fuel for storage and transport’ (BBSRC, 2010).2 The impending crisis has been discursively constructed as both a technological and a political challenge, as the now near-ubiquitous use of the term ‘food security’ implies. Yet ‘food security’ is also a contested concept, with multiple and sometimes conflicting meanings. At a global scale it has been employed to justify the (neo)liberalization of agricultural trade, the intensification of (super-)productivist farming techniques and the rolling out of genetic technologies. But it has also been employed by national governments to support protectionist trade policies and purchase of agricultural land in other countries to ensure food supply. Equally, as rural sociologists Mooney and Hunt (2009) discuss, ‘food security’ can also be understood as minimizing the environmental, health and economic risks of the globalized industrial food system, giving rise to a food relocalization movement. This latter meaning in turn resonates with the alternative frame of ‘food sovereignty’ promoted by the transnational farmers’ coalition La Via Campesina (Boyer, 2010) that emphasizes community control over food supply.
These competing meanings of food security, and their differing resonance at different scales, raise questions about how discourses of food security are translated into practice, and how they are operationalized in particular rural places. Although relatively little research has been undertaken to date in rural geography that directly interrogates the notion of ‘food security’, a renewed interest in food as a focus of research by rural geographers over the last decade has produced findings that can inform the food security debate in several ways.
First, rural geography research has highlighted the political challenges facing technocratic ‘solutions’ to food security. Scientific discourses of food security, in particular, have tended to emphasize biotechnological responses, including the development and use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture (BBSRC, 2010). Yet, as Gibbs et al. (2008: 145) observe, ‘biotechnology will have important implications for the future of rural places and the debates about GMOs expose conceptions of what the future should hold’. They point out that the GM debate encapsulates two competing visions of rural futures (and arguably, of food security): one based on economic efficiency, standardized products and reduced risk from exposure to disease and climate events; the other based on local food systems and ‘clean and green’ production. Marsden (2008) additionally argues that GM and non-GM futures represent contrasting dynamics of rural development.
The competing representations of GM and biotechnology are incorporated into divergent public attitudes – including the opinions of farmers, who Hall (2008) shows to be divided on the introduction of GM crops – and the regulatory frameworks adopted by governments at different scales (Cocklin et al., 2008; Levidow and Boschert, 2008; Marsden, 2008). Accordingly, Marsden (2008) suggests that rural spaces are becoming a ‘regulatory battleground’, ‘with different types of producers and consumers seeking to create new boundaries and ‘safe-havens’ around their particular production systems’ (p. 200), throwing into doubt prospects for co-existence between the different approaches (Levidow and Boschert, 2008). Opposition to the introduction of GM agriculture has been especially virulent in parts of the global south, where the rationality of ‘global food security’ evoked by biotechnology advocates is countered by a ‘food sovereignty’ discourse that emphasizes the independence and resilience of indigenous food systems (McAfee, 2008; Scoones, 2008). Work by McAfee (2008) in Mexico, for example, reveals how the introduction of GM maize by American agri-industrial corporations following accession to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has been perceived not only as an environmental risk, but also as a threat to distinctive cultural and social structures that are closely tied to indigenous maize diversity (see also Keleman et al., 2009). As such, Gibbs et al. (2008) conclude that ‘rural futures may be characterised by increased differentiation among commodity sectors and between large and small farms, spatial differentiation between GM and non-GM areas, and social tensions between GM and non-GM producers’ (Gibbs et al., 2008: 145), disrupting the apparently smooth rural space abstractly envisaged in technological discourses of food security.
Second, rural geography research has also identified spatial and social differentiation in the development and operation of local food systems and alternative food networks. Interest in food (re)localization has grown as a reaction to both globalization and environmental concerns, and has been promoted as contributing to food security as a more sustainable form of food production. However, studies by Ricketts Hein et al. (2006) and Winter (2003) have demonstrated the uneven geography of food localization in England, reflecting a range of environmental, social, political and economic factors, while Jarosz (2008) argues in a case study of Washington State, USA, that localized alternative food networks ‘develop out of the interactions between rural restructuring and urbanization in metropolitan regions’ (p. 242), with demand led by urban populations. Jarosz also points to the social differentiation of food localization, noting that demand for locally produced food ‘may be especially pronounced in cities with well-educated residents who have high-incomes and, in the case of Seattle, where politics have a particularly liberal cast’ (p. 242). Alternative food networks are commonly perceived as serving niche markets, and expanding uptake is a challenge, although Little et al. (2010) highlight the potential role of collective purchase initiatives in facilitating more inclusive local procurement systems. Yet Eaton (2008) argues that the adoption of neoliberal policies in regions such as Ontario, Canada, has pushed local food producers towards more elitist, market-led forms of local food projects, undermining earlier neocommunitarian ambitions.
Third, while local food systems are popularly associated with environmental sustainability, research by Penker (2006) in Austria has echoed Hinrichs (2003) and Winter (2003) in warning that ‘local or short food chains cannot simply be equated with ecological quality and environmentally friendly production processes’ (Penker, 2006: 377; see also Duram and Oberholtzer, 2010). Similarly, claims to local embeddedness may be more complex than suggested. Feagan (2007) critiques the construction of ‘local’ in food localization, noting that ‘how we determine the local in [local food systems] will have to be contingent on the place – the social, ecological, and political circumstances that circumscribe it ... while also cognizant that any localism is dialectically and relationally tied to the global in diverse ways’ (p. 39). Studies by Milestad et al. (2010) in Austria and Sims (2010) in England both reveal the ‘local’ to be elastic in its use by practitioners in local food systems to define their suppliers and customers, while Maye and Ilbery (2006) and Trabalzi (2007) both argue that local food systems are more accurately hybrid systems, incorporating local and non-local components, actors, technologies and markets.
These observations do not necessarily diminish the contribution of food localization towards food security – indeed, they could be argued to enhance it – but they do demonstrate that approaches to food production and consumption are contingent on a range of political, social, cultural, economic and ethical influences that combine to produce different outcomes in different places, such that questions of food supply and security cannot be divorced from the constitution and regulation of rural space.
III Climate change and rural futures
Climate change parallels food security as a paradigm shaping perspectives on rural futures. Not only will climate change itself have direct impacts on the rural environment, and hence on rural economies and societies, but the responses and adaptation of rural communities to climate change will determine their future social and economic viability, while the harnessing of renewable rural resources could also play a key role in mitigating and limiting the effects of climate change. As Molnar (2010) argues, ‘research on the rural and local impacts of climate change and how rural communities respond to these increasingly recognized challenges is a growing need’ (p. 11), and, while Molnar’s comments are directed at rural sociologists, they should register equally strongly (if not more so) with rural geographers. Yet, perhaps oddly, rural geography research on climate change to date has been fairly limited, and rural geographers have certainly been no more prominent than environmental and agricultural economists, rural sociologists and anthropologists in examining climate change in a rural context.
Nonetheless, the evidence produced through this research emphasizes the highly geographical character of rural experiences of climate change. For example, the impact of climate change on rural communities is spatially differentiated – as modelling of rural community vulnerability to climate change in Australia by economists shows (Nelson et al., 2010a, 2010b). Such variations result in part from environmental factors and projected changes in climate patterns, but also reflect social, economic and political factors that influence that adaptive capacity of a community, as has been further demonstrated by a handful of place-based qualitative case studies. Pittman et al. (2010), for instance, examine the adaptive capacity of a Canadian rural community that is particularly vulnerable to increased drought occurrence resulting from climate change. They identify further development of irrigation as key to adaptation to climate change in the community, but note that limitations in organization and cooperation had the potential to compromise the ability of the community to achieve this change.
The combination of economic and environmental factors in intensifying local vulnerability to climate change in rural areas has also been recorded by Silva et al. (2010) in Mozambique. They found that villagers in two case study communities were generally resilient to environmental risks such as flooding and drought, but were less resilient to socio-economic stresses associated with globalization. In particular, farmers struggled to adapt to more commercial farming, which in turn weakened their resilience to climate change by creating economic uncertainty and removing traditional agricultural methods that had been part of mitigation strategies for extreme environmental events. As such, Silva et al. argue that the villages are ‘doubly exposed’ to both climatic and economic pressures.
Silva et al. emphasize the importance of local environmental knowledge in framing responses to climate change, and this is reiterated in other studies from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. Mertz et al. (2009), for example, observe that farmers in Senegal are ‘strongly aware of the climate and have clear opinions on changes, especially in wind patterns and the intensity of climate events’ (p. 812), informing a range of adaptive strategies but also reinforcing ‘a rather fatalistic approach to climate changes’ (p. 814), believing that they cannot alter the weather. Eakin and Appendini (2008), meanwhile, describe the subjugation of local environmental knowledge and methods of adaptation to flooding in the Lerma valley in Mexico by modernist technocratic solutions, driven in part by neoliberal economic policies. The shift in approach, they suggest, created ‘a flood hazard from flooding that was previously a well-known and accepted dimension of the hydrology of the Lerma Valley’ (p. 556), and as such has reduced the resilience and adaptability of the region to any future intensification in flood events (see also Gamble et al., 2010; Valdiva et al., 2010).
The vulnerability of rural communities to climate change, and their capacity to adapt, is consequently shaped by multiple factors, and adaptive capacity will vary spatially and between social groups. Osbahr et al. (2008) show from research in Mozambique that adaptation strategies are multiscalar and dependent on socio-economic context, with many poorer residents falling back on traditional methods of ‘coping with’ rather than ‘adapting to’ climate change. The social stratification of adaptive capacity is supported by historical research conducted by Gilbert and McLeman (2010) examining the significance of household access to capital on adaptation strategies to drought of rural residents in Alberta, Canada, in the 1930s. They found that higher household measures of financial capital, human capital and social capital enabled a greater range of adaptation options, and that households with shortfalls in one or more types of capital were more likely to migrate out of the region, as the adaptive strategy of last resort (see also McLeman et al., 2010, on mapping drought and population change in 1930s Canada).
Migration continues to be an adaptive strategy for rural communities in response to climate change, with some evidence of climate changes contributing to above-average rates of urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa (Barrios et al., 2006), and to migration from rural districts of small island states in the Pacific (Locke, 2009). Furthermore, while little attention has been thus far paid to the prospect of climate-induced migration from rural areas in the global north, the trend is implied in discourses of ‘sustainable urbanism’ that contend that urban living can be better adapted to environmental sustainability in the context of climate change than life in rural areas. At the same time, however, there is a counter-argument that suggests that ‘rural’ attributes such as solidarity, self-sufficiency and closeness to nature are the qualities required for environmental sustainability – articulated in a non-academic book by French writer Bernard Farinelli (2008), the title of which declares ‘L’Avenir est a` la Campagne’ (‘The Future is in the Countryside’).
Studies by Halfacree (2007a, 2007b) in Britain and by Meijering et al. (2007a, 2007b) in the Netherlands, describe attempts to put the philosophy of sustainable rural living into practice, either by individual migrants heading ‘back to the land’ (Halfacree, 2007b), or as part of intentional communities based on principles of low environmental impact and relative self-sufficiency. The movement, which forms a notable but largely neglected component in counter-urbanization, offers a radically different vision of the rural future to those imagined in the scenario-analyses discussed at the start of this article. Intentional eco-communities in particular have frequently come into conflict with regulatory frameworks for planning and land use, or with residents who perceive a threat to their property interests (Halfacree, 2007a).
Perceived incompatibility with both rural property interests and imagined notions of the rural idyll also presents challenges for attempts to engage rural areas in more mainstream strategies for mitigating climate change. Neoliberal responses to climate change envisage marketdriven solutions based on a spatial division of labour in which rural areas supply renewable energy and provide ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration to urban populations. As rural areas would be remunerated for these services through market payments, advocates have heralded the approach as the foundation of a new rural-urban compact that would underpin the economic sustainability of rural communities and alleviate rural poverty (Engel et al., 2008; Gutman, 2007; Milder et al., 2010). Yet, as with technological discourses of food security, the ‘ecosystem services’ approach arguably falls foul of misconceiving the dynamics of rural localities. Not only is the operationalization of ecosystem services challenged by the problem of aligning varying relations of law, politics, markets and ecosystems across different spatial scales – as Robertson (2004) demonstrates in a study of a wetland mitigation banking scheme – but local social, economic, political and cultural structures mediate both receptiveness to projects and the distribution of any financial reward.
Research on localized struggles over the development of wind turbine power stations, for example, repeatedly reveal opponents to be motivated by socially constructed ideas of landscape and nature as expressions of the rural idyll, which are prioritized over economic and global environmental arguments (Moragues-Faus and Ortiz-Miranda, 2010; Woods, 2003; Zografos and Martinez-Alier, 2009). At the same time, Selfa (2010) reports the willingness of economically struggling rural communities in the US Mid West that have traditionally depended on resource extraction industries to develop biofuel production, overlooking potential environmental risks. This contrasting evidence points to the potential emergence of a further spatial divide within the rural, between localities resistant to renewable energy developments and those amenable to them. While this may in theory suggest that greater economic benefits could flow to more deprived communities, research by Munday et al. (2010) has found limited economic development opportunities resulting from windfarm developments in Wales. Moreover, Corbera and Brown (2010) in an analysis of forest-based carbon-offsetting programmes in Latin America show that the distribution of financial payments within communities is contingent on local economic, political and legal structures. As such, the potential for payments for ecosystem services to significantly alleviate rural poverty in either the global north or the global south can be questioned.
IV The future of rural geography
Climate change and food security, along with other growing global concerns including protecting biodiversity, maintaining energy supplies, and managing irregular international migration, will undoubtedly be major influences in shaping the future trajectories of rural spaces and rural societies into the 21st century. As demonstrated by the brief examples discussed in this progress report, rural geography has an important and distinctive contribution to make to knowledge and understanding of these concerns, and it is likely that such issues will increase in prominence as a focus for rural geography research, not least because they are also likely to be targeted with substantial research funding. Yet, to date, the engagement of rural geographers with debates around food security, climate change, energy security and biodiversity has arguably been muted, especially when compared to cognate disciplines such as agricultural and environmental economics, land-use planning and rural sociology.
There a number of reasons for this reticence. As noted earlier, many rural geographers will be uneasy with the positivist or normative nature of much existing research on climate change and food security, with the predominant use of quantitative analysis and modelling, with the emphasis on technocratic solutions, and with the occasional hints of environmental determinism. Moreover, there is wariness among rural geographers at seemingly returning to topics that characterized the early days of the subdiscipline in the 1970s and 1980s: food, farming, land use, conservation, planning, transport, natural resources and environmental adaptation.
However, it is precisely the breadth of perspectives that rural geography has grown to accommodate over the ensuing three decades, and the conceptual and methodological richness that it has evolved, that equip rural geography to contribute strongly to debates on climate change, food security and so on. Indeed, there are at least three ways in which rural geography research can make distinctive interventions, including as correctives to some of the more instrumentalist research emerging from other disciplines. First, rural geography is attuned to spatial differentiation in rural experiences of and responses to challenges such as climate change and food security, and to the diverse factors contributing to these uneven geographies. Second, in understanding the rural as co-constituted by human and non-human elements, contemporary rural geography can draw on conceptual tools from actor-network theory and dwelling theory to understand the interrelationship of human and non-human actors in rural space and the potential effects of changes to non-human actants – for instance from climate change, or from modifications to agricultural practice. Third, in equally recognizing the contested discursive construction of the rural, rural geography can critique the sometimes functional representation of rural space in scientific and technocratic prescriptions on climate change and food security, highlighting the cultural and political resistance that may confront efforts to enroll rural space in responses to climate change or food security – for example, through the construction of renewable energy power stations, the conversion of farmland to biofuel cultivation, the introduction of GM crops, the re-wilding of rural landscapes, or constraints on rural energy use.
Addressing these agendas may lead rural geographers to adopt new methods – from scenario analysis to competency groups – to engage new conceptual insights from fields such as political ecology, and to develop collaborations with natural scientists, as well as with urban geographers and development geographers. However, each of these steps will simply consolidate trends that are already under way, as charted in these last three progress reports for rural geography (see Woods, 2009, 2010). Understanding rural futures must be embedded in our understanding of the rural present and few disciplinary fields are as well placed as rural geography to make this connection.
Notes
1. These projects include BioScene – ‘Scenarios for reconciling the conservation of biodiversity with declining agricultural use in the mountains of Europe’ (EC Framework Programme 6), www.bioscene.co.uk; FARO – ‘Foresight analysis of rural areas of Europe’ (EC Framework Programme 6), www.faro-eu.org; MULTIFOR – ‘Management of multifunctional forests’ (INTERREG), www.forestresearch.gov.uk/fr/ INFD-82SDC4; RUFUS – ‘Rural future networks’ (EC Framework Programme 7), www.rufus-eu.de.
2. ‘Global Food Security’ is an interdisciplinary research programme in the UK led by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) in partnership with other science and social science research councils and government departments and agencies. Its four key themes focus on: economic resilience; resource efficiency; sustainable production; and sustainable, healthy, safe diets. See www.foodsecurity.ac.uk.
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