Category Archives: Regional Development

The diversity of rural areas as background for place-based policy and planning

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Last week June 22 Dr. Sylvia Herrmann gave a presentation titled ‘The diversity of rural areas as background for place-based policy and planning’ (see the Presentation WASS-seminar by Dr Sylvia Herrmann).

Dr Sylvia Hermann is affiliated at the Institute for Environmental Planning, Leibniz Universität Hannover and was coordinator of the EU-funded FP7 research project RUFUS (www.rufus-eu.de). Based on the findings of RUFUS dr Hermann pleads for place-based policy and planning to cope with rural diversity in the EU.

In her lecture she presented findings of the RUFUS project and argued that the specific characteristics of places have to be included in planning and policy to reach a more successful implementation of sustainable and site related policy measures. Ergo: policies and planning need to be more place-based.

In the discussion about future rural development, the diversity of rural areas in Europe increasingly raises the interest of policy makers and stakeholders. The strategic paper Europe2020 states that the common EU targets for future development ‘must be … capable of reflecting the diversity of Member States situations and based on sufficiently reliable data for purposes of comparison’. Rural areas have to be recognised as places with diverse combinations of historical, social, cultural and environmental features and the installation of relations among local actors (Cisilino et al., 2010). This shows that the diversity of rural European areas is more and more recognized as a key potential for intelligent growth. Thus, society seeks for development approaches based on regional diversity to better understand the development opportunities and challenges of diverse types of rural areas in Europe. Consequently, research has to combine quantitative and qualitative approaches to deal with the diversity. It also has to support the improvement of endogenous potential and governance approaches reflecting the diversity of the specific regions.

The EU FP 7 project ‘RUFUS’ (Rural Future Networks) tried to meet these challenges with a research approach supporting politicians with knowledge about the diversity of rural regions. RUFUS combined a set of methods to provide a’ mosaic’ of answers to policy makers and stakeholders. It has created a new classification system to map the diverse combinations of economic, social, and ecological conditions of European rural regions in nine EU countries (the UK, Germany, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Poland, and Hungary). This could help target rural development policy and provide insight into the need for CAP’s interaction with other policy areas. Maps showing the diverse development potentials of rural areas have been created. By the help of case studies the linkage between the top-down approaches of mapping with the reality in the regions has been established. The findings have been translated to policy relevant recommendations.

Gracious Empowerment?

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By Alexandra Rijke

Minor Thesis
Title: Gracious Empowerment? Evaluating the impact the GRACE-network project had on the empowerment of female university students in their stance against Gender-Based Violence.

This minor thesis (click here for the complete thesis) is part of the Research Master International Development Studies at the Wageningen University and Research Centre. The objective of this minor thesis was to evaluate the GRACE-network project. This project was conducted in Irbid, Jordan. The aim of the GRACE-network project was to investigate how ICTs could be used to empower female university students in their stance against Gender-based Violence (GbV). The project was evaluated during four months of field work in Irbid, Jordan. During these four months the women participating in the project were interviewed and a focus group discussion was organized. The women, participating in the project as participants and as researchers, were asked during these interviews what empowerment meant for them, how they had experienced the GRACE-network project, if they felt empowered because of their participation in the GRACE-network project and how their stance against GbV was influenced.

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Guest lectures on ‘A global sense of place’

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In the context of the new Capita Selecta course ‘A global sense of place’ several guest lectures are organized by the Rural Sociology Group. These lectures are open for all students, PhD’s and staff members. Coming up are the following events, please join! More information: lummina.horlings@wur.nl.

Monday May 23th (15.30-17.00, room C63): Will Day.

Will Day is a PhD candidate in Harvard University’s dual PhD program in Middle Eastern Studies and Social Anthropology. His main interests are in economic and political anthropology, Marxist thought and its legacy in anthropology, urbanization and urban political economies defined by displacement and dispossession, and political geography and political ecology. He has carried out two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Diyarbakir, Turkey (June 2007-June 2009). His dissertation is focused on urban livelihoods and cultural politics in Diyarbakir the wake of massive state counterinsurgency campaigns that led to the displacement and dispossession of, very likely, well over 1,000,000 rural Kurds. He is interested in how family histories of rural displacement and dispossession and subsequent urban realities of mass unemployment have resulting in the transformation of not only the practices of work, but also the meaning of productivity, work, and masculinity, wealth, value, masculinity, and, ultimately, political belonging and citizenship and the imagination of political futures in this space of rapid and radical political economic transformations.
Content of the lecture: Will Day will talk about urban development in a place in Turkey. He will focus on ”political economy and urban livelihoods in the city through the lens of Massey’s concepts about thinking spatially which might help to clarify what it means to think of a space (a city, a village, etc) as less a fixed, stable entity and more a temporary, contingent crystallization of dynamic processes that link localities to wider geographies and relations of political community, economic life, and cultural imagination”.

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DERREG Policy Seminar in Brussels

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Last Thursday March 31, a Policy Seminar had place to discuss the relevancy of the results from the EU-funded reserach project DERREG for EU-policies.  Although the project and the work is not yet completed, emerging outcomes and policy recommendations were presented by the project coordinator prof. Michael Woods and the four coordinators of the respective workpackages on Rural business networks, Rural migration patterns, Sustainable development and Rural regional learning. The emerging outcomes and recommendations are also capitalised in the European Policy Brief published at the DERREG website.

WU is coordinator of Workpackage 4. We focussed on how public support and faciliation of joint learning and innovation in grassroots (place-based) development activities can be best arranged. We have explored, mapped and analysed various such arrangements in six case study areas. See the example of the map of the ‘governance of joint learning and innovation’ in the Westerkwartier below.

Map of the governance of joint learning and innovation in the Westerkwartier (NL)

These arrangements and the support or faciliation given was evaluated by the beneficiaries (see earlier posts on case-study area Westerkwartier, Alytus, Dresden and Comarca de Verin).

Although we will extend our analysis and specifically elaborate more on ‘promising or good practices’ revealed, Wiebke Wellbrock and I presented the main findings and policy recommendations (see our presentation).

Key to our findings is that the effectiveness of support policies depends on well working operational interfaces between public policies, grassroots development initiatives and (knowledge) facilities to support joint learning and innovation. These interfaces get shaped in agreements between various public and private partners but it are operational agents or agencies fulfilling various intermediary task and roles connecting different ‘worlds’ that make them work (well).

“Urban Development with Rural Consequences”

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As part of the course Understanding Rural Development, a group of master students from France, Cameroon, Taiwan and the Netherlands plus staff from the Rural Sociology Group went on a study trip to Nijmegen-Lent to learn more on the developments in this area. The group was met by Karolien Andela, from the Municipality of Nijmegen. Gathered around a scale model of the area in the information centre De Waalsprong, she informed us on projects such as: ‘Space for the river Waal’, ‘the Waal Jump’ (new urbanisation in Lent), the ‘Waal front’ (reconstruction of an industrial area) and landscape development.

Her story revolved around the central meaning of the river Waal in the expansion of the city. The carrying capacity of the river is becoming too limited for the amount of water flowing through. In 1995 this already led to flooding in several parts of the city and as the water level tends to rise this is expected to have more negative consequences in the future. This is of course a concern to both local government as well as its citizens. In the past, the response to rising water levels in the Netherlands has been to strengthen dikes and increase its height, but this is not a long term solution. Therefore on a national level, the government decided to change its approach to this threat and introduced the idea to give more space to the river (“Geef de Rivier de Ruimte”) meaning to give the river more capacity. This is done for example by returning flood lands to the river, construct side dams, dig channels along the polder or streamline vegetation. The national government appointed 39 spots where this concept should be applied, concerning the rivers Maas, Waal and Lek. Most of these projects are located in predominantly rural areas but in this case it is right in the middle of a city.

In the case of Nijmegen, the suggested plan by the government entailed to relocate the existing dike more land inwards and in addition dig a channel in front of it to increase the capacity of the river and thus lower the water level. As a result, an island is created which will give opportunities for housing, recreation and cultural activities as well as nature development.

At first this plan was faced with a lot of public opposition as it implied the removal of houses and farming enterprises as well as other negative impacts such as a rise in the ground water level. The group of protesters even came up with an alternative plan which was accepted by the city council but eventually rejected by the national government who favoured the original plan. Initially the city was reluctant with this decision but managed to change it into an opportunity for urban development and even get the necessary public support. One of the factors enabling this public support was the creation of a platform that is involved  in different stages of the plan development and gives voice to various interest groups including a group of affected households.

The group from Wageningen was interested in aspects like: What is the effect of the plans on local farmers? Are the planned green spaces in the new part of the city going to be interconnected or just loose patches of green? How do the citizens of the village of Lent feel about the plans as they suddenly becoming part of a city? How are the urban planners going to create a shared feeling of identity between the inhabitants of the old and the new part of the city? What are the effects of the economic developments on the plan? And are sustainability concepts  taken into account in the design of the area and its houses?

After this informative talk by the Municipal spokesperson, the group took a short stroll over the bicycle bridge that connects the city of Nijmegen with the village of Lent. From here the group could see, with a bit of imagination, what the effects of the planned developments will be. Suddenly it became clear which households were going to be on the  “wrong” side of the new dike and will not be able to escape the new course of the river.

To voice your opinion about the plans you can interact with the project team on twitter (www.twitter.com/waalsprong) or follow the developments on YouTube (www.youtube.com/waalsprongnijmegen). The work is planned to start in 2013.