“Can civil society contribute to mitigate wicked problems in rural areas?”

• In Event: Rural civil society response to challenge and crises

Abstract

Rural areas in several national contexts share challenges of ageing and decreasing depopulation, the shutdown of decentralized welfare institutions and closure of shops and industry (Wallace et al., 2017; Wuthnow, 2013; Gieling, Haartsen & Vermeij, 2019; Spaijj, 2009).

We argue that such challenges of rural areas can be understood as a wicked problem (Grant & Langer, 2021) as these challenges have an intractable nature and lack of definitive scope (Rittel and Weber, 1973).

Network steering has been suggested a possible way forward for municipalities when aiming to handle wicked problems (Klijn and Koppenjan, 2015). We aimed to assess whether network steering applied by municipalities in rural areas via civil society partnerships could mitigate at least some of the wicked challenges. We follow the understanding of network steering set forth by Rhodes (2017:75) who defines a network as the: ‘…sets of formal institutional and informal linkages between governmental and other societal actors structured around shared, if endlessly negotiated, beliefs and interests…’.

To answer our research question, we investigate how network steering has played out in eight rural areas located in four Danish municipalities. We argue that all eight rural areas are critical cases (Flyvbjerg, 2006) because the municipalities in these areas have experienced that civil society has the resources to contribute to the local development. If network steering in these eight rural areas (with strong preconditions for civil society getting involved in network steering) fails to succeed, it is less likely that other rural areas will succeed in such endeavours. Almost equally distributed across the eight rural areas, we conducted 40 semi-structured interviews with local stakeholders particularly from civil society but also with representatives from municipalities, local industries and welfare institutions.

Our preliminary conclusions suggest that the attempts of network steering by the municipalities partially had traits of successful network steering (following Rhodes, 2017) because the networks under scrutiny 1) involved at least some different local stakeholders, 2) invited the local stakeholders to be represented from early on in the process and 3) were based on strategic signposting form the municipalities allowing the local stakeholders to have a say in the process and 4) the local stakeholders experienced a mutual resource dependency. However, the local stakeholders were not able to mitigate some of the more intractable wicked problems in rural areas, as all the rural areas under scrutiny continued to suffer from ageing and decreasing populations.

Therefore, our findings suggest, that it is necessary to be realistic about the extent to which network steering involving civil society might contribute to solving wicked challenges. Particularly, when the wicked challenge is attributed to overall demographic and structural changes in society, it is not likely that network steering involving civil society in itself will be a viable solution. However, it might be possible to integrate civil society in incremental responses, which might in the longer run will also reduce wicked problems of rural areas.

References

Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). Five misunderstandings about case-study research. Qualitative inquiry, 12(2), 219-245.

Grant, A., & E. R. (L.) Langer. 2021. Wildfire volunteering and community disaster resilience in New Zealand: institutional change in a dynamic rural social-ecological setting. Ecology and Society, 26(3), 18. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-12474-260318

Gieling, J., Haartsen, T., Vermeij, L., and Strijker, D. (2019). Out of love for the village? How general and selective forms of attachment to the village explain volunteering in Dutch community life. Journal of Rural Studies, 71, 181-188.

Klijn, E. H., & Koppenjan, J. (2015). Governance networks in the public sector. Routledge.

Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. W. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4, 155-169.

Rhodes, R. A. (2017). Network governance and the differentiated polity: Selected essays (Vol. 1). Oxford University Press.

Spaaij, R. (2009 ) ‘The Glue that Holds the Community Together? Sport and Sustainability in Rural Australia’, Sport in Society, 12(9): 1124-1138.

Wallace, C., Vincent, K., Luguzan, C., Townsend, L., and Beel, D. (2017). Information technology and social cohesion: A tale of two villages. Journal of Rural Studies, 54, 426-434. 

Wuthnow, R. (2013). Small-Town America. Princeton University Press. 

Authors

• Evald Bundgård Iversen, University of Southern Denmark, Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics

• Leonie Lockstone-Binney, Griffith University

• Bjarne Ibsen, University of Southern Denmark