An Institutional Analysis of Rural Policy in the United States

Abstract

A managerial approach to community development is becoming quite common in contemporary rural policy in the United States. Central government is finding new ways for guiding decision making through the use of managerial techniques, including performance systems and evaluation tools. Concomitantly, managerial values—like local empowerment and entrepreneurship—are promoted at lower governance levels. This article assesses whether a managerial approach in rural policy institutionally supports rural development in practice. Findings indicate the federal government poses difficult institutional barriers to rural development and leaves little room for local initiatives as a result of managerial control. Community leadership is identified as a key factor in addressing and avoiding this risk.

Keywords:

• leadership
• public management
• rural policy

In the 1980s and 1990s, major public sector reforms took place in the United States and many other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. These reforms reflected attempts to cope with the financial crises in these countries (Bovaird & Löffler, 2003) and were a response to the replacement of Keynesian economic politics by monetarism (Saint-Martin, 2000). The reforms initially accentuated the need for cost reduction in public policy, but gradually led to a more ambitious effort of making the public sector less bureaucratic and more market-oriented (OECD, 1995; Padt, 2007; Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2004). These reforms also affected U.S. rural policy. In the 1990s, the federal government reduced its role in rural policy and sent a message to rural communities to empower themselves and to become more entrepreneurial (Midgley & Livermore, 2005). The 2002 and 2007 Farm Bills clearly echoed this message (United States Department of Agriculture [USDA], 2006a, 2006b).

As a result of these shifts, we expect communities would benefit from less federal interference precisely because many rural problems require a comprehensive and participative approach at a decentralized level. On the other hand, community empowerment and/or entrepreneurship could easily lead to cuts in federal budgets for rural policy, making it more difficult for such communities to reach their goals and solve the complex problems confronting them. In this article we discuss the opportunities and pitfalls of this new federal policy in more detail and evaluate how it supports rural development in practice.

The Policy Arrangements Approach (PAA; Arts & Leroy, 2006) is used to accomplish these tasks. PAA is a theoretically informed approach for analyzing policy developments within a broader political and societal context. Earlier, PAA was successfully applied to analyze rural policy in the Netherlands (Padt, 2007). This article continues that research and helps frame a more extended and comparative approach. Here, analysis takes place at two distinct levels. The first refers to “political modernization” and deals with long-term political and societal changes which guide and shape actual policies. We analyze rural policy reforms at this level. The second level of analysis is the policy level. Using PAA, we discern a discursive and an organizational dimension of policy. The discursive dimension refers to a shared, structured way of speaking, thinking, interpreting, and representing things in the world. Discourses are not just words but make a real impact:

How actors behave—the strategies they consider in the first place, the strategies they deploy in the final instance and the policies they formulate—reflects their understanding of the context in which they find themselves. Moreover, that understanding may eliminate a whole range of realistic alternatives and may, in fact, prove over time to be a systematic misrepresentation of the context in question. (Hay, 2001, p. 11)

The organizational dimension of policy includes actors' access to the decision-making process and their formal and informal coalitions; the division of resources, power and influence among these actors; and the formal and informal rules for interaction. Policy discourse and organization are interrelated. Changes in policy discourse will lead to changes in actor coalitions, power relationships, and rules. Vice versa, changes in policy organization will lead to new policy discourses.

Discourse and policy organization result from the interplay of institutional structures and people's agency (see Figure 1). However, rather than suggesting a dualism between the two, PAA follows Giddens' duality of structure (Giddens, 1976, 1984). Giddens defined this duality: “By the duality of structure I mean that social structure is both constituted by human agency and yet is at the same time the very medium of this constitution” (Giddens 1976, p. 128).

FIGURE 1 The analytical frame of the Policy Arrangements Approach.

From this it follows that discourses, on the one hand, are “inscribed” in institutional structures. They represent an institutional way of thinking and are taken for granted by many. The long-established bureaucratic approach to rural policy is an example of an “inscribed” discourse. On the other hand, people also give new interpretations to these discourses in their day-to-day communications and actions and, as a result, gradually transform them. High-level conferences to discuss bureaucratic approaches and to articulate and communicate “new” rural policies illustrate this capacity. Discursive change can also begin at lower levels when communities and rural entrepreneurs challenge bureaucratic approaches and agree on actions to bring about policy reforms. Similarly, the organizational aspects of a given policy are manifestations of institutional structures. The series of Farm Bills, for example, reflect the political-institutional organization of the state and structures policies to a large extent. On the other hand, actors can influence the policy-making process by their structurally oriented actions (see also Jessop, 2007). All kinds of actions to influence the Farm Bills (e.g., regional meetings, lobbying, the political process) illustrate this point. As will be demonstrated in this article, local leadership is crucial to gradually transform institutional structures and prevailing discourses.

We use PAA to analyze rural policy within the broader context of public sector reforms. These reforms are addressed first. Next, we describe U.S. rural policies from the 1970s until the current time in general terms and the USDA Resource Conservation & Development (RC&D) Program in more detail. This program was selected for detailed analysis because it nicely illustrates rural policy reforms. The next section defines barriers to rural development. Information is drawn from interviews with experts associated with the Penn State Cooperative Extension Service. After that we present the results of a case study on how the RC&D program addresses the barriers in practice. The Southern Alleghenies in South-Central Pennsylvania was selected as the study area. Remaining challenges for government and rural communities are discussed in the final section.

THE MANAGERIAL TURN IN FEDERAL RURAL POLICY

Recent federal concerns about rural and small communities date to the Rural Development Act of 1972. This act, reaffirmed in 1980, was the first modern concrete legislative commitment to solving rural development problems. It aimed to bring rural America into mainstream U.S. society. To this end, it launched new programs for rural education, research, financial assistance, and planning. The Act was filled with promise. However, substantive funding for many of its programs did not emerge (Barkley, 1988). This prevented rural development from institutionalizing as a distinct policy domain in the years that followed.

In 1990, a new impetus was given to U.S. rural policy. In that year, the federal government launched the President's Initiative on Rural America which soon led to the establishment of the President's Council on Rural America. This council was formed to advise the federal government on improving federal rural policy. Its members were drawn from farmers, state and local governments, rural businesses, and high-technology industries. In 1992, the President's Council advised a bottom-up approach to rural development:

Rural development is and must be, fundamentally, development of the whole community, and not merely on its business sector. Community development is not an act but a process, by which the community's level of well being is increased. That process must be a bottom up process. It begins with expansion of the community's ability to act effectively on its own behalf and to develop creative and effective partnerships with the public sector. It depends heavily on the ability of local leadership to guide the community to a clearly understood vision and a plan for achieving it. It depends equally on the capacity of local citizens and local institutions to carry the load of creating their own futures, which is why we use the words “rural community development.” (President's Council on Rural America, 1992, pp. 12–13)

The President's initiative is now called the National Rural Development Partnership (NRDP) and gained Congressional authorization in the 2002 Farm Bill. The 2002 Farm Bill charged the NRDP to:

[…] empower and build the capacity of States and rural communities to design flexible and innovative responses to their own special rural development needs, with local determinations of progress and selection of projects and activities. (U.S. Code, title 7, section 2008 m)

Since 2000, the NRDP has worked with State Rural Development Councils to respond to community concerns. The NRDP was authorized for a budget of $10 million per year for the period 2003–2007. However, actual funding was much lower on the assumption states and communities would mobilize additional resources (NRDP, 2006). This lack of funding reflected the federal government's scaling back of commitment to rural development, both in discourse and practice, and was consistent with the agenda of the political right since the mid-1980s to reduce the role of the federal government in rural policy by promoting community empowerment and rural entrepreneurship (Midgley & Livermore, 2005; Radin et al., 1996; Murray & Dunn, 1996).

The 2007 Farm Bill again expressed high ambitions for rural development:

[…] the improvement in overall rural community conditions, including economic and other quality of life considerations such as the environment, health, infrastructure, and housing. For most small communities, this improvement involves population and employment growth, however, such growth is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for rural development. (USDA, 2006a, p. 1)

We can expect limited funding in future years. The 2008 Farm Bill is very clear in this respect. In background documents for this bill (USDA 2006a, 2006b), USDA stated market-based development (incentives) would be increasingly encouraged relative to socially based development (grants). This emerging market-based discourse for rural development was based on rural entrepreneurship and regional development (USDA, 2006a). Rural entrepreneurship is a strategy to create new business, private rural investment, and private-public partnerships. Regional development is a strategy for empowering communities to help provide for themselves. According to this strategy, assistance is given to projects included in the strategic plans of regional development organizations. Further, extant conservation and environmental programs would be made more cost-effective by using: (a) green payments as a way to provide income support; (b) environmental rights that provide environmental goods and services to private sector markets; and (c) cross compliance as a means of strengthening the link between price and income support and conservation (USDA, 2006b).

The combination of devolution of responsibilities, the use of market-like incentives, rural entrepreneurship, community empowerment, and the emphasis on cost-effectiveness indicate a reform from the bureaucratic toward a “managerial” government. Rural development is not unique in this. As indicated in the Introduction, such reform reflects general public sector changes since the mid-1980s in many OECD countries. Osborne and Gaebler famously summarized these reforms in their best-selling book Reinventing Government. There, they indicated through the application of 10 principles that managerial governments had many advantages over conventional ones.

They promote competition between service providers. They empower citizens by pushing control out of the bureaucracy, into the community. They measure the performance of their agencies, focusing not on inputs but on outcomes. They are driven by their goals—their missions—not by their rules and regulations. They redefine their clients as customers and offer them choices—between schools, between training programs, between housing options. They prevent problems before they emerge, rather than simply offering services afterward. They put on their energies in earning money, not simply spending it. They decentralize authority, embracing participatory management. They prefer market mechanisms to bureaucratic mechanisms. And they focus not simply on providing public services, but on catalyzing all sectors—public, private, and voluntary—into action to solve their community's problems. (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992, pp. 19–20; original italics)

In the United States, the Clinton administration (1994–2001) embraced the managerial approach with vigor. Former vice-president Al Gore famously referred to the managerial government as a “government which works better, costs less, and gets results Americans care about” (Gore, 1993). In the next section we illustrate the “managerial” turn in rural policy by the specific USDA Resource Conservation & Development (RC&D) Program.

USDA RESOURCE CONSERVATION & DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM

The purpose of the RC&D program is to accelerate conservation, development, and utilization of natural resources; improve the general level of economic activity; and enhance the environment and standard of living in designated RC&D areas. The program works to improve the capability of local citizens to plan and implement programs and projects which address natural resource and community development issues within and across communities of a geographic region. Program objectives address (a) improvements to the quality of life, including social, economic, and environmental concerns; (b) continuing prudent use of natural resources; and (c) strengthening local citizens' ability to utilize available sources of assistance through USDA and other federal agency partnerships (USDA, 2006b, p. 23). The RC&D Program follows a regional approach and on average covers seven counties. The program was launched in 1962 and received permanent authorization as part of the 2002 Farm Bill. In 2008, there were 375 RC&D areas. USDA's National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS, originally known as the Soil Conservation Service) administers the program.

In January 2006, the NRCS prepared a report for Congress on its RC&D Program (NRCS, 2006) containing an evaluation of the program for the years 2002–2004. This evaluation was used as our primary information source. According to the evaluation, the program was likely to support communities in several ways. First, each RC&D area had a council comprised of local government officials, farmers, ranchers, civic leaders, and/or business leaders. These councils provided leadership and decision making for local activities. By law the council was required to prepare and implement an area plan. These were strategic plans addressing RC&D needs and opportunities over a 5-year planning horizon. They also served as an agreement between the RC&D council and NRCS for program assistance during that period. The Secretary of Agriculture provided technical and financial assistance to councils to aid the development and implementation of an approved area plan, conduct surveys and inventories, and disseminate information. NRCS managed the program and employed coordinators to help develop and implement area plans and provide day-to-day coordination of resources sought by RC&D councils.

At the same time, there was substantive and organizational control by the federal government. There was substantive control because the councils had to address at least the four legislated RC&D Program elements: (a) land conservation (erosion and sedimentation); (b) water management (quality and quantity); (c) community development (including a wide range of topics); and (d) land management (including energy conservation and the protection of farm land, fish and wildlife habitat; see Table 1). Another control instrument was the NRCS State Conservationists' responsibility to monitor and evaluate RC&D program activities and to supervise the coordinator. State Conservationists were assigned federal responsibility to follow national program guidelines for the RC&D program in each state.

TABLE 1 Required Elements of a RC&D Area Plan

RC&D program elements	Purpose
Land conservation	Erosion and sedimentation control
Water management	Conservation, use, and quality of water, including irrigation and rural water supplies
	Mitigation of floods and high water tables
	Repair and improvement of reservoirs
	Improvement of agricultural water management
	Improvement of water quality
Community development	Development of resources-based industries
	Protection of rural industries from natural resource hazards
	Development of adequate rural water and waste disposal systems
	Improvement of recreation facilities
	Improvement in the quality of rural housing
	Provision of adequate health and education facilities
	Satisfaction of essential transportation and communication needs
	Promotion of food security, economic development, and education
Land management	Energy conservation, including the production of energy crops
	Protection of agricultural land, as appropriate, from conversion to other uses
	Farmland protection
	Protection of fish and wildlife habitats

The evaluation indicates participants in the program appreciated the flexibility it offered to address local issues. The plan and planning process were seen as effective ways to focus and prioritize efforts and to establish projects meeting local community needs. Program participants also believed the RC&D program successfully linked conservation and economic development through an effective public-private partnership delivery system.

It is also the case federal agencies were dissatisfied with their ability to control RC&D program results. For example, only 23% of the councils identified clear area plan goals or time frames for achieving them. Moreover, two thirds of total funds (federal and non-federal) appeared to go toward community development activity with the remaining spent on the other three legislated program elements. Finally, the evaluation was not clear as to the necessity of permanent federal support for local councils through the RC&D program. As a result, questions about why local councils should be held accountable for performance and cost efficiency could be raised. An earlier evaluation of the RC&D program by the White House Office of Management and Budget was more specific on this point (NRCS, 2006). That evaluation found the program suffered shortfalls in strategic planning, proper measurement of program results, and accountability. Moreover, it stated that the RC&D program had not demonstrated how it was distinct and unique from other programs offered.

The Administration recommended continuing federal support for the RC&D Program, but at a reduced level. Moreover, it recommended a review of the performance of each RC&D area to determine the appropriate level of support. To accomplish the latter, long-term performance goals and measures were needed, as well as a new performance reporting system supporting the White House management system. These two sets of recommendations can be viewed as a compromise between the positive findings related to community support and the negative findings about accountability. This compromise clearly reflects—and inspired—the managerial turn in rural development described above.

We now arrive at the core question of article: does the managerial turn actually support rural development in practice? To answer this question we first critically analyze extant rural policy and barriers to rural development. After that we assess how actors deal with these barriers in practice. As will be shown, many barriers are manifestations of the managerial turn in rural policy, whereas others represent the political organization of the state.

BARRIERS TO RURAL DEVELOPMENT

What are the barriers to rural development? Following PAA, we define both “discursive” and “organizational” barriers to answer this question. The latter dimension is further subdivided into coalition building, resource distribution, and the rules of the game.

Policy Discourse

We defined discourse as a shared, structured way of speaking, thinking, interpreting, and representing things in the world. Discourse expresses both institutional structures and communication between actors. Shared policy discourses are powerful because they bring people together in their views about physical and social realities (Bridger, 1994; Hajer, 1995). The current institutional structure associated with American rural development, however, poses many barriers for building a shared discourse for rural development. First, multiple levels of government exist, each impacting local life in different ways. For example, agricultural policies are often determined at the state level (i.e., State Farm Bureaus) while environmental policies are determined primarily at the federal level (i.e., the Environmental Protection Agency). Second, government at the local level is highly fragmented. Pennsylvania, for example, has about 2,600 units of government: townships, cities, boroughs, and counties. Land issues decided at the local level could have as many as 2,600 variations. Third, rural development policy is weakly integrated with other sector policies, including environmental protection, and agricultural policy typically take precedence. Fourth, federal agencies work independently. There tends to be little cross-agency coordination or cooperation.

Beyond these structural barriers to discourse building, another barrier related to the value a community and place has for people exists. A community is not simply something out there, but has a given symbolic meaning for its residents. It provides anchors to make sense of the world they live in as well as their social relationships (Konig, 1968; Procter, 2005; Wilkinson, 1991). Community is produced by the activities of individuals and groups (Luloff, 1998). Procter considers the physical environment an important factor for creating community place:

Physical environment exists initially as a vast repository of undifferentiated space. It is through the selection of certain elements of the physical landscape and symbolic process of naming and symbolizing physical environment that individuals and groups attach meaning and value to space, thereby creating place. (Procter, 2005, p. 77)

A major barrier to rural development is the underestimation of the value of place in federal and state policies. Instead, economic factors and the ethos of individualism and competition prevail in which one place is easily exchanged for another.

All of these factors, alone or in combination, contribute to the reality that there is neither shared discourse, nor a comprehensive policy, on rural development in the United States. This creates a barrier for rural development because federal, state, and local governments have different views and policies on rural development. This barrier is most manifest at local level, as it keeps people in a state of suspense about the future direction of their community.

Policy Organization

This dimension includes the actor's access to the decision-making process and its formal and informal coalitions. On the one hand, coalitions are related to the institutional organization of rural policy in the United States, with different departments, agencies, NGOs, and research institutes. On the other hand, people can build new coalitions through social interaction. This social interaction has long been recognized as an important factor in community development (Wilkinson, 1991), but it also applies to coalition building between local communities, the federal government, state departments, agencies, and local authorities.

Several factors hinder coalition building in rural policy. First, commodity groups play a disproportionately large role in creating rural policy, often making community development a secondary issue. Second, the operational relationship between the federal government and local communities is via representatives of the executive branch of the federal government. As a result of reductions in personnel, there are simply fewer of these people, thereby loosening the bond between the federal government and local communities. Third, at the community level, there is a lack of collaboration around community issues. Most leaders see the community through particular sets of lenses reflecting specific interests. As a consequence, initiatives are often narrow and lack coordination with other initiatives. This, in part, reflects the fact there are many municipal authorities, each with its own plans, each wanting to do something unique. Also, taxes and tax revenues associated with land-use planning are not shared regionally. In the current system of land-use planning, there are winners and losers. As a result, people tend to think about what is good for them, individually, rather than what is good for the larger community or regional area. Often lacking in such places are community-wide coordinating associations which can bring various local groups, such as churches, schools, and local clubs, together.

The distribution of resources between and among actors reflects both structures of domination and power exercised by actors and is another descriptor of policy organization. Barriers to rural development often relate to the uneven distribution of resources and the inability for actors to mobilize them. Wilkinson (1991) critically stated:

Programs to implement these developments too often express the interests of actors outside rural areas who benefit indirectly and implicitly, if not directly and explicitly, from the patterns of spatial inequality that sustain rural disadvantages. […] It is necessary, therefore, that rural growth be promoted at state, regional and national levels to help build an environment in which local efforts can have some hope of success. (pp. 101, 103)

Crucial to rural development is how well the community can play the power game with other institutions when access to resources is the issue (Luloff & Bridger, 2003). For two reasons this is not an easy task. First, in American politics, authorizing legislation is separated from appropriating legislation and funding. Legislation is broad-brush, whereas implementation is largely dependent on political will, the availability of money, and implementing regulations and procedures. This means communities should actively negotiate federal resources on a yearly basis. Often this is unrealistic given the existing capacity of rural communities and the way resource decisions are made at federal level. Further, this problem is exacerbated by the increased emphasis on cost-effectiveness, which translates into greater federal government constraints on resource spending. As a result, local communities often find funding their projects with federal money less attractive. This creates a formidable barrier to rural development.

As well, the difficulty of obtaining federal resources creates increased challenges for local communities who, as result, need to mobilize money from local taxes and state government. Local people and small and rural communities often do not have the operational capacity (resources, skills, techniques, or infrastructure) to effectively accomplish such a task. This lack of operational capacity poses an additional barrier to rural development beyond the governmental constraints raised earlier.

Finally, the rules of the game in rural policy, which also describe policy organization, are simultaneously the result of political-institutional order and the meaning given to them by people. They express the room to maneuver in policy making for local communities. In rural policy, the room to maneuver is limited because federal and state governments put local communities in a “double-bind.” On the one hand, they create unfunded mandates (e.g., education, health care, and criminal justice). Thus, the federal and state governments establish constraints and parameters local communities are unable to change. On the other, for many environmental issues, the federal government attempts to transfer responsibility for addressing such problems to lower levels of government. Local communities are not able to take up this responsibility for either political reasons or because of scale (Mondros, 2005). After all, “local” problems may often be local manifestations of problems whose sources lay farther upstream (Bhattacharyya, 2004). In such cases, community actions must go beyond the grassroots level (Brown & Nylander, 1998; Peterman, 2000; Wilkinson, 1991) and this is very difficult to organize. This type of problem and unfunded mandates are two additional serious barriers to rural development.

Our description of rural development basically follows a sociological viewpoint. Discourse, coalitions, power and resources, and the rules of the game are each useful dimensions. We highlighted the many barriers associated with rural development. The next section assesses how actors deal with these barriers in practice.

RURAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE SOUTHERN ALLEGHENIES

The Southern Alleghenies was selected to illustrate how people work on rural development in practice. The Southern Alleghenies RC&D area is situated in South-Central Pennsylvania and includes six counties. Its size is 4,653 square miles. Approximately 66% of the RC&D area is forested, 17% is cultivated, and about 2% is in pasture. Examples of identified problems include abandoned mine drainage, illegal dumps, sediment and nutrient runoff, sewage disposal problems, loss of forested and wetland areas, destruction of historic locations, storm-water runoff, and public water supply.

The Southern Alleghenies RC&D Council was established in 1988 and formally authorized by the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture in 1990. The Council consists of representatives of the six County Boards of Commissioners and the six Conservation Districts. ¹ The Southern Alleghenies Conservancy was established as the financial arm of the Council and was recognized by the federal government as a 501 C (3) non-profit organization exempt from certain federal taxes. The Conservancy provides administrative staff to support the RC&D Council, provides fiscal management services, and serves as a regional land trust organization to hold property for resource conservation and development purposes. The USDA provides one coordinator for the Southern Alleghenies. The RC&D Council has two standing committees: Land Use/Resource Conservation and Water Resources and one ad hoc committee to promote sustainable agriculture in the region. Committee members include County Commissioners, Conservation District Directors, planners, business people, educators, conservationists, foresters, and farmers.

The first strategic area plan for the Southern Alleghenies was adopted in 1992. The plan was revised in 2003. The plan is required by USDA to maintain federal support for the Council. The Southern Alleghenies Area Plan defines two objectives: “Manage and promote the renewable resources while conserving the non-renewable resources […]” and “Maintain and improve ground and surface water quality […]”. These objectives are elaborated through 43 qualitative goals.

A series of interviews was used to assess how RC&D representatives perceived barriers to rural development as described above and how they deal with them. Interviews were held with a USDA RC&D representative, the Coordinator for Southern Alleghenies RC&D, two managers of County Conservation Districts within the Southern Alleghenies, and the regional director of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. This was a purposeful sample of people closely involved in the RC&D process for a long time at middle- and high-level managerial positions. The interviews were held in November and December 2006 and took about 1 hour each. A semi-structured interview guide was produced in accordance with the barriers described above. All the interviews were recorded on a minirecorder and transcribed manually. From the transcripts a synthesis report was made. The interview results are presented below and described using the two dimensions of rural policy.

Policy Discourse

Earlier, the multiple levels of government and local governmental fragmentation were identified as barriers to rural development as they worked to keep people in a state of suspense about the future direction of their community. This is especially the case in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The Southern Alleghenies consists of six counties and 58 municipalities. Despite these specific jurisdictions, the Southern Alleghenies RC&D Council provides an arena for people to discuss the future of the Southern Alleghenies as a specific area of interest. In doing so, the program acknowledges the importance of place and helps remove an important barrier to rural development. However, a barrier to discourse building across policies and agencies remains since USDA and NRCS control the RC&D program. Direct control is exercised by defining the elements needing to be included in the area plan and by approving RC&D area plans. Indirect control is exercised by defining USDA and NRCS priorities. In the NRCS Strategic Plan 2005–2010 the priorities were: air quality, energy conservation, renewable energy and biofuels, and “connected landscapes”, meaning the prevention of urban and rural sprawl and fragmentation of the landscape. The RC&D coordinator, who is an NRCS official, wrote the area plan as well as the annual Plan of Work and reports and is, therefore, able to write NRCS priorities into these documents.

Traditionally, many projects in the area relate to sustainable agriculture. There is, however, a new emerging discourse suggesting rural policy must go beyond farm-related issues because only a small minority of the people there actually work on a farm. Moreover, most farmers cannot support themselves by farming alone and need additional off-farm income. The Southern Alleghenies RC&D Council attempts to address this issue by adopting a more comprehensive approach including a focus on community facilities and small business development. It also tried to establish new comprehensive efforts, including its bio-energy project, which attempted to educate landowners about growing crops that can be used to make energy. This required new forms of leadership, which went beyond addressing single policies and agency interests.

Policy Organization

The influence of commodity groups was considered a general barrier to coalition building, the first descriptor of policy organization. Following the law, farmers are formally represented in Conservation Districts by a majority of four which might create a barrier. However, in the Southern Alleghenies RC&D, the interviewees said these farmers were known as being forward thinking and community oriented. As such, their representation might help resolve this barrier. Moreover, WTO negotiations on cross-compliance helped get people thinking about taking better care of the environment. The loose bond with the federal government was also considered a barrier and this was especially the case in the Southern Alleghenies. Four people used to be funded by the federal government to work on projects. Now they provide funds for only one coordinator. The third barrier, a lack of local collaboration on community issues, could not be confirmed for the Southern Alleghenies. Prior to the emergence of the RC&D, strong informal coalitions among county representatives existed. The presence of the RC&D strengthened these coalitions. Moreover, the Conservation Districts have worked together with township officials, boroughs, and school districts since the early 1950s. In addition, the Southern Alleghenies Conservancy works with community groups, individuals, local governments, businesses, and industry; it has more than 50 partners and sponsors for projects throughout the Southern Alleghenies. It actively brings its partners and project initiators together which indicates strong coalitions and leadership in the Southern Alleghenies RC&D.

The federal government increasingly controls resources and, therefore, the more general policy organization in the Southern Alleghenies (and other RC&D areas). The program used to have its own resources, but these were removed and now people have to apply for grants. This was considered one barrier to rural development. The other barrier was the lack of capacity of local RC&D offices to apply for such grants. It takes a great deal of expertise to identify grants, read and comply with the supporting documentation to attain the highest rank possible, write them in the appropriate way, and to locate the required matches for funding. Yet, the Southern Alleghenies has addressed these barriers quite effectively. Currently, they have more than 2 million dollars in place. The Conservancy played a crucial role by providing the necessary leadership. However, there was another problem. Because there were fewer federal resources, employees could not be paid a high salary. The effect of this problem was a continued high turnover of employees in the RC&D Office. To overcome this problem, the Conservancy now trains local people in the necessary skills for project grant writing and facilitation. It also encourages local Conservation Districts to write grants themselves.

Today, roughly half of the resources generated by the Southern Alleghenies RC&D is federal money, directly or indirectly. The federal government increasingly controls the spending of such resources. To this end, it is establishing a nationwide information and management system (POINT) containing specific project information. POINT will make it possible to allocate budgets to RC&D areas on the basis of performance and competition. This approach obviously reflects the managerial turn in rural policy. It is difficult to foresee the effects of this approach in the future. On the one hand, accountability on spending public resources is a good thing. On the other, doing this will mandate additional paperwork, which may be a disincentive for counties wanting to undertake smaller projects. Moreover, an approach based on performance can easily lead to further cuts in federal funding for RC&D areas. The fact RC&D Councils have an effective lobbying presence in Washington, DC might prevent this from happening. Thus, leadership at national level remains a crucial factor for rural development.

Finally, in the Southern Alleghenies there is much room to maneuver, which is associated with taking local initiative, establishing projects, and changing the rules of the game. Formally, only initiatives fitting into an existing area plan can be realized, but in practice this does not pose a constraint because the area plan is very broad. Moreover, the plan can be changed if everyone agrees. The Southern Alleghenies Conservancy usually helps people with project funding, partnerships, and environmental legislation. Most projects realize things not anticipated in the plan and which face little federal interference. Examples include abandoned mine reclamation, agricultural land preservation, erosion and sedimentation pollution control, nutrient management, storm-water management, and watershed protection projects. Each of these projects goes beyond the grassroots level, suggesting the Southern Alleghenies resolved this barrier quite effectively.

The Conservancy is, however, very aware of its vulnerable position. On the one hand, the Southern Alleghenies Conservancy is widely recognized as an expert in rural development. On the other, precisely because of its expertise and decentralized organizational structure, the federal government increasingly considers the Southern Alleghenies Conservancy an implementation agency, especially for environmental policy. The federal government continues to transfer federal responsibilities to lower levels creating unfunded mandates. The Conservancy is reluctant to act as an implementation agency because people are often hesitant to contact regulatory agencies and are more likely to contact a neutral organization. For this reason, the Conservancy wants to maintain its image as an independent community agency in order to be successful. This creates a challenge for community leaders to support genuine local action while meeting federal requirements at the same time. This is a key factor for rural development.

Conclusions

The question asked in the Introduction was how the new form of “managerial” rural policy helps resolve barriers to rural development in practice. There are three answers to this question. First, the RC&D program helps remove barriers to rural development by addressing, in various ways, issues related to multiple levels of government, local governmental fragmentation, the underestimation of the value of place, the influence of commodity groups, the lack of cooperation at local level, and the difficulties involved with community action beyond the grassroots level. The Southern Alleghenies case study indicated the RC&D program brings community groups, individuals, governments, businesses, and industry together to make plans and realize projects. This is an obvious strength of the RC&D program and a pleasant confirmation of current managerial federal rural policy in which devolution, community empowerment, rural entrepreneurship, and public-private artnerships are core values.

The managerial approach has also made other barriers more manifest: the loose bonds between communities and the federal government; governmental constraints on resource spending by using performance systems; lack of operational capacity; and unfunded mandates. Such barriers indicate a managerial approach which aims at cost-effectiveness but in practice leads to a scaling back of the federal government's commitment to rural development.

Third, the managerial approach leaves some major barriers to rural development relatively unaffected. These barriers include the weak integration of rural policy with other policies and a lack of cross-agency cooperation. There are no signs these barriers are being removed by, for example, the creation of a comprehensive U.S. rural policy. Rather, the federal government continues to support the twofold approach of community empowerment and entrepreneurship on the one hand, and the quest for cost-effectiveness on the other.

DISCUSSION

In this article we examined the impact of a new managerial approach on rural development. We demonstrated how this approach provides local communities opportunities to develop themselves. At the same time, they receive little institutional support. The federal government increasingly poses managerial control on rural development, but omits the development of a comprehensive rural policy. This leaves rural communities in a vulnerable position. There is a risk that managerial control will monopolize rural development, leaving little room for local initiatives.

What can communities do themselves to prevent this from happening? The Southern Alleghenies case demonstrates local leadership is a crucial factor (see also Crosby & Bryson, 2005; Pigg, 1999, 2002). As demonstrated here, leadership was provided in different ways. First, in order to cope with a lack of a comprehensive rural policy in the United States, in the Southern Alleghenies comprehensive efforts were taken to go beyond single policies and agency interests. Second, cooperation within the community was fostered by building strong coalitions among community groups, individuals, local governments, business, and industry. Third, leadership was provided at local and national levels to locate funding and to establish projects despite continuing cuts in federal funding. Fourth, creating room to maneuver within established policies so that local action could be taken required a great deal of leadership. In PAA terms, a community leader needs to be a communicator, networker, power-player, and activist at the same time. Such leadership at the community level may effectively countervail the trend toward increasing managerial control of rural policy by nonlocals.

Notes

Note. From NRCS, 2006, p. 15.

Conservation Districts are legal subdivisions of state government, authorized by the Legislature under Act 217 “Conservation District Law.” They coordinate assistance from all available sources—public and private, local, state, and federal—in an effort to develop locally driven solutions to natural resource concerns. In Pennsylvania there is a Conservation District for every county. They were formed in 1950.