Rural Community Development and its Potentials

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Table of Contents

The Essence of a Community
Conclusion
References

When almost the entire world is harking about the advances of technology and globalization, rural development has since been put in the backseat in the efforts to uphold a concept called modernization. However, it is not difficult to realize that without rural development, the sustainability of globalization and modernization will not become what is expected because food security and environmental management is rooted upon rural development. Thus, rural development must go hand in hand with all other types of development for globalization to achieve its full potential. In this case, the article “In Search of the Community in the Changing Countryside” authored by Kenneth Wilkinson (1996) is right in saying that rural community development must be espoused so that rural and urban communities can be integrated to be able suffice the needs of everyone and achieve “ecological stability in the larger society”.

Although Wilkinson’s article is rather old, it has many salient points that expounded the importance of community development in rural America. In fact, it is a speech the author delivered as a presidential address at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Rural Sociological Society in Blacksburg, Virginia. The article discussed how communities in the countryside should face economic hardships and severe alienation by involving themselves into communities that can guide them to enhance development within their midst. Although technological changes have been going on around them, Wilkinson (1986) insisted that there are resilient strategies that countryside communities can take in order to encourage rural community development. In this paper, we will delve into the details of Wilkinson’s article and try to weigh down his perspectives about rural community development. In analysis, it is expected that we can apply the concepts Wilkinson stated in our contemporary times as we will attempt to upgrade the strategies instilled by this landmark paper.

The Essence of a Community

Before Wilkinson (1986) sparked his discussion about rural community development, he first suggested to clear out the concept of a community. Although there are “several hundred definitions of community now in print”, Wilkinson (1986) warned that “a new definition” is his intention to achieve but he wanted to spell out “two approaches to defining this concept”. By “taking one of the approaches”, Wilkinson (1986) will explain “the elements of a measurable form of community in a modern society”.

In the first approach, Wilkinson cited Nisbet (1967) who defined community by equating “it with the integrative element of social interaction, wherever the interaction occurs” Wilkinson (1986) explained that “social bonds might be called community” because it can be “found between nations, between persons who share an interest but are scattered over a nation or city, between residents of a ‘bedroom’ suburb, or between the residents of a more or less complete local society”. In this case, when we mention the word community, it essentially “ignores the original territorial meaning of this term and directs the search for community into a broad area that would be more properly called ‘sociology’ than ‘sociology of community’.” In comparing it to the second approach, Wilkinson (1986) stated that the difference is upheld only by the article “the” when combined with “community”. In this case, he said that the “study of the community entails a search for community in a particular kind of territorial and social environment”. After defining the concept, Wilkinson (1986) proceeded into discussing the three elements of a community, in which these elements are the criteria that can measure the “extent of presence or development of community in a population. These elements are:

Community is a local ecology – Wilkinson (1986) explained that this is the original defining factor in conceptualizing a community. In fact, this topic is “the oldest and best-developed body of theoretical literature on the community”, wherein “a local ecology designates the community as a collective organization through which residents of a small territory meet their daily needs”.
Community has social structures – To become a community, it must contain social structures. As an organization of social life, a community must contain “sufficient structures such as groups, firms, agencies, and facilities to meet all of the daily needs and to express all the major categories of the common interests of people”. In short, “the community is a holistic or global structure, unlike a prison, monastery, or neighborhood where one or more common social institutions would be absent”. Wilkinson (1986) explained that “one could meet all daily needs in a community, although one need not actually do so for this criterion to be met”.
The community consists of a field of community actions – In order for a community to thrive immensely for its people, Wilkinson (1986) reasoned out that “collective efforts” are needed to be undertaken “to solve local problems” and showcase “collective expressions of local identity and solidarity”.

Upon combining the three elements, Wilkinson (1986) expressed that the search for a community can be achieved. As “the phenomenon indicated by convergence of these three elements-a local ecology, a holistic organization, and a field of community actions-is the object of the search for the community” because “the community is the smallest form of society and the most comprehensive social unit one can experience firsthand”. As explained by “Durkheim’s concept of “truly collective activity”, Mead’s concept of the “generalized other” and the broad idea of community as a social bond, Wilkinson (1986) gathered that “the relations between people who actually live together and work together on local problems are of special sociological importance”. In addition to “the qualities of primacy and immediacy”, Wilkinson (1986) suggested that a “community has instrumental and intrinsic values”, where the “extent to which community is present or developed in a local population can influence the level of achievement of common goals by that population, although this instrumental value has been more widely proclaimed in the literature than it has ‘been demonstrated empirically’”.

Wilkinson (1986) lamented that the intrinsic values of most communities are “hidden or suppressed”. For example, “local ecology has little focus or structure”, “major institutions and services are missing” or “public affairs are disrupted by turbulence, conflict, and self-seeking behaviors”. When in this situation, the full potential of the community is stunted down and the needs of the people will not be served out completely. He also mentioned about the critics saying that a community “no longer exists or will no longer exist when the urbanization of the world is complete”. Another response observed is that the “community has been replaced by smaller structures rather than by larger structures”. Lastly, a response Wilkinson faced is the comment that delineated a community “having three essential elements persists despite the importance of larger and smaller structures in social life and this phenomenon continues to influence social well-being” and most communities do not “act”.

While all these comments have valid arguments, Wilkinson (1986) declared that all communities are different and can “act but only under special conditions”. He mentioned particularly that “community action occurs when unusual events threaten local residents” and. “when that occurs, an identity of interest can produce a more or less unified process of collective action among people who seem otherwise to have few if any common interests”. While there is more studies needed to counteract some criticisms about the elements of communities, Wilkinson (1986) deemed that what is important to focus on is the “potential for community to develop and the implications of such a potential become even more apparent when the search for the community takes us into the changing countryside”.

Changes in the Countryside and Rural Development

Wilkinson (1986) shared that the “relative advantage of a rural setting for development of community” is that most of the things are “being equal, are more or less self-evident”. He expounded that “fewer people and fewer groups generally have fewer problems of communication, coordination, and integration”, as the population increases there are more difficulties that needed to be faced but it is not impossible to achieve the emergence of a community in the local society. However, there are serious constraints that may appear during the emergence of a community. Wilkinson (1986) mentioned that “the first requirement for community is that the local ecology be able to serve the daily needs of its residents”, but as studies in human ecology and geography have shown, this ability adaptive capacity, tends to increase with urbanization, at least up to some threshold”. Thus, “rurality limits community development ecologically by restricting the ability of the local population to meet its daily needs within the local territory”. This phenomenon can partially be explained “by the terms ‘dependency’ and ‘distance” because when “a population that is too small to provide essential services itself, for example, must rely on larger centers, and distance from larger centers limits access to the needed resources”. This can be seen in the reality that most rural communities are underdeveloped than their urban counterparts because of their utter dependency and the complacence of not tapping its full potentials for development.

Wilkinson (1986) also explained that blaming the encroachment of urban society into rural society is not viable, when arguing about the immediacy and dependency issue. He explained that “this encroachment argument has two flaws”:

It assumes that rural and urban sectors of society constitute different societies or at least different forms of society. Thus, it ignores the integration of the fate of the rural with that of the urban.
The anomie it predicts during periods of rapid rural growth is poorly documented. For example, crime is found not to increase with boom growth in small towns, although the fear of crime is found to increase, implying perhaps that some residents of boom towns have embraced myths of boomtown disruption promulgated by journalists and other observers.

Although it is convincing that there are big problems that arise during transition when rural communities transform to become urban centers, available studies have not proven that this is mainly the culprit of all serious rural problems. In this case, Wilkinson (1986) suggested that what rural communities need is to be “more urban and less isolated from resources and institutions of our essentially urban society”. In this case, the answer should be rural community development.

Wilkinson (1986) suggested strategies on how communities in the countryside can undertake rural community development:

A strategy of rural community development should have a structural focus to complement the social psychological or individual-level focus of many development programs.
Although community development is a local action process, efforts to encourage that process in rural areas should address issues in a larger context than a strictly local one.
The key objective of rural community development should be to remove the constraints to community associated with rurality while building upon the potential for community development also associated with rurality.

With these strategies, rural communities will be able to “set the stage for delineating challenges to rural sociology associated with promoting rural community development”. Wilkinson (1986) thought that “the effective strategy of rural community development must address structural factors because the problems of dependency and distance are mainly structural”. Communities should also focus on their competitive advantages and their rural community development agenda should not undermine the “growth in jobs, income services, and other resources, and such growth typically means urbanization”. Emery et al. (2004) agreed to the fact that communities should focus in enhancing economic potentials “community economic development programs continually assert attracting industry as the most effective strategy for job creation”. Because when there are no jobs, it “increases community dependency on forces outside the locale”. In the future, rural communities need not to become a “big city”, but it should not also isolate itself within the advantages of modernization. Thus, “combining the advantages of the rural and the urban, one can outline an ideal rural-urban model of local social organization”. Lastly, equality should always be espoused because community development is “an interactional phenomenon” that “obviously requires frequent, open contact among those who share a local society”.

Conclusion

Wilkinson’s article shared a lot of points that needed to be explored on. Especially during this age of globalization, rural communities should not fear to embrace the advantages of these modernization going on within their midst. In fact, they can co-exist with it and instill the values of what rural community development is all about. Rural communities should not remain as backward villages that are seemingly forgotten by society, rather they can be proactive contributors to modern society as they enjoy the benefits of development like their urban counterparts. For example, Brooks (2007) emphasized that rural community development is essential in the modern age because it is essential in enhancing the social capital of any state because “community growth and prosperity requires recognition of the active partnership role that government must adopt in the process”. Also, improvements in education can help in this quest for rural community development and collective actions are needed to combat dependency, distance, and inequality that serve as barriers to achieve the full potentials of community development.

References

Brooks, K. (2007). Social Capital: Analysing the Effect of a Political Perspective on the Perceived Role of Government in Community Prosperity. Rural Society 17(3): 231-248.
Emery, Mary, Wall, M. & Macke, D. (2004). From Theory to Action: Energizing Entrepreneurship (E2), Strategies to Aid Distressed Communities Grow their Own. Journal of the Community Development Society, 35(1): 82.
Wilkinson, K.P. (1986) In Search of the Community in the Changing Countryside. Rural Sociology 51(1): 1-17.

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Rural Community Development and its Potentials

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