Final Report Summary - GLOBAL-RURAL (The Global Countryside: Rural Change and Development in Globalization)
Globalization is a pervasive and transformative influence on rural economies and societies around the world at the start of the 21st century, yet research on the ‘global countryside’ has been far less extensive than research on its urban counterpart, the ‘global city’. GLOBAL-RURAL aimed to address this shortcoming and develop our understanding of precisely how globalization processes impact on rural localities, why they have different outcomes in different rural places, and how rural communities can effectively respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by globalization. The project has involved a five-year mixed-methods research programme, investigating 31 case studies in 13 countries. These case studies illustrated different aspects of globalization, from ‘land-grabbing’ and the expansion of commodity crops such as soy, to foreign direct investment by manufacturing firms, migration by refugees and migrant workers, international festivals, and the global spread of plant diseases, among others. They explored contexts from Brazil to China, Ireland to Malawi, and Nigeria to New Zealand. To help us analyse the evidence collected, we developed a new analytical framework derived from a body of social theory known as ‘assemblage thinking’. This suggests that places, corporations, industries, migration flows, transport networks and so on are all ‘assemblages’ of diverse human and non-human components that are held together in contingent configurations and are constantly changing as they interact with each other. This framework gave us a way to think about how globalization works and directed our research and questions.
Several key findings have emerged from the research. First, globalization is not a coherent force, but is the aggregated effect of innumerable interactions between places and ‘assemblages’ such as commodity chains or migration flows. Some interactions are dramatic – e.g. a factory closure – but most are mundane and everyday, such as buying a globally branded soft drink. As such, people have an uncertain understanding of globalization, which limits the capacity of communities to plan and respond effectively. Second, global economic networks connect rural localities in reflexive relations, such that the aggressive expansion of sugarcane in Brazil has reverberations in the closure of a sugar mill in Australia and the conversion of caneland in Mauritius. However, these effects are mediated through factors including the physical properties of components, national and local regulations, corporate accounting and decision-making, competition for land and the social and economic relations of an industry within a localities, which help to determine which places are ‘winners’ and which are ‘losers’. Similarly, opportunities for growth for rural economies through trade with new markets – as observed in New Zealand dairy exports to China – require the assembling of various components including products, technologies, transport, capital, labour, marketing etc., which may have knock-on effects in the rural localities concerned, for instance irrigation for dairying changing the colour of the landscape in parts of New Zealand. Third, communities are linked by international migration from, to and through rural areas, changing each place that is touched. Notable destination communities, such as Ballyhaunis and Gort in Ireland, exhibit an emerging but precarious ‘rural cosmopolitanism’, with signs of openness to diversity that is reinforced by the small town setting, but which is vulnerable to shifting wider political, economic and cultural trends. Remittances and return migration meanwhile stimulate development and poverty alleviation in source communities, connecting these to transnational economic and social networks. Fourth, the outcomes of globalization are not predetermined. With each change there are multiple possible futures that could result, depending on the actions of local and non-local agents and the constraining influence of geography, history and culture. Accordingly, effective rural community responses to globalization require an awareness of a place’s translocal connections, identification of vulnerabilities and opportunities, assessment of possible futures and the mobilisation of the right components and connections to achieve a desired outcome. More detailed findings and stories from the research can be found at www.global-rural.org.
Several key findings have emerged from the research. First, globalization is not a coherent force, but is the aggregated effect of innumerable interactions between places and ‘assemblages’ such as commodity chains or migration flows. Some interactions are dramatic – e.g. a factory closure – but most are mundane and everyday, such as buying a globally branded soft drink. As such, people have an uncertain understanding of globalization, which limits the capacity of communities to plan and respond effectively. Second, global economic networks connect rural localities in reflexive relations, such that the aggressive expansion of sugarcane in Brazil has reverberations in the closure of a sugar mill in Australia and the conversion of caneland in Mauritius. However, these effects are mediated through factors including the physical properties of components, national and local regulations, corporate accounting and decision-making, competition for land and the social and economic relations of an industry within a localities, which help to determine which places are ‘winners’ and which are ‘losers’. Similarly, opportunities for growth for rural economies through trade with new markets – as observed in New Zealand dairy exports to China – require the assembling of various components including products, technologies, transport, capital, labour, marketing etc., which may have knock-on effects in the rural localities concerned, for instance irrigation for dairying changing the colour of the landscape in parts of New Zealand. Third, communities are linked by international migration from, to and through rural areas, changing each place that is touched. Notable destination communities, such as Ballyhaunis and Gort in Ireland, exhibit an emerging but precarious ‘rural cosmopolitanism’, with signs of openness to diversity that is reinforced by the small town setting, but which is vulnerable to shifting wider political, economic and cultural trends. Remittances and return migration meanwhile stimulate development and poverty alleviation in source communities, connecting these to transnational economic and social networks. Fourth, the outcomes of globalization are not predetermined. With each change there are multiple possible futures that could result, depending on the actions of local and non-local agents and the constraining influence of geography, history and culture. Accordingly, effective rural community responses to globalization require an awareness of a place’s translocal connections, identification of vulnerabilities and opportunities, assessment of possible futures and the mobilisation of the right components and connections to achieve a desired outcome. More detailed findings and stories from the research can be found at www.global-rural.org.