Final Report Summary - GLOBAL-RURAL (The Global Countryside: Rural Change and Development in Globalization)
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.