In Chapter 4, the author profiled and illustrated rural regions as a potential peripheral economy. The specific context is looking at the use of this theory in a complex way by upgrading these regions innovatively in order to significantly contribute to economic development through dynamic developmental operations and strategic orientation of their businesses. Analyzed and compared are concepts and regions in terms of mutual cooperation, growth, and leadership role of founders. The chapter is concerned with making the first steps in the process of developing consistent concepts of local rural development for overcoming an alienated and peripheral economy. The developmental approach has, from the beginning, been that the concepts concerning rural development and the great potential of entrepreneurship are in a continuous process of advancement, and that one may have to start with ideas that are merely some sort of improvement over what has thus far been available to go on from there to ideas that are more profound.
TopIntroduction
In this chapter we develop the basic principles of our interpretation of local rural development in the context of rural-urban dichotomy (Schaeffer, Kahsai & Jackson, 2012), while the treatment of role of rural development agencies will follow in the next two chapters. One may indeed compare them with the concept of rural business cooperative service (RBCS, 2019). It is perhaps useful here to begin by classifying in Table 1 some of the key identified rural causes and effects.
Table 1. A classification of critical controversies and root problems in rural development
| RURAL CONTROVERSY | RURAL ROOT PROBLEM |
| Pollution; Habitat Loss | Intensification of Farming |
| Access, Infrastructure, Habitat Loss/Damage | Increasing Visitors / Infrastructure Cost |
| Social-Political Conflicts, House Prices | Urban to Rural Migration / No Inverse Trend |
| Livestock Care, Hunting | Growing Resistance to Cruelty to Animals |
| Unemployment / Underemployment | Job Losses in rural farming and non-farming |
| Falling Incomes | Underestimation of rural entrepreneurship |
| Social Decomposition | Fewer Family Farms |
| Access to Health, Education, Retail, Leisure | Centralization and Growing Cost of Services |
| Dependency, Community, Destabilization | Rural Depopulation and Brain Drain |
| Uncontrolled Urbanization | Rural Destitution |
Source: Compiled by the author
Note: Rural regions can obviously show very different properties depending on their environmental context within which they exist and are subject to observation. Definitions can be based on administrative, land-use, or economic concepts, displaying significant variation in socio-economic features and well-being of the measured population. USDA, OECD, World Bank and FAO, among others, have been heavily involved in defining and monitoring rural regions and indicators. We recognize that the definition we provide in Box 1 merely serves as a basis for discussion of certain important rural-entrepreneurial questions in the context of this book.