If Your Rural Community Is Failing,Just Leave? The Revival of Place Prosperity in Rural Development Planning

Abstract

Spanish

Chinese

Rural-urban disparities exposed by the Great Recession have rekindled interest in place prosperity approaches to rural development. The conventional wisdom has been skeptical about the efficacy of locality development, preferring to assist rural people to relocate. As a practical matter, however, people are not leaving. The secular trend toward metropolitanization may be ending, reviving interest in place prosperity. One strategy, sometimes termed the new natural resource economy, aims at place prosperity through innovative approaches to resource management and agriculture. We report some of the results of an empirical study of NNRE in Oregon and their implications practice and scholarship.

Keywords

community development economic development multifunctionality place prosperity rural planning

Introduction

The rural areas of the United States are struggling with a complex set of challenges in the early years of the twenty-first century. The slow and uneven recovery from the Great Recession of 2008 has led to a recent wave of attention to the issue of rural decline and how to address it (see, e.g., Austin, Glaeser, and Summers 2018; Hendrickson, Muro, and Galston 2018¹). Much of it raises the evergreen planning question of whether to focus on people or place prosperity. People prosperity aims to improve the welfare of people wherever they are, directing supports to them that enable them to relocate. Place prosperity, sometimes called locality development,² targets support to specific spatial locations, aiming to improve conditions in particular places (Bolton 1992).

The conventional wisdom in economic development planning was long skeptical about place prosperity strategies, holding that policies and programs should support people not places, because incomes in poor areas were converging toward incomes in rich areas anyway and because of fears that favoring one location would impoverish another (Austin, Glaeser, and Summers 2018). Underlying this view is the argument that rural people should just leave, move to cities, based on the theory of agglomeration, that urban areas are more innovative, productive, and efficient (Moretti 2018).

As a practical matter, however, people are not leaving rural areas. The long secular trend toward metropolitanization seems to be ending. Rural to urban migration has slowed significantly (Austin, Glaeser, and Summers 2018) and although it is a declining share of a growing total population, the rural population has held steady at around sixty million since 1980 (U.S. Census Bureau 1995, 2010) And those sixty million people occupy 97 percent of the U.S. landmass as measured by census blocks (Cox 2013). How should development planning respond to rural people and communities?

An effective locality development strategy needs to attend to social and environmental factors as well as the local economy. As Friedmann (1988) documented thirty years ago, and Rajan (2019) has lately affirmed, the places where people grow up, live, and work are not only sites of economic activity, they shape people’s identities and anchor them to human networks.

A robust locality development strategy needs to start by recognizing the web of economic and social ties in which rural people are entangled, based largely on the landscape they occupy and the ways they make use of it (Halseth, Markey, and Bruce 2010; Hibbard, Senkyr, and Webb 2015). People want to participate in a community in which they can interact and develop (Phelps 2003). An effective place prosperity strategy builds on that web of connections to enable such participation. It looks for opportunities to open up socioeconomic space to address emerging problems and opportunities by using the landscape in new ways.

In that vein, a number of activities have emerged over the last twenty years—values-based agriculture, community forestry, watershed restoration, community forestry, value-chain differentiated products, watershed restoration, and ecosystem services, to mention several examples—that suggest new ways of thinking about natural resources, including soil, water, and other inputs to agriculture. Instead of their exclusive use for primary production, these kinds of activities enable rural communities and their people to engage with natural resources in new ways, through a mix of approaches: production; nonconsumptive uses, using resources without using them up, as, for example, in agri- and eco-tourism; and conservation and restoration. In addition to helping to diversify the local economy, these activities also enhance the community environmentally, socially, and culturally through resource management and agriculture that simultaneously advance local environmental and community socioeconomic health, that “meld ecology with economics and the needs of community” (Weber 2000, 238). They exemplify one form of rural place prosperity or locality development, variously termed conservation-based development, community-based natural resource management, or the new natural resource economy (NNRE) (Hibbard and Lurie 2012; von Hagen and Fight 1999). We use the term NNRE here.

This paper investigates issues around NNRE as a rural place prosperity strategy. It has four sections following this Introduction. The next section provides background. We describe the emergence, decline, and revival of place prosperity/locality development approaches in U.S. rural development planning. We then draw on the literature to examine current thinking about new approaches to agriculture and natural resource management and their implications for locality development. Following that, for a more operational look we report some of the results of an empirical study of the views of NNRE entrepreneurs in eastern Oregon and discuss the implications for place prosperity. Finally, we offer recommendations for policy, for planning practice, and for scholarship.

Development Planning and the Rural United States

Planning in its modern form emerged in the United States in the early twentieth century, as a part of the broader Progressive movement. The Progressives believed in problem-solving through applied science, organization, and technical expertise—rational planning (Lippman 1914). The first National Conference on City Planning, in 1909, is often billed as the birthplace of professional city planning in the United States (Peterson 2009). In that same year, the Presidential Commission on Country Life, appointed by Theodore Roosevelt, issued its report, calling for what today we would term rural development planning, the application of a synthesis of modern technology, community and regional economic development, and ecological thinking in rural areas (Country Life Commission 1911). To understand the evolution of rural development planning, it is helpful to position the Commission’s report in the context of the early twentieth century Country Life movement.

Compared with the rapid economic, social, and political changes in cities, driven by technological developments and industrialization, rural areas were relatively static at the turn of the twentieth century (Butterfield 1908). Industry and commerce were replacing agriculture as the foundation of the national economy while, in broad outline, rural life remained as it had always been. Rural people lived in a pre-industrial age and embraced the values of that age (Douglass 1927). Innovations in business practices, social institutions, and political forms had little impact in rural areas and rural people were dubious about their merits (Dunn 1914). Concern arose that traditional methods of commodity production were backward, inefficient, and wasteful and needed to be brought up to date and similarly that rural social life was backward and disorganized and in need of reform (Danbom 1979).

The Country Life movement emerged in response, promoting an economically efficient, socially progressive, and politically stable countryside. The Country Lifers held that rural lifestyles embodied certain moral values that were a positive influence on society as a whole. However, they believed that earlier unplanned community and economic change was inapplicable in the twentieth century, and that bringing technological and social advances to the rural economy and society would create a rural world compatible with modern America (Roth 2002).

The locality development or place prosperity strategies that emerged from the Country Life movement aimed to improve rural places through “scientific management” of critical resources such as soils, forests, minerals, and water and to reform local community institutions to promote “sound community life” in rural regions. Theodore Roosevelt was one of the most powerful voices for this approach. For example, he stated that the primary objective of his forest policy was to ensure “a steady and continuous supply of timber, grass, and above all, water” to foster the growth of prosperous communities; and he promoted federal funding for irrigation projects that enabled “small irrigated farms (for) actual settlers, (for) actual home-makers” (quoted in Goodwin 2013, 352).

The writing of two leading regional planning figures demonstrates the early thinking about locality development/place prosperity strategies. Elwood Mead, longtime chairman of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, advocated for the development of irrigation-based agricultural communities, accompanied by socioeconomic measures such as credit cooperatives, training in “scientific” farming and stock breeding, and school reform (Mead 1920). In a 1919 report for the U.S. Department of Labor, Benton Mackaye, a founding member of the influential Regional Planning Association of America, called for all primary production to be organized so that “employment would be continuous (and workers) could at all times live in their homes with their families” in stable rural communities (MacKaye 1919, 18, 23).

Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission gave form and legitimacy to the intentions of the Country Life movement. It called for place prosperity strategies, strategies that advance “the kind of life that should ultimately be established in rural communities.” “Country life must be made thoroughly attractive and satisfying as well as remunerative, and able to hold the center of interest throughout one’s lifetime” (Country Life Commission 1911, 109, 108). Furthermore, in keeping with the Progressives’ confidence in rational planning, the Commission promoted the view that sound public decisions had to be grounded in data.

We cannot make the best and most permanent progress in the developing of a good country life until we have completed a very careful inventory . . . on which we could proceed to build a scientifically and economically sound country life. (Country Life Commission 1911, 118–19)

In sum, the Commission affirmed the use of applied social science—rational planning—in support of place prosperity concepts such as those of Mead and Mackaye, to modernize rural communities economically and socially while maintaining their attractiveness and viability.

The Country Life movement faded in the 1920s, but the applied social science approach continued to define rural development planning efforts in the United States, from the river basin development of the 1930s and 1940s (Barbour 1937; Selznick 1949) to the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) and eight other regional development commissions of the 1960s and 1970s (Widner 1990). However, the experience of the regional development commissions led to the discrediting of locality development. Outcome evaluations of their effort, especially in creating jobs, concluded that it is difficult to bring aid to people if the aid is conditional on the people continuing to live in a declining area. Such aid has little effect and/or it introduces inefficiencies that impose a high net cost on the larger society (Bolton 1992). Those findings provoked a shift in emphasis to people prosperity, programs directed at health, education, and training of individuals, to enable them to compete for jobs “wherever they might choose to live” (Watkins, n.d.).

Associated with this view of encouraging the unrestricted mobility of labor, the ARC and the other regional commissions began to prioritize economic efficiency and least-cost production, commodity production, over the social aspects of rural development. There was a single-minded focus on the high-intensity production by a rural region of one or a few primary commodities to provide raw material for industry and affordable goods for consumers in both domestic and export markets (Friedmann and Alonso 1964; Perloff et al. 1960). To mention several examples of these “Fordist” pressures, cattle and sheep grazing were no longer sources of raw commodities for local stockyards, meatpackers, tanneries, or woolen mills; mechanized logging and enormous, highly automated lumber, plywood, and paper mills replaced labor-intensive timber operations; and small-scale family farms gave way to “factories in the field.” These centralizing tendencies intensified the exodus of people from areas of commodity production (i.e., rural areas) (Friedmann 2001).

Since the 1990s, however, there has been a revival of interest in locality development, in place prosperity. John Friedmann (1988) anticipated this with his exposition of economic space and life space. The principle actors in economic space are firms and their goal is “efficiency in the accumulation of a surplus” (Friedmann 1988, 97). Life space is the culturally produced territory “on which the history of a people is enacted” (Friedmann 1988, 96). He argued that both are necessary for locality development but that economic space has been “subverting, invading and fragmenting” life space (Friedmann 1988, 96). Further developing that theme, Bolton (1992) made the case that sense of place, sense of community, plays a central role in such economic development factors as entrepreneurship, the labor supply, and the supply of public goods. Localities are not simply economic agglomerations; they shape people’s identities and anchor them in real human networks (Rajan 2019). Effective locality development responds to a particular geographic setting, including the natural and built environment, culture, and history.

The role of life space and sense of place are manifest in two principal ways in rural development. Specific to the local economy, a rural community’s social structure and culture reflect the local business climate, the institutional capacity and attitudes toward change, experimentation, and entrepreneurship (see, e.g., Shaffer, Deller, and Marcouiller 2006). With respect to the community as a whole, rural people are entangled in a web of economic and social ties based largely on the landscape they occupy and the ways they make use of it; they value low population density and the closeness to nature associated with agriculture and natural resource production (Halseth, Markey, and Bruce 2010; Hibbard, Senkyr, and Webb 2015). Even though incomes have consistently been lower in rural than in urban areas since the rise of commodity production, rural people accept the reduced standard of living in exchange for the rural influences on their lives (Partridge and Rickman 2006). Thus, rural communities engage locality development in search of strategies that involve new ways of thinking about and using resources (Irwin et al. 2010).

Locality Development and NNRE

Until quite recently, a healthy natural-resource-based community was thought to be a stable community, and community stability was the goal of locality development. This is exemplified by the case of the forest community in which the local mill is supplied with timber managed for even-flow sustained yield (Kelly and Bliss 2009). But the experience of the last quarter-century shows commodity production to be unstable, along with the life spaces of communities tied to commodity production. Scholars and practitioners have recognized that change is ever-present and long-term stability is unattainable—for communities as well as industries and firms. The concept of resilience is replacing stability as the basis for locality development (Davoudi 2012; Maclean et al. 2017). Resilience is the adaptive and learning capacity of individuals, groups, and institutions to self-organize in a way that maintains system function in the face of change or in response to a disturbance, to absorb change in ways that preserve or enhance essential functions, structure, and identity (Magis 2010). A resilient community is an active agent on its own behalf in developing and utilizing the necessary resources to advance community well-being.

Wilson (2013) describes a resilient community as exhibiting a well-developed and well-balanced mix of economic, social, and environmental capital, associated with a diverse local economy that continuously generates new sources of incomes and jobs to replace those being lost, strengthening community self-sufficiency. Wilson’s mix of capitals reflects an important recent convergence between scholars, policymakers, and practitioners working in community development on one hand, and those involved with environmental planning and natural resource management on the other. It begins with the observation that there has been a shift in the use of rural landscapes. Nature is the key asset of most rural communities—timber, water, soil, and minerals, but also wildlife habitat, recreational opportunities, and the like. Under commodity production, nature is managed with a primary—some would say exclusive—emphasis on the production of food, fiber, lumber, and other commodities. The decline of commodity production as the economic base for rural communities is leading to a rethinking about the human uses of rural space. There has been a shift from the dominant use of rural landscapes for production toward a more complex and often overlapping combination of uses—production, consumption, and protection—that has been termed multifunctionality:

An economic activity may have multiple outputs and, by virtue of this, may contribute to several societal objectives at once. . . . (It is) an activity-oriented concept that refers to specific properties of the production process and its multiple outputs. (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2001, 11)

In the World Trade Organization (WTO) definition of multifunctionality, those outputs include, in addition to commodity production, such things as environmental protection, landscape preservation, rural employment, and food security (WTO, n.d.).

Multifunctionality has important implications for locality development in rural communities. Drawing on the resource base for uses other than commodity production enables a more diverse rural economy. It also enables uses that support the environmental as well as the economic health of the local community.³ Three types of activities can be easily identified. Most obviously, the consolidation and vertical integration that characterize commodity production in agriculture have stimulated new ways of utilizing resources. In the well-known case of beef production referenced above (Leonard and Russell 2019), four packers (Tyson, ConAgra, Cargill, and Farmland) control over 80 percent of the North American beef commodity production market. Many producers of grass-fed beef have emerged in response, from the family-owned but gigantic (150,000 acres) Hearst Ranch on the central California coast, to marketing coops such as Country Natural Beef and Tallgrass Beef Company, to individual ranches around the country. In managing their “working landscapes” to meet the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) requirement that “grass-fed” cattle be fed only grass and forage, these operators must also address such issues as soil and water conservation, and protection of wildlife habitat (USDA, n.d.).

This is an example of the agriculture of the middle (Stevenson and Pirog 2008). These operators, along with very-small-scale “farm gate” producers such as community-supported agriculture units (CSAs) and farm stands, generally target local or regional markets and do business with local and regional suppliers, distributers, and wholesalers. In contrast with commodity production, which operates at too large a scale to benefit the local economy, smaller producers contribute to a community’s economic and social health and build local culture and institutions (see, e.g., Barnes and Hayter 2005; Besser 2009).

In addition, the concept of payment for ecosystem services (PES) is growing in importance. PES is a market-based strategy including voluntary and regulatory incentives for protecting and restoring ecosystems by linking transactions between landowner-providers and beneficiaries. Providers obtain revenues for providing various ecosystem services such as water and air filtration, water supply, pollination, biodiversity and carbon sequestration, while beneficiaries acquire cost savings and reduced risks from protection and restoration activities in addition to the broad intrinsic benefits from healthy ecosystems (Hibbard and Lurie 2012). For instance, utilization of “natural” hydrological services such as water filtration and purification, flow regulation, erosion and sediment control, water temperature control and habitat provision have been shown to reduce capital, operation, maintenance, and regulatory costs for water utilities and their ratepayers (Cochran and Logue 2011; Postel and Thompson 2005). Rangeland and forest restoration projects to improve soil composition and land cover as well as improving watercourse and wetland ecological conditions have been utilized for both voluntary and compliance carbon sequestration markets (e.g., Diaz, Charnley, and Gosnell 2009; White 2011). A 2018 study revealed that PES schemes have grown in volume and value over the past several decades to a current annual value of $36 billion (Thiel 2018).

The most fully developed body of knowledge is the accumulating evidence of the local socioeconomic benefits of ecosystem restoration. Hibbard and Lurie (2006) found that every dollar in administrative support received by local watershed councils from the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board brought an additional $5.09 to the local economy. Hjerpe and Kim (2008) found that fuels reduction programs on five southwestern national forests generated 500 jobs in 2005. And Nielsen-Pincus and Moseley (2013) found that each $1 million invested in forest or watershed restoration generates between 15.7 and 23.8 jobs, and between $2.1 and $2.4 million dollars for the local economy. All sectors of the local economy benefit as the investment dollars circulate through it. Hibbard and Lurie (2006) estimated a multiplier of 1.7 from restoration activity. Nielsen-Pincus and Moseley (2013) calculated multipliers in the range of 1.4 to 2.4, depending on the nature of the project.

Ecosystem restoration, PES, small-scale agriculture, and other multifunctional activities are all efforts to build on an expanded conception of the potential of the rural landscape and its resources to support communities, opening the field for conservation-based development or NNRE. NNRE views rural regions and their resources as assets rather than as inputs to production. It draws on them for production, consumption, and protection activities that use natural resources in ways that sustain rural communities economically and socially while restoring and safeguarding the ecosystems that are the foundations of the goods and services on which the local economy is based.

NNRE in Oregon

To bring these ideas into focus it is helpful to look at them on the ground in a specific place. Thus, we have been studying NNRE in Oregon. We began with a statewide exploratory study (Hibbard and Lurie 2012). We invited rural community leaders across Oregon to respond electronically to a set of open-ended questions about several aspects of their local economy. Relevant to this article, we asked them about new ways people in their community have found to generate income from local natural resources. Our purposive sample consisted of 340 community leaders participating in an ongoing statewide rural leadership development program organized by an Oregon nonprofit organization. We posted the questionnaire on Google Survey and then contacted all participants by e-mail and invited each to go to the site to complete the questionnaire. After one week we sent a reminder. We received 59 responses, including at least one from every Oregon county.

The survey provided a sense of the NNRE activities in rural Oregon communities. Forty-seven of the 59 respondents (80%) said they know of NNRE businesses in their community. They reported an extensive range of activities. We have organized the types of currently operating enterprises into the three multifunctional categories of production, consumption, and preservation/protection (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Types of Oregon NNRE enterprises.

This gave us an overview of NNRE activities across Oregon. Not all of these business types are new, though many are. What is new is thinking strategically about NNRE as an emerging economic sector in its own right, which presents significant possibilities for locality development, by diversifying rural economies and increasing local resilience. To more fully explore the results of the scoping survey we took a more in-depth look at the two development districts that comprise eastern Oregon, the Greater Eastern Oregon Development Corporation and the Northeast Oregon Development District.

The ten-county eastern Oregon region is an especially pertinent locale in which to investigate NNRE. It is a vast, largely deep rural area. At 42,000 square miles, it is slightly larger than the state of Kentucky. It includes four cities in the population range of 10 to 15,000. Outside those cities the population density is two to three people per square mile. Industrialized commodity production in agriculture and natural resources continues to be important to the regional economy as a whole but, as is common (Halseth, Markey, and Bruce 2010), those activities are no longer sufficient to support the regional economy and its communities and NNRE is emerging as an important alternative.

We conducted face-to-face, semistructured interviews with purposively selected respondents (Charmaz 2014) across the ten-county region. The aim was not a random sample. We wanted to talk to as many types of NNRE firms based in eastern Oregon as we could. We used a snowball process, beginning with firms suggested by staff of the development districts. We asked the initial interviewees to propose other firms to interview, and continued until we reached saturation, interviewing 42 business owners and economic development professionals. We supplemented the face-to-face interviews with a more focused online survey. We extended an open invitation both directly to specific businesses and through various Eastern Oregon business associations, organizations, and trade groups. Forty-three firms responded, giving us a total of 83 respondents. Here we report their responses with respect to the breadth and depth of activities that make up NNRE in the region, the business goals of NNRE entrepreneurs, and the place of NNRE firms in their local communities.⁴

Types of NNRE Activities in Eastern Oregon

As with the exploratory study, the responding businesses were all involved in new ways of thinking about and using local resources specific to the eastern Oregon ecosystem. We have organized them in terms of the three categories of multifunctionality.

Production

Forest products: lumber and furniture from juniper trees, usually considered a weed species; specialized wood products such as furniture from small diameter trees usually thought to have no commercial value; biomass products such as wood pellets and briquettes made from scrap wood and used for heating and electricity generation.

Agricultural products: artisanal value-added enterprises such as micro-distilleries and craft breweries; organically raised products, both certified and uncertified; grass-fed livestock raised for meat; specialty products such as gourmet garlic.

Consumption (amenity-based landscape uses): farm and ranch stays; guided bicycle tours; rafting; lodging catering to bicyclists or equestrians; local food tours.

Restoration: Forest thinning for ecological health and for fuels reduction for wildfire mitigation; watershed and forest restoration activities and support services such as native plant nurseries, fence building, and planting.

Significantly, the respondents’ businesses overlap the various categories of multifunctionality. Nearly a quarter span production, nonconsumptive uses, and/or restoration. They produce multiple useful outputs from a single production process, for example, removing juniper trees from the landscape is an environmental restoration activity that also provides logs to be manufactured into lumber and furniture. Similarly, production of grass-fed meats requires restoration of healthy natural prairie land that, in addition to fodder, also provides important ecosystem services such as wildlife habitat and clean water. Other examples of multifunctional businesses are working ranches that also offer homestays or other hospitality services, farmers who also provide marketing or environmental management consulting services, and native plant nurseries that produce for both environmental restoration and ornamental uses.

NNRE Business Goals

Multifuctionality is not only a “target of opportunity” for business success; it is also in harmony with respondents’ goals for their business. Profitability and environmental health are equally important goals for these businesses; 95 percent of respondents rated both of them as very important or somewhat important. And 78 percent said that getting rich as only slightly or not at all important in making business decisions. When asked, no one aspired to “grow as big as possible.” Most (74%) want to grow “slowly and incrementally.” In keeping with this, over 90 percent of the on-line survey respondents reported five or fewer employees and nearly one-third had no employees.⁵

“Community well-being” is also a prominent consideration in making business decisions; it was rated as very or somewhat important by 90 percent of respondents. More specifically, “supporting employees” was rated as very or somewhat important by 77 percent of respondents, and “providing interesting work” was rated as very or somewhat important by 74 percent. Responding to open-ended questions, interviewees mentioned such business goals as improving community economic heath, creating jobs for locals, and having enough money to donate to charities.

All of this is consistent with the view of rural people caught up in a network of economic and social ties—a community—based in the landscape they occupy. They value their community and seek to maintain it even if it means foregoing opportunities for greater personal wealth.

The Role of NNRE in the Local Community

Respondents were quite enthusiastic about the role of NNRE firms in building a more diverse local economy and thus a more resilient community. They are very dedicated to/proud of their communities and want to see them thrive. Creating long-term local vitality was a very important goal for 82 percent of them in making decisions about their business. As an approach for doing so, more than 80 percent said producing an innovative product (for export beyond the immediate region) is very important. Also specifically mentioned in response to open-ended questions were utilizing local resources and spending money with other local businesses (import replacement and plugging leaks).

More generally, NNRE entrepreneurs are eager to create an economic asset for the community. Their greatest frustration was the lack of local leadership and consequent deficit in rural development planning appropriate to their communities and businesses. They indicated a miss-match between the services provided by economic development organizations and the services desired by businesses.

“The county has NO ECONOMIC PLAN at ALL” (emphasis in original)

“It is imperative that small business dealing with natural resources not be tossed around like a football.”

“. . . the lack of the (county) Economic Coordinator doing her job . . .”

“Local city and county officials need to be on board for innovative ways to use existing infrastructure. Without broad minded local officials, creative ideas are stopped before they start.”

Discussion

Overall, then, the responses bear out the view of NNRE as a multifunctional activity that produces a range of goods and services that contribute to economic well-being while also advancing the environmental and social well-being of their community. However, NNRE businesses need the support of local leaders and the direction that can be provided by planning. NNRE propels rural communities to engage locality development in search of strategies that involve new ways of thinking about and using resources. Drawing on the resource base for uses other than commodity production enables a more diverse rural economy. It also enables uses that support the environmental as well as the economic health of the local community. NNRE firms contribute to the resilience of rural areas both directly and indirectly. Directly, they provide jobs and income, including through self-employment, as well as needed products and services (Muske et al. 2001; Rupasingha and Goetz 2013). Moreover, they are likely to persist through periods of economic downturn (Fitzgerald and Muske 2016). Indirectly, they have a sense of social responsibility. They have the motivation and resources to respond to local challenges (Steiner and Atterson 2015) and they prioritize nonpecuniary benefits over growth—being one’s own boss, having flexibility of hours, and so on (Hurst and Pugsley 2011).

This points to a range of considerations for rural development policy, planning, and research.

Conclusions and Recommendations

As we have seen, economic health is a necessary but not sufficient aspect of rural place prosperity. People live in rural areas for a variety of noneconomic reasons. In keeping with that, they create and maintain businesses for a variety of reasons beyond profit. They find ways to make a living and support their communities by with the resources available in a specific place. Rural development planning needs to acknowledge and build on that reality, and we need policy and research that supports that approach to planning.

With respect to policy, there is a need to particularize. First, the advantage of the multifunctional approach is that it takes advantage of all the resources of a specific landscape, treating then as assets to be managed, using them without using them up rather than exploiting them. Policies in support of place prosperity need to enable context-specific actions that build on the unique local physical, social, and economic attributes of a community. That implies so-called endogenous development. Planning for place prosperity needs policies that support development from within, supporting existing and new local businesses in the community that are working on newly emerging products rather than trying to recruit firms to relocate from elsewhere. And that in turn speaks to the issue of size. Policies need to acknowledge that small businesses comprise the backbone of place prosperity in rural settings. Many firms, each with a small number of employees, provide more economic and social stability to a rural community than a few firms with a large number of employees.

The NNRE approach to rural development planning for place prosperity needs to build on that policy framework. The goal is not just economic development, it is community development—changing and improving the community as a whole, by means of multifunctional approaches to natural resources. That goal is approached through a planning process that is participatory and bottom-up, drawing on ideas and engagement from all parts of the community. And the planning is action-oriented; the participatory approach needs direction and guidance toward the delineation and realization of its goals from vigorous planning leadership.

The policy framework and planning activities need feedback from careful empirical studies of both processes and outcomes.

We need more, and more sharply drawn, studies of NNRE businesses, in order to better understand how to support them. What products do they provide, to what markets? How are they organized and how do they come into being?

We need studies of the influences of NNRE businesses on the local communities in which they are embedded. What are the economic, social, and environmental effects of such firms?

We need studies of the development planning processes engaged in by communities. How did it get started? Who is involved? How did they set goals? How did they assess their success?

In conclusion, rural development planning for place prosperity is by definition very place-based. It is highly context-specific and attentive to local conditions and desires. It identifies existing and potential multifunctional natural resource enterprises and their actual and possible aggregate contributions to the local economy and community. The aim is to identify and support entrepreneurial opportunities that take advantage of locally unique arrays of natural resources, adding to business diversity. NNRE is therefore an approach to place prosperity enhancing economic, environmental, and social health as well as community resilience that strengthens the long-term health of rural communities and their natural resource assets.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to the two economic development districts that comprise Eastern Oregon, the Greater Eastern Oregon Development Corporation, and the Northeast Oregon Economic Development District for their enthusiastic support. In particular, we thank Executive Directors Susan Christensen of GEODC and Lisa Dawson of NEOEDD for their encouragement, advice, and critical observations. The Expert Advisory Council created specifically for this project helped us immeasurably to understand the social, economic, and ecological realities of Eastern Oregon. In addition to Susan and Lisa, they are Rex Baker, GEODC loan officer; Jack Southworth, Southworth Brothers Ranch; Mark Webb, Executive Director, Blue Mountains Forest Partnership; and Adam Zimmerman, President and CEO, Craft 3 community development financial institution.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Ford Family Foundation (20160226); Meyer Memorial Trust (16020387); Oregon Community Foundation (273258).

ORCID iD

Michael Hibbard

Notes

Author Biographies

Michael Hibbard is professor emeritus at the University of Oregon School of Planning, Public Policy and Management. His research focuses on community and regional development, with a special interest in the social impacts of economic change on small towns, Indigenous communities, and rural regions in the United States and other industrialized nations.

Susan Lurie is a research associate in the Institute for Policy Research and Engagement, University of Oregon School of Planning, Public Policy and Management. Her research focuses on natural resource management, particularly on watershed management, regional food systems and natural resource related rural sustainability strategies.

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