3 pages, 11 pages, This paper examines the usefulness of the new social movements (NSMs) paradigm in the changing context of East European post-communist societies and their agricultural systems and rural communities. Starting with statements formulated in Western sociology in the context of Western democratic societies about NSMs as a protest against modernity, the paper analyses the role of such movements in the still modernizing Eastern European reality. The first part of the paper briefly examines some basic elements of the NSMs paradigm in European and American social science. The goal of this section is not only to identify the basic characteristics of NSMs, but also to identify the typical frames used by them. The second part of the paper focuses on the presence of NSMs in the communist era. Drawing on the idea of NSMs as indicators of a "post-materialist shift" as well as of "anti-establishment" and "pro-participatory democracy", the paper examines the frames of democratic opposition in Eastern Europe before 1989. The final part of the paper considers several selected examples from Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to explore the role of NSMs in the process of shaping new ruralities during the post-communist transformation.
14 pages, via online journal, Designing effective policies for economic development often entails categorizing populations by their rural or urban status. Yet there exists no universal definition of what constitutes an “urban” area, and countries alternately apply criteria related to settlement size, population density, or economic advancement. In this study, we explore the implications of applying different urban definitions, focusing on Tanzania for illustrative purposes. Toward this end, we refer to nationally representative household survey data from Tanzania, collected in 2008 and 2014, and categorize households as urban or rural using seven distinct definitions. These are based on official administrative categorizations, population densities, daytime and nighttime satellite imagery, local economic characteristics, and subjective assessments of Google Earth images. These definitions are then applied in some common analyses of demographic and economic change. We find that these urban definitions produce different levels of urbanization. Thus, Tanzania's urban population share based on administrative designations was 28% in 2014, though this varies from 12% to 39% with alternative urban definitions. Some indicators of economic development, such as the level of rural poverty or the rate of rural electrification, also shift markedly when measured with different urban definitions. The periodic (official) recategorization of places as rural or urban, as occurs with the decennial census, results in a slower rate of rural poverty decline than would be measured with time-constant boundaries delimiting rural Tanzania. Because the outcomes of analysis are sensitive to the urban definitions used, policy makers should give attention to the definitions that underpin any statistics used in their decision making.
9 pages, via online journal, This paper examines the role of the “Bluefin Tuna Cultural Festival” in developing and sustaining regional identities within the context of rural regeneration, sustainability, and the creation of closer relationships between production and consumption in the countryside. It focuses on Donggang, Southern Taiwan, an area with rural development issues, increasing tourism impacts, and contested issues of local identity, sustainability, and an aging society. This paper draws on public discourse and in-depth interviews with key stakeholders in Donggang to understand the conditions required for substantiating authenticity of the gastronomic products and experiences and the promotion of an appealing gastronomic image. This study traces the process of embedding bluefin tuna in Donggang through marketing,branding and provides a preliminary conceptualization of interrelations between gastronomic tourism and community development in East Asia.
The paper draws attention to these particular issues issues: the commodification of local heritage and countryside capital, strategies and challenges of hosting culinary festivals and resolving the issue of return migration.
14 pages, via online journal, China's rapid urbanization process has pushed rural villages into an urban-rural integration movement. Several modes and approaches have been applied to remake space in rural China, which differ greatly in restructuring outcomes. In response, this article builds on the insights of regime theory to develop a conceptual framework to reveal the mechanism behind China's rural spatial restructuring and seeks to explore the underlying reasons that affect the outcomes. It is found that resource adequacy, the quality of resource coalition, and the effectiveness of implementation determine the rural regime's capacity to manage spatial restructuring. Case studies from Hua County, Chaohu City, and Shenzhen are used to illustrate the conceptual framework's application and facilitate a comparative analysis from the perspective of rural regime capacity. The findings provide a critical rethinking of the “sustainable remaking of rural space”, which could therefore shed light on the rural governance of countries in the global south generally.
12 pages, via online journal, Rural settlements in China have been experiencing unprecedented transformation since the economic reforms of the late 1970s. This paper examines population movement over the post-reform era and how this affects settlement patterns in an inland nonmetropolitan county-level city region with a well performing economy. It is found that the settlement size distribution in Gongyi is generally transforming from a traditional rural pattern to one that features an urban system, taking place in the form of “in situ urbanisation” and “rural urbanisation”. Without experiencing mass out-migration and in line with the transition of China's political economy, Gongyi has developed its local urban system in parallel with the life and spatial cycles of city-based urbanisation in China. From the perspective of urbanisation cycles, “in situ urbanisation” underpinned by relevant socioeconomic and political conditions is argued to be both theoretically meaningful and practically useful in the context of the evolving settlement systems in China and less urbanised countries.
9 pages, via online journal, The conversion of population and land from rural to urban areas has been widely explored; however, the spatial change in rural settlements and its relations to population changes involved in urbanization have been ignored. This paper aims to reveal the underlying human-land relationship from the perspective of rural settlement urbanization (RSU). Based on identifying the spatiotemporal characteristics of RSU in Wuhan city circle from 2009 to 2016, we analyzed the human-land relations using a combination of a dynamic coupling model and a decoupling model. The results showed that a total area of 27.77 km2 (accounting for 0.81% of the level in 2009) of rural settlements was converted to urban construction land from 2009 to 2016. Although the rural population decreased by 32.21%, the overall size of rural settlements increased by 104.62 km2, and 37 counties had a low-level coordination between population urbanization and RSU. Only 2 counties emerged with high-level coordination in this process. Additionally, the changes in rural settlements and rural population showed a strong negative decoupling; that is, the population decreased while the area of rural settlements increased. Combining the decoupling results with the coupling analysis, eight human-land relationship patterns in rural settlement urbanization were identified, and “strong negative decoupling–low-level coupling” was the main pattern observed in counties, which summarized the human-land relations in most RSU and should be given priorities in improving rural human-land relationships. The question of how to promote harmonious human-land relationships lies at the core of promoting balanced urban-rural development. This research could provide a decision-making basis for formulating a sustainable development strategy for urban-rural integration.
12 pages, via online journal, This paper charts two exploratory practices of rural transformation in the Yangtze River Delta that began around 2008, aimed at revitalising villages and exploring new urban-rural interrelationships while simultaneously expanding the knowledge base on possible development opportunities, risks and existing diversities in rural China. Using a comparative case study, the study shows that both practices promoted a redefinition of urban-rural relationships, a reconnection of rural networks, and the introduction of alternative spatial intervention methods. However, they also led to the intrusion of certain social values which were alien to the local population and resulted in the further exclusion of rural residents. By revealing the substantial changes and analysing the interactions of actors involved in the practices according to actor-network theory, this paper highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the new initiatives and thus allows for a more rigorous understanding of how emerging bottom-up and top-down initiatives affect rural transformation. The paper argues that the inclusion of the locals primarily in the form of land-leasing contracts and a limited number of job opportunities are far from sufficient to stimulate sustainable development processes and to address the major social challenges facing rural areas. It further identifies 23 key factors distilled from the empirical evidence that closely related to rural sustainable development and proposed to constitute a checklist for assessing the sustainability of emerging rural practices. The practical insights from the study thus enrich the theory of sustainability with regard to rural development by expanding the scope and dimension.
9 pages, via online journal, Rural communities are not restricted to bounded territories but increasingly reproduced by intensified rural connections with the outside. Extant research tends to suggest that the production of rural community unbound relies on the movement and activities of mobile groups while ignoring the trans-local practice of community-making by local villagers who stay in the countryside. This paper draws on ethnographic insights on the formation of inter-regional surname associations in contemporary China, a contemporary form of Chinese lineage communities which is relatively unknown both in and outside China. By adopting a trans-local approach, it explores how rural lineage members and groups initiate the alliance with their same surname fellows in different rural localities to forge trans-local communities. Such rural-to-rural alliance is consolidated through various meanings and practices, producing the idea of a big ‘family’. This trans-local community not only enables rural members to enhance their mobilities and cultural and socio-economic capital but is also grounded in lineage groups' assertion of territorial identity, power, and social status. With a nuanced analysis of the trans-local agency of local villagers, this paper contributes to understanding the production of trans-local communities and trans-local rurality based on rural-to-rural connections. It also offers insights into the reconstruction of rural people's identities in contemporary China.
11 pages, via online journal, Land fragmentation is an interesting physical character in some developing countries, especially China. This study aims to discover the direct and mediated effects of land fragmentation on collective action in China based on an empirical test and the social-ecological system framework. We introduce three innovations to the literature on collective action in the commons. First, we focus on the mechanism of land fragmentation on collective action in the commons, which has been largely ignored in the literature. Second, building on the social-ecological system framework, we use structural equation modeling, which is robust to endogeneity and latent variable problems. Third, we use original survey data from 3895 households and 284 villages from 17 provinces/regions in China, a critical case because China has some of the most fragmented farmland use in the world. We find that land fragmentation has a direct negative effect on irrigation collective action. And besides the direct negative effect, there are four indirect factors: dependency on farming, irrigation rule-making, economic pressure and land circulation. Of these, the first three have a negative effect, and the last one, a positive effect. Our findings add to the theoretical literature on collective action in the commons and suggest new policy handles for more efficient land and labor markets in China.
10 pages, via online journal, Under China's “Western Development” plan, inland China has witnessed massive urban expansion and land development, but little is known about the consequent stratification among relocated communities. This study examines the urbanization process on the outskirts of the Municipality of Yinchuan in northwestern China. Previous studies have focused on how urbanization impoverished or enriched rural communities, while this study examines how relocated communities (or teams) were differentiated in their compensation and relocation outcomes, as a combined outcome of policies and resource structures. Quantitative evidence suggests that urbanization has led to both between-team and within-team variations, and qualitative analyses illustrate why even the “lucky” teams always had “unlucky” villagers in compensation outcomes. Between-team variations were often used to mobilize collective resistance to strive for better compensation, but the rise of within-team variations has undermined the grassroots alliance against “unfair” policies. Villagers were more obsessed with individual competition of property investment based on their wealth and self-financing capabilities, but they also complained about “unjust” competition, such as the appropriation of resources based on cadres' privileges and connections. Although individual competition was celebrated under the official neoliberal market-oriented narratives, the decline of collective patronage and the resentment toward cadres' rent-seeking behaviors have added to tensions within relocated communities and contributed to their fragmentation.
