Rural communities are challenged by different problems, ranging from demographic ageing, infrastructural decline and economic transformation to climate change effects or a social-cultural change of values and identification. These problems are often heterogeneous and manifest locally, preventing all-encompassing social and political solutions.

To cope with those challenges more reliably and sustainably, a tailored social-spatial governance approach appears progressive. From a spatial perspective, an exclusive territorial space paradigm is less suitable because it homogenises facts internally and tries to exclude external interrelations. Territories like municipalities are subject to competitive comparisons for economic and social profit or threatened by urban outsourcing strategies, e.g., food and energy provision. From a social perspective, prevailing market-driven or state-based approaches are less suitable as their problem-solving strategy involves an inherently top-down power relation to the local population. Centralised governance mechanisms are likely to threaten local civic and self-organised engagement.

Promoting local permeability of territorial borders and social permeability of power relations is thus an issue and can be achieved by incorporating models of relational or network space concepts (Latour 2018). They appreciate an extension of actors’ levels of autonomy by decentralising the scope of decision-making. Critical social geography discusses concepts of municipalism and communalism, aiming to establish institutions for the common good and a new relationship between municipal governments and social activist movements (Bookchin 2007). This idea aspires to promote an egalitarian interdependency between places, people, nature, and things. In addition, strategies of municipalism consider poverty prevention and social inequality reduction an explicit mission – not least by incorporating the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

The session aims to explore these complex interrelations to seek the feasibility of a social-ecological transformation of rural populations at the community level. Contributions with an evident dedication to theoretical ideas, such as commons, municipalism, communalism or neo-socialism, are welcome. Papers that deal with empirical explorations into these self-determined governance mechanisms are likewise welcome.

References:

Bookchin M. (2007): Social Ecology and Communalism. AK Press.

Latour B. (2018): Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Wiley & Sons.