Rural Governance

This paper examines regional development initiated by endogenous self-governing associations in depopulated rural areas of Korea.
It focuses on how the associations function and contribute to regional development. The village of Shin Heung 2 Ri was selected as a case study. This village has a self-governing association named Ri-Assembly.
  As well as being the endogenous self-governing association for shin Heung 2Ri, Ri-Assembly is also an adminitrative assistant agency. Even though being part of a lager administrative authority, Ri-Assembly has its own election system for leaders, decision making unit, management method and operational budget. It also has its own decision criteria in adoption
and implementation of regional developments.
Through three major regional development projects, Ri-Assembly has changed its roles and functions. The first was implemented during Sae Maul Movement in the 1970s. Around the same time, the Youth Union
of the village started to fuction as a sub-organization of Ri-Assembly and has become an educational institute for junior memebers of the assembly. The second project was a gol-course construction project in the 1990s; Re-Assembly represented the village community and negotiated with the prospective devoloper. Ri-Assembly successfully incorporated the community's demands into the negotiations. The third project in ongoing; Ri-Assembly is conducting the "Camellia Village Project". A special team was formed to plan various regional development projects. The special team participates in the decision making process of Ri-Assembly as a sub-organization.This sturcture has enable the local community to actively participated in community development projects. As a result, Ri-Assembly has become the main body through which community businesses can initiate various regional development projects to maintain and improve locals' lives.

In 2006, the Chinese central government abolished the agricultural tax. This came after several years of intense focus on the growing rural crisis, sparking a new debate on the shape of rural society. Putting these contemporary debates in the context of 100 years of rural governance reforms, this paper argues that contemporary rural advocates find themselves in a situation similar to that of the first half of the twentieth century, and their reimagination of rural governance draws on the ideas of that time as well. It focuses on the contemporary visions for rural reform of Xu Yong, Dang Guoying, Yu Jianrong, Wu Licai, Li Changping, Cao Jinqing and He Xuefeng.

This dissertation focuses on the Brazilian land issue, especially the state of Piauí. The
INTERPI (Land Institute of Piauí), a state authority responsible for land management, was the object of this research. Historical, social, geographic and economic aspects were scrutinized in order to provide an illuminating analysis of the primordial facts that shaped the current situation. The recovery of historical events, from the arrival of the Portuguese on Brazilian soil in the 16th century, concomitant with the impacts of the territorial occupation process, led to the establishment of the entanglements considered. The southwest of the state, also known as "cerrado", given its agricultural potential (soy) vis-à-vis recent agrarian conflicts, received the most attention. The signing of an agreement of the State Government with the World Bank in April 2016 triggered a series of actions aimed at promoting land regularization in this region.
In this sense, several state and federal agencies are part of this initiative - INCRA, Secretariat of the Environment and Water Resources, General Corregidor of Justice and State Public Ministry - constituting a task force of land regularization. Since the beginning of this project, the Corregedoria Geral da Justiça has assumed the role of protagonist of the actions, in large part due to the urgent need to readjust the regional registries of real estate registration to good notary practices. INTERPI's performance, in light of its legal attributions, in parallel with its interaction with the Corregedoria Geral da Justiça, revealed a potential conflict of governance. Having this scenario as a background, analysis were developed and diagnoses were elaborated, subsidizing recommendations of institutional aspects, human resources practices, technological
trends and political-administrative issues.

In this paper we consider issues surrounding the formation of partnerships for the delivery of rural regeneration. Partnership processes are of vital importance because of the central role they play in the emergent culture of governance which is now receiving a great deal of theoretical attention. We argue that the characteristic forms of governance emerged in the urban sphere and have now spread to rural area, bringing with them the requirement for rural organisations and actors to form partnerships in order to secure funding and to deliver services. We believe that this relatively uncritical transference of partnership requirements into rural areas fails to take account of the very di!ering socio-economic conditions which may exist in such areas. In a consideration of the Rural Development Commission's Rural Challenge scheme we draw attention to the considerable internal tensions hindering the formation of partnerships in rural areas and the con#icting pressures and constraints surrounding their implementation. We question the culture of partnership and its suitability as a means of securing e!ective regeneration, arguing for greater scrutiny to be paid to its increased political currency and practical application.

Coping with Depopulation and Demographic Ageing in Rural Japan: From Government to Local Governance Recently, the Japanese government initiated an administrative process that has resulted in the merging of municipalities across the country. Since then, the quality of services provided to inhabitants by the local government has declined in depopulated areas. As a result, it has been suggested that there may be a role for self-organization in the revival of local governance. Despite having a rapidly ageing population, Kawane village has been particularly successful in revitalizing local governance through reorganization of the local community. This research examines a variety of the community activities involved and the unique management methods behind them in an attempt to ascertain the factors that have resulted in successful self-governance in this village.

Recently, the Japanese governemnt initiated an administrative process which has resulted in the merging
of municipalities across the country. Since then, the quality of services provided to inhabitants by
the local government has declined in depopulated areas. As a result, it has been suggested that there
may be a role for self-organization in the revival of local governance.
In many depopulated areas, the distance between local government and the local community has continued to grow, and this has led to the newly established
local government transferring certain responsibilities to the local community. Consequently, the reorganization of the local community has become indispensable.
  Kawane Village is located in the mountainous area of Akitakata City, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. Despite having a rapidly aging population, this village has been
particularly successful in revitalizing local governance through reorganization of the local community. This research examines a variety of the community activites involved
, and the unique management methods behind them, in an attempt to ascertain the factors which have resulted in successful self-governance in this village.
  Since its establishment in 1972, the Kawane Promotion Association has experienced three crucial turning points.
Initially, the Kawane Promotion Association, which had previously consisted of only a few households, encouraged every household in the village to become involved in the
organization of cultural activities. Since the 1980s, the Kawanae Promotion Association has begun to act as arepresntative for the local community, for example, in dealing with
local problems and in communicating with the local government. Finally, sice the 1990s, the Kawane Promotion Association has begun to manage private land resources and offer welfare
services to individuals. The Kawane Promotion Association has instigated the development of eight related departments that are responsible for specific tasks or activities.
This research shows that the success of the Kawane Promotion Association likes in its unique style of management, whereby there is no central authority; instead, decision-making powers
are transferred among unitis as required, ensuring full participation by local residents.

Is China’s central leadership willing and able to initiate a paradigm shift in rural governance? Or is the leadership simply trying to ‘muddle through’ indefinitely? This paper attempts to answer these questions by studying one crucial subfield of rural  governance: village self-administration. Against the backdrop of decollectivization and a loss of party-state control over the countryside in the 1980s, village self-administration
was introduced as a means to stabilize state–society relations and regain control. As experiments over the following decade matured, a new version of the relevant legislation, the Organic Law on Village Committees, was passed in 1998. Subsequently, a new round of local experiments and regional codification started, leading to another revision of the Organic Law in 2009/2010. In other words, each of the three reform-era decades produced its own version of village self-administration. Taking a longer-term
perspective on this evolution of the norms and institutions of village governance helps us to understand the shifting political agendas of the central leadership.
The paper is organized as follows: First, it provides
a brief overview of village governance reforms leading up to the most recent round of national legislation. Second, the sources of rising discontent and rural unrest are examined. Third, the chapter takes a close look at recent legislation on village self-administration to answer the questions raised above: Is there a paradigm shift in rural governance as epitomized by village self-administration? Or is the central leadership simply attempting to muddle through? Finally, the conclusion sums up and contextualizes the findings.

This article explores the local governance of poverty alleviation in a marginalised Hungarian rural community, with over 50 per cent Roma inhabitants, most of whom were either unemployed or participated in public work projects. Kisbalog is among those marginalised rural communities which are characterised by increasing social polarisation and ethnic cleavages as a result of selective outmigration and a municipal leadership which negotiates access to public work along racialised notions of deservingness. Hungary follows the EU concept of public private partnerships for local governance. This article unravels the room for manoeuvre for NGOs working for poverty alleviation in the context of the racialised narratives of a paternalistic local welfare state. Utilising Young's notions of social justice it explores the complicit nature of recognitional, associative and distributional justice in order to understand the interplay in partnerships between public and private agencies. From among three types of strategies, coercive, isolated and deliberative, the last one has the potential to bring about transformative changes.

The shift form the 'national farm' to the 'differentiated countryside' refers to the decline of agricultural dominance and the economic, societal and political regionalisation of the European countryside. Running in parallel with such countryside changes are broader changes in state structures and process of government. The supposed shift from government to governance refers to a decline in nation-State's ability to steer society: first, the governance literature emphasis the institutional re-structuring towards decentralisation and multi-level government structure such as EU, second scholars stress the failure of hierarchical decision making and top down-planning and the spreading of new forms of policy making that work through networks embracing the States, private and voluntary sector. Finally, governance has to do with the 'democratic renewal' which is about enhancing opportunities for political participation. If 'rural government' concerns the institutional ad administrative apparatus of the State underpinning the 'national farm' through top-down planning aligned with agricultural concerns and interests, 'rural governance' can be seen as multidimensional: a system of regulation that encompasses networks distributed across various spatial scales and sectors reflecting the economic and social complexity of the differentiated countryside. Multi-stakeholders partnerships appear as the most dominant for of the new rural governance.

Studying the failed Rural Tax and Fee Reform (RTFR) that began in the late 1990s, Christian Göbel shows that the new policy failed not so much because of the content of the reform but because of the process of its formulation and implementation. Its failure led the state to reverse course and announce the abolition of the agricultural tax in 2004. Based on extensive analysis of official documents, extensive interviews, and a wide range of secondary sources, Göbel’s study transcends specific policy questions about rural finance and peasant burden reduction to show that the structure of interaction of political actors from the local to the central level shaped the outcome of the reforms. As such, it will primarily be of interest to political scientists and those interested in rural governance.

In this paper we propose a comparative perspective on Europeanization of rural policies in the post-socialist realm. We focus here specifically on two countries – Hungary and Poland, as well as situate them in a wider relational framework – alongside the ‘old’ EU Member States. This exercise, a research in progress, revealed that Europeanization has been a one-way process, oriented mainly on copying and pasting ‘Western’ policy models into newly accepted EU countries. We argue that effectiveness of this effort has been hindered by the lack of detailed survey and recognition of dissimilarities between various EU countries.