Abstract
A transition to programmes adopting a governance-based approach in encouraging value-added and innovation in rural economies is often described as offering new opportunities for marginalised rural communities that have not benefited from top-down development policies. In practice, however, it is noted in Ireland and elsewhere in the EU that traditional fishers and farmers have been slow to engage in economic activities favoured by contemporary policies. I discuss how traditional small-scale fishing communities can be estranged from contemporary rural development policies that are focused primarily on providing high value-added service-oriented and processed goods. I approach the problem of poor integration of fishing communities by focusing on how contemporary rural development programmes - though shrouded in language of local participation, governance, and indigenisation - can fail to actively engage with indigenous socio-cultural identity and resources. Exploring how intricate human ecological relationships involving custom and local knowledge of physical resources are not readily commoditised, I raise questions in relation to some of the central claims of the governance and rural development model, such as that it has the capacity to empower and generate confidence through locally appropriate economic activity.
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Notes
‘Liaisons Entre Actions de Developpment de l’Economie Rurale’ (linkages between development actions in the rural economy).
“To hell or to Connaught” was an order of English puritan Oliver Cromwell, during the time of Ireland’s ‘Great Rebellion’ (1641), to Irish Catholics instructing them to either move to the barren lands of the West or be killed. Today, the cultural, political and social connotations of the West of Ireland are described as being “endowed with particular qualities ranging from lawlessness, sensuality and physicality in the writings of Synge, to peasant resilience, Puritanism and courage in the vision of nationalists such as Pearse and MacNeill” (Kneafsey 1998:113).
Conventional agriculture and mariculture is development through different axes of the CAP and the CFP. Small-scale/artisan food enterprises associated with farms are currently ineligible for LEADER funding in Ireland.
See www.mfg.ie (date accessed: 16th June, 2008)
Trans-national and Inter-territorial projects involve partnership projects and initiatives between LEADER companies internationally.
Acaill, an island in neighbouring Co. Mayo, was the area that engaged most successfully with the MFG LEADER programme. Applicants based in Acaill submitted 44 applications and 32 of these were funded, amounting to a total of €329,430 or 41 % of the total funding available.
Consequently, the functioning of the participatory aspect of the LEADER programme did not arise in a significant way in the analysis, only to the extent that it was noted that the programme did not engage the participation of inhabitants interviewed for this study.
The role of local development workers to animate and mobilise members of the local community is emphasised in the EC bureaucratic literature relating to the LEADER programme.
It is important to note that Acaill also has a strong small-scale fishing tradition. However, an alternative civil society and rural economy has become established in the area that is arguably unconnected with the traditional fishing culture and more reflective of a more recently established population that is well suited occupationally and culturally to engaging with the LEADER programme (see Kovach and Kucerova (2006) and Macken-Walsh (2009) on the rise of a ‘project class’ in the context of the LEADER programme).
Duggan (2004:11) also notes that this coherent occupational identity is without “objective validity,” as only half of the 400 households at that time in Carna had a full-time or regular fisher.
The fishers’ behaviour echoes interestingly with another Irish case-study presented in Taylor (1990).
The attitudes of interviewees are reminiscent of a quotation in a 1979 report on arts and culture in the North and South of Ireland: “to an Irishman who has a social conscience, the conception of Ireland as a romantic picture, in which the background is formed by the lakes of Killarney by moonlight, and a round tower or so, whilst every male figure is a ‘broth of a bhoy’ and every female one is a colleen in a crimson Connemara cloak, is as exasperating as the conception of Italy as a huge garden and art museum inhabited by picturesque artists’ models is to a sensible Italian” (Shaw (1896) cited in A Sense of Ireland 1979:.39).
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. This work was funded through the Beaufort Marine Research Award, which is carried out under the Sea Change Strategy and the Strategy for Science Technology and Innovation (2006–2013), with the support of the Marine Institute, funded under the Marine Research Sub-Programme of Ireland’s National Development Plan 2007–2013.
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Macken-Walsh, Á. Operationalising Contemporary Rural Development: Socio-Cultural Determinants Arising from a Strong Local Fishing Culture. Hum Ecol 40, 199–211 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-012-9477-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-012-9477-4