The Disempowerment of Empowerment: How Stakeholding Clogs Up Rural Decision-making

Abstract

In the context of a growth in both participatory democracy and responsible participation, rural decision-making in England has become increasingly complex over the past 30 years, fuelled by national polices relating to regionalism, citizenship and relocalisation. A survey of ‘agents of rural governance’ (ARGs) in the county of Gloucestershire, England, charts their recent growth, reasons for formation and perceived jurisdiction as well as examining complexities of decision-making relating to partnerships, networks and finance. The survey suggests that policies designed to ‘empower’ rural people can be seen to have clogged up rural decision-making processes sufficiently to have, effectively, disempowered many of them. The paper identifies and exemplifies six different types of ‘clogging up’ that impact upon rural decision-making: crowding, knotting, clouding, meandering, subverting and impoverishing. Whilst governmental proposals have been introduced in an attempt to rationalise this decision-making complexity, particularly through the Haskins Review and the English National Rural Strategy, other policy strands have conspired to make such decision-making essentially laissez faire.

Notes

Studies of urban governance are more common than those that are set in a rural context, which was one of the motivations for this research. Whilst urban–rural comparisons of decision-making complexity are beyond the scope of this paper, much of the urban literature focuses on shifts in governing responsibilities (for example, from state housing to third-sector housing provision) whilst interest in rural governance has a definable element that is interest in new forms of governance (parish planning, transition towns, local asset development and so on) not least because of the new opportunities afforded by the English Rural White Papers of 1995 and 2000.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nigel Curry

Part of this work was funded with a grant from the Government Office for the South West, awarded in 2006. The views reported in this paper do not necessarily represent the views of the GOSW.