Crossing boundaries in rural research

Abstract

Rural places around the world share common issues related to their positioning outside social, political, and economic centres of power. More than simply tyranny of distance, many issues can be attributed to tyranny at distance: that is, the power of distant decision-makers to direct rural development from afar with little knowledge of rural contexts. In response to the challenge to progress a transformative research agenda for rural sociology, this article theorises a ‘cross-boundary’ approach to research for rural development, to address persisting issues of development ignorance. Cross-boundary knowledge production values the multiple, contextualised knowledges of rural people and brings these into dialogue with academic knowledges across disciplines to inform practical rural solutions. Rural sociologists, with their in-depth understanding of rural community dynamics and larger social structures, are ideally positioned to broker cross-boundary knowledge partnerships that equip rural communities to solve old problems in new ways.

Keywords

applied social research cross-boundary knowledge local knowledge rural development rural sociology rural transformation

Rural transformation is nothing new. Rural societies through history have experienced change, from gradual and incremental to sudden and disruptive. Social researchers are skilled at describing and theorising these change processes, yet conversely much less skilled in supporting practical efforts to steer, manage or create change. A significant gap persists between theory and practice: between what we know about how rural communities and societies change, and the practical rural development efforts of governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and others. While it is broadly recognised that social research can provide useful insights for rural development, the ‘social’ components of rural development work are frequently overshadowed by technical and economic considerations.

In aiming to articulate a transformative research agenda for rural sociology, this special issue raises the question of practical impact: how can social researchers and social theorists leverage our expertise to support rural communities toward positive rural futures? This question is central to articulating the significance of our discipline beyond the academy and clarifying its broader social impact.¹ Yet answering it involves much more than a simple commitment to ‘applied’ rural sociology or ‘translation’ of research findings to make them accessible to policy and practice audiences. These are necessary yet not sufficient strategies, as experience has shown that orienting research toward policy and practice does not necessarily influence change in either.

More fundamentally, answering the impact question requires understanding what kinds of knowledge are necessary to create prosperous and sustainable rural futures. The failures of rural development efforts are often failures of knowledge. Research and experience demonstrate that development efforts fail when external developers and policy makers lack knowledge about local contexts, values, and ways of working in rural places. At the same time, rural people, isolated from knowledge infrastructure, often lack the information, ideas, and expertise they need to create the futures they want. Local and non-local forms of knowledge are both needed to inform rural futures, yet there are challenges in bringing them together across geographic, social, and epistemological boundaries. This article introduces the idea of ‘cross-boundary’ knowledge work and the role that rural sociologists can play in bringing different kinds of knowledge into dialogue to inform rural futures. These ideas are illustrated through the empirical example of regional research centres.

Knowledge for rural development: a cross-boundary knowledge problem

Rural development can be defined at a basic level as the pursuit of positive social, economic, and environmental outcomes in rural places. Rural development seeks to address questions of sustainability and change in non-urban places, recognising both the demographic and socio-cultural dimensions of rurality (Shucksmith and Brown, 2019). Across vastly different contexts, rural regions share many common issues; particularly those that are positioned distant from social, political and economic centres of power. Challenges to rural demographic and economic sustainability, such as depopulation, industry restructuring, skills deficits, and loss of services, have been noted in many rural regions in Australia and overseas, and have been persisting topics of concern over decades (e.g. Farrugia, 2014; Gray and Lawrence, 2001; OECD, 2006; Parliament of Australia, 2020; Pritchard and McManus, 2000; Shucksmith and Brown, 2019). These common issues reflect a classic ‘tyranny of distance’, that is, a physical location on the geographic periphery, distant from population centres where investment and services are concentrated. At the same time, many of the issues faced by rural communities can be attributed to tyranny at distance, reflecting the power of decision-makers in distant centres to direct the futures of rural communities from afar, with little knowledge of local realities.

Much of the history of rural development and its contested definitions reflect that development work has frequently been an exercise of tyranny at distance for peripheral societies. Developers have imposed a particular view of ‘development’ from afar: often a version grounded in modernisation theory and seeking to transfer technology and raise productivity for global capitalist markets (Escobar, 1995; Grillo and Stirrat, 1997). Alternative efforts for rural development have challenged distant tyrannies with approaches that more explicitly privilege local views and actions, such as grassroots development (Annis and Hakim, 1988) and community development (Craig et al., 2011). The failures of modernisation to deliver positive outcomes for people in rural places has led to rural development agendas that seek alternative rural futures (van der Ploeg et al., 2000) in the context of economic globalisation, neoliberal governance, fast-evolving technologies, and environmental change (Young, 2019).

Beyond simply describing rural change, rural development seeks to actively influence the trajectories of change toward positive rural futures. Efforts to theorise rural development thus necessarily grapple with the reality that there are different definitions of ‘positive’ futures, and of what actions are required by whom to achieve them. Understanding rural development requires sociological attention to the actors who influence change (Long, 2000) and their various logics about what ‘positive’ change looks like: in the language of development anthropology, their different development logics (Eversole, 2018a; Olivier de Sardan, 2005). Rural development has been theorised as a top-down ‘exogenous’ process, a bottom-up ‘endogenous’ process, and as a hybrid process involving both internal and external actors (Adamski and Gorloch, 2007; Lowe et al., 2019; Shucksmith, 2010). Each of these theorisations paints a different picture of the actors that influence rural development trajectories, and the types of knowledge that are required for prosperous and sustainable rural futures.

Governments and mainstream development organisations have traditionally cast themselves in the role of lead actors in the development of rural areas; this is top-down or exogenous development action. Anthropologists and sociologists of development have documented how development work is frequently driven by state and other actors outside rural communities, whose high-level solutions have the benefit of resources and scale, but are often ill-suited to the realities of local contexts (e.g. Hobart, 1993; Mosse, 2005; Scott, 1998). Development initiatives and their goals are framed by professionals focusing narrowly on an identified problem (such as low agricultural productivity or poor educational attainment) in isolation from local social, economic, and environmental contexts. Ignorance of local contexts is often exacerbated by metrocentricity, or the tendency to view social change through an urban lens (see e.g. Farrugia, 2014); this is frequently reinforced by the physical location of decision-makers in distant cities with little exposure to rural contexts (Chambers, 1983). Exogenous development initiatives therefore tend to overlook systemic interactions at the local level and the institutions and actions for change that are already successfully operating in rural communities; indeed, they may inadvertently damage these through ill-informed action. This systemic lack of understanding of local contexts in exogenous development has been termed development ignorance (Eversole, 2018a; Hobart, 1993).

Recognition of the failures of exogenous rural development approaches to improve the conditions of rural people has given rise to three distinct rural development responses, each of which expresses a different understanding of the types of knowledge that are required to combat development ignorance. One response posits that exogenous rural development failures are due to their narrow focus on the technical or economic components of development work, and highlights the need for the ‘social’ knowledge of sociologists and anthropologists to inform rural development efforts with a deeper understanding of rural communities (Cernea, 1991; Western, 1975). This approach does not essentially challenge the exogenous framing of rural development action, but it recognises that social researchers can provide valuable knowledge about local dynamics that would otherwise be overlooked.

A second response to development ignorance argues for the need for rural development efforts to engage directly with rural people’s knowledge (Brokensha et al., 1980; Chambers, 1983, Sillitoe et al., 2002) to avoid ‘errors of diagnosis’ when dealing with local contexts (Shucksmith, 2010: 2). In practice this has taken the form of citizen participation (Craig et al., 2011) and participatory development (Cornwall, 2011) approaches, which encourage developers to engage more systematically with local rural people in defining and operationalising rural development initiatives. Nevertheless, development professionals tend to frame opportunities for participation within dominant development institutions and values, leaving little room for the knowledge of rural people (Cornwall, 2011; Craig and Porter, 1997). Thus, participation may simply be external ‘tyranny’ in new clothes (Cooke and Kothari, 2001).

A third response to development ignorance shifts the focus to ‘grassroots’, ‘bottom-up’ or ‘endogenous’ rural development approaches: rural development that is defined and executed by rural communities. This is a substantively different approach from the previous two, which still presuppose exogenous development leadership. Endogenous development considers the agency of rural actors and challenges the persistent idea that development is a single, expert-led trajectory toward more modern rural societies. Western (1975), writing on sociology and development, drew this distinction between development imposed by external experts and a ‘highly-specific rural development in which the great majority of the population are provided with the opportunity to control their own life situation’ (1975: 58). Endogenous rural development creates ‘scope for choice’ in development trajectories (Booth, 1994: 17). It is theorised as a ‘multi-actor’ process in which rural people are not mere subjects of others’ development efforts, but capable of driving their own ‘search for new futures’ (van der Ploeg et al., 2000: 394–6).

Nevertheless, endogenous approaches are not without their own issues of development ignorance. While local people are well placed to understand their local contexts, they rarely have all the knowledge they need to create the futures they want. First, local knowledge itself is fragmented: different people know different things, and organisations and individuals don’t necessarily work together at the local level to share the knowledge required for rural development action (Eversole, 2018b; Qureshi et al., 2018). Further, endogenous rural development efforts can become parochial, focusing on the local scale and missing opportunities further afield. For this reason, local development is increasingly seen to require ‘connectivity between local and wider – national or global – communities’ (Nordberg et al., 2020: 158). Finally, purely endogenous development approaches are unlikely to overcome entrenched historical disadvantages that have left many rural communities with limited access to education, political influence, and other resources, including specialised expertise. There remains a role for external development actors, though now reconceptualised as partners or support actors for rural communities (OECD, 2006): termed ‘neo-endogenous’ rural development approaches (van der Ploeg and Renting, 2000).

Neo-endogenous rural development approaches recognise the value of local knowledge, as well as the potential for such knowledge to dialogue with scientific and managerial knowledge in pursuit of sustainable rural development (Adamski and Gorloch, 2007). Nevertheless, neo-endogenous rural development approaches do not necessarily overcome development ignorance. In the same way that participatory development has tended to frame participation within externally defined development agendas, neo-endogenous rural development is still often structured to privilege external development logics over local knowledge. External partners often control rural development agendas; they shape and steer local action indirectly via governance arrangements (Shucksmith, 2010). For instance, research on ‘self-help’ rural development policy in Australia showed how these programs promoted government agendas and external experts while discouraging rural people’s critical engagement with external decisions (Cheshire, 2006). Research on neo-endogenous rural development experiences in Europe indicates that initiatives vary in the extent to which they recognise rural communities’ own knowledge and capabilities; the most successful rural development initiatives have done so (Nordberg et al., 2020; van der Ploeg and Renting, 2000).

The meeting-points between rural communities and external developers remain a necessary but difficult terrain, and development ignorance persists despite broad recognition of the need to bring local and external knowledge into dialogue to inform successful rural development efforts. In response to the question of what kinds of knowledge are needed to create positive rural futures, the consensus in the literature is that both ‘local’ and ‘external’ knowledges are required. Yet rural development programs or projects arguably create a ‘development field’ with an expected set of social relationships between developers and developees (Jakimow, 2013). This development field will tend to privilege the (often metrocentric) knowledges and worldviews of outside, expert developers and devalue the knowledges and logics of rural actors.

Dialogue between local and non-local forms of knowledge, and between rural communities and outside helpers is therefore complicated not only by the epistemological boundaries between different types of knowledge, but by the social boundaries between development actors who engage with each other on unequal footing. Knowledge is socially situated, and some social actors’ knowledges – women and men, wealthy and poor, urban and rural, Indigenous and non-Indigenous – are more valued and visible than others. Cross-boundary dialogue for effective rural development is complicated precisely by the ‘social’ dynamics that social researchers regularly observe and document.

This suggests a potentially impactful role for rural sociologists. Rural development is a cross-boundary knowledge problem; to address rural issues and create the conditions for positive rural futures, very different kinds of knowledge and logics need to come into dialogue. Facilitating knowledge dialogue across epistemological and social boundaries requires an understanding of knowledge, and of social dynamics; it necessitates a familiarity with the ‘on-the-ground’ social realities in rural communities, as well as the larger social structures that reproduce tyranny at distance. Rural sociologists therefore have particular expertise to contribute to generating cross-boundary knowledge that is practically useful for rural communities.

Toward a methodology for cross-boundary knowledge production

A ‘cross-boundary’ approach to knowledge production brings expert and local knowledges into dialogue across disciplinary and social divides to create knowledge that is practically useful. In rural contexts, this may mean bringing together local and expert knowledges about technical aspects of agricultural production, tourism, cultural industries, or other economic drivers, to inform industry development and improved livelihoods. It may involve putting the experiential knowledges of service providers and users into dialogue with experts in service design to find new ways to provide services in thin markets. It may require bringing together different scientific, technical, and cultural knowledges to inform more effective land management. Each of the challenges faced by rural communities requires more than one kind of knowledge to address it; cross-boundary knowledge is needed to inform positive rural futures.

Cross-boundary knowledge is similar to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge in that it draws together insights across multiple academic paradigms to inform understanding of a multi-dimensional problem. Cross-boundary knowledge goes further, however, to integrate contextualised local knowledge and socially situated cultural, technical, and experiential knowledges, including the multiple knowledges of rural people. It therefore draws in insights from the traditions of participatory and community-based action research (Fals-Borda and Rahman, 1992; Greenwood and Levin, 2007; Karlsen and Larrea, 2015; Munck et al., 2014), and Indigenous research methodologies (tebrakunna country et al., in press; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999), as they have sought to grapple with the power dynamics of knowledge production and create knowledge that is practically useful. All knowledge creation is situated in social contexts (Jasanoff et al., 1995); knowledge creation that is relevant for rural communities requires crossing epistemological and social boundaries to bring non-academic and academic knowledges into mutually coherent dialogue.

Methodologically, a cross-boundary approach to rural research starts from the perspective that knowledge is socially situated, and provides a key resource for those possessing it, enabling them to pursue their interests (Barnes, 1977). This places knowledge generation within its social context, recognising that knowledge is a tool for action which can benefit or harm different social groups. In the context of rural development, this means not only attending to research’s practical relevance and impact, but also its relevance ‘to whom and for what purpose’ (Booth, 1994: 25). Research can perpetuate development ignorance by reinforcing the agendas of external developers; for instance, by framing research questions to focus on local deficits and external definitions of success. Research can also empower local action in communities that have been historically disadvantaged and marginalised; for instance, by identifying local strengths and ways communities can leverage them. Research can reinforce stereotypes and stigma, or challenge them; it can be an instrument of control, or a tool for empowerment. Much depends upon whose knowledge is visible and valued in the research process. For rural communities, a cross-boundary approach to knowledge production can challenge systemic ignorances, enabling decision-makers to understand needs and opportunities in rural communities while enabling rural communities to gain the knowledge they need to progress their visions of the future. Yet this requires not just creating knowledge for or about rural people, but with and by them.

Cross-boundary knowledge production also requires a facilitative ‘brokering’ function to enable knowledge exchange and dialogue across social divides. The role of knowledge broker has been broadly recognised in rural development work, though typically within the social context of agricultural extension or other activities that involve knowledge flow from external experts into rural communities (e.g. Qureshi et al., 2018). By contrast, anthropological analyses of ‘development brokers’ attend to how rural people themselves leverage external relationships to attract resources (Bierschenk et al., 2002; Gonzalez, 1972; Mosse and Lewis, 2006). This literature, however, has paid limited attention to how new knowledge might emerge from these relationships. In the rural development literature, a brokerage role has been attributed to skilled external administrators or experts who facilitate the formation of networks (Adamski and Gorloch, 2007: 489; Apostolopoulos et al., 2020: 97). Yet knowledge brokerage requires more than simply connecting people and organisations into networks; active facilitation may be required to overcome social and epistemological divides. Recent research in knowledge management for development has concluded that ‘a new type of knowledge brokering is needed which is able to broker knowledge between local actors and development experts, recognizing that this is not just a one-way process’ (Cummings et al., 2019: 791).

Knowledge partnering is an action-oriented approach to brokering knowledge exchange among different actors, communities, and organisations to address development issues. It is grounded in the insight that ‘The benefits to be gained from connecting local knowledges with each other and other forms of knowledge are generally unrecognised’ and can spark innovative solutions to local development issues (Eversole, 2015: 102). Originally articulated as an approach for local communities and community development professionals to define and address issues from the ground up (Eversole, 2015), it has also been employed as a rural development action research methodology to explore issues such as dairy farmers’ responses to climate change (Titterton et al., 2011) and strategic regional development planning (Eversole and McCall, 2014). When knowledge partnering is used as a research methodology, a researcher plays the role of knowledge broker, bringing different types of knowledge together to inform community understanding of, and response to, a practical development issue.

Knowledge partnering as a research methodology starts by recognising the existence of multiple knowledges and logics about a development issue, both within and beyond a local area. Conceived as a cyclical process of enquiry and action with influences from participatory action research (Fals-Borda and Rahman, 1991; Greenwood and Levin, 2007), knowledge partnering starts with local people and what they know about a development issue, then brokers engagement with academic literatures, with other local people across organisational and social boundaries, and with external experts of various kinds. This type of knowledge brokerage requires an active awareness of social roles, power relations, and epistemological positionings, and how these lead different actors to frame development issues and possible actions differently.

Knowledge partnering has three core principles: (1) a recognition that development is a social, rather than primarily a technical, process; (2) a recognition that the knowledge of less-powerful groups is vital for successful development; and (3) a commitment to mobilising knowledge to create practical solutions (Eversole, 2015: 146–52). As a methodology that recognises the social situatedness of rural development actors and seeks to work with them to create knowledge for practical action, knowledge partnering provides a methodological starting-point for operationalising cross-boundary knowledge production in rural research.

Operationalising cross-boundary knowledge production in rural settings

If rural development is a cross-boundary knowledge problem, then a transformative rural research agenda requires the generation of cross-boundary knowledge. Yet knowledge institutions such as universities are not well designed to generate this type of knowledge for rural communities. Despite some positive experiences in community-engaged research (e.g. Munck et al., 2014), university knowledge production remains primarily the domain of expert researchers publishing in top disciplinary journals with concerns far removed from practice (Frank and Landstrom, 2016; Kieser and Leiner, 2009). Universities’ institutional structures also produce tensions and limitations for regional engagement in practice (Allison and Eversole, 2008; Duke et al., 2013; Gunasekara, 2006; Morgan, 2007). Further, universities tend to cluster in cities, distant from rural places. The result is significant geographic, social, and epistemological distance between academic knowledge generation processes and practical rural knowledge needs. This raises the question: what institutional forms are capable of operationalising cross-boundary knowledge production for positive rural futures? This section identifies a knowledge institution that has potential to do so.

Explicit institutional infrastructure for knowledge production currently exists in some rural settings in the form of ‘regional campuses’, ‘rural extension centres’ and ‘regional research centres’. These knowledge-focused organisational types are all found in rural regions around the world, with somewhat different names and points of emphasis. Each represents an explicit effort to link the knowledge infrastructure of universities with the needs and opportunities in rural communities. They therefore provide a starting-point for analysing the institutional possibilities for cross-boundary knowledge production. Many of these organisations generate knowledge physically in the rural context, and nearly always about the rural context. They vary, however, in the extent to which they produce knowledge with or by rural people.

Regional campuses of universities, technical education schools and colleges, are a common format for bringing knowledge institutions into rural settings. Regional campuses typically offer formal programs of technical or academic study, as well as community outreach and engagement activities. Many regional university campuses also have active programmes of research. In Australia there are approximately seventy regional university campuses, defined as campuses located outside capital cities (Eversole, 2016: 78–83) as well as numerous rural vocational and technical education providers, including TAFE colleges (Technical and Further Education) and agricultural colleges. Campuses range in size from small satellite campuses with one or two programs of study, to large and vibrant main campuses. Many aim to address the persisting under-representation of students from rural regions in higher education (Burnheim and Harvey, 2016) and often have an explicit regional engagement and development mandate (Garlick and Pryor, 2002; Wise, 2016). Nevertheless, regional campuses are unevenly distributed across rural regions, with many Australian regions having no access to a university (Eversole, 2016). Internationally, a classic example of regional campuses are the US ‘land grant’ universities, charged with making education and research available to rural regions.

Rural extension centres are similar to regional campuses, but they operate at much smaller scale and are generally outreach mechanisms for larger institutions located elsewhere. Typically established by universities, rural extension centres may also be sponsored by, or partnered with, other community organisations. Rural extension centres often offer short courses on specific themes such as agriculture, health, business, or community development; they may also provide academic support to university students based locally. In the Australian context, a number of universities and communities have established study centres as a resource for local students (e.g. country universities centres, regional study hubs). In the US, agriculture and community development extension centres are common.

Regional research centres are a less known form of institutional infrastructure for knowledge production in rural regions areas, but one with particular characteristics that are suited to cross-boundary knowledge production. Regional research centres are place-based research institutions with a mandate to conduct research that benefits the local region. They may also offer short courses and other extension activities. Some regional research centres are single discipline, on topics such as agriculture or environmental science; others, particularly those with an explicit ‘regional development’ mandate, are multidisciplinary. A desktop scoping study in 2017 identified 14 such multidisciplinary regional research centres in Australia that were based in the region where they worked, and similar numbers in Chile and Argentina.²

Regional campuses, rural extension centres and regional research centres are manifestation of a practical need to create a point of engagement between rural communities and knowledge institutions. They bring academic knowledge physically in to rural communities; further, they often have an explicit focus on the local, rural context and offering knowledge products that are relevant to their local region. Embeddedness in the rural context is an important first step; but on its own, simply being located in a rural region does not mean that these organisations are able to create cross-boundary knowledge. Many rural campuses and extension centres are small, with limited resources for research. In pursuing a transformative research agenda for rural futures, regional research centres with an explicit rural development mandate appear to offer the most promising potential for cross-boundary knowledge production.

Regional research centres are specifically dedicated to the production of knowledge for rural regions. Further, they are physically located in rural communities, which means that the researchers are locals who are either from the local area or have come to live there. Finally, many of these centres are multidisciplinary or even explicitly interdisciplinary, and it also common for such centres to work closely with non-university organisations. When the Sustainable Regions Applied Research Network was established in 2017, it brought together over two dozen of these locally embedded, multidisciplinary regional research centres across three countries (Australia, Chile and Argentina). Observing that this ‘regional research centre’ model had emerged independently across these three very different contexts – and likely in others as well – suggested that these types of organisations are responding to a need to bring academic and local knowledges into dialogue to inform rural futures.

The knowledge partnering research methodology originated, not by accident, in a regional research centre, with a multidisciplinary research team that was committed to engaging with local knowledge to help actors in the rural region of North West Tasmania (IRD, 2011). The Institute for Regional Development (IRD) was established in 2007 as a research centre of the University of Tasmania with government support. IRD brought together senior academics and local development professionals across disciplines to generate knowledge for regional development. Its projects focused on locally relevant sectors and issues such as agri-food business development, strategic land-use planning, social enterprise and unemployment. All research projects were jointly developed with local partners from beyond the university, usually directly in response to concerns raised in practice. Through this work it became apparent that practical responses to rural development issues as diverse as growing new businesses, tacking unemployment, housing the elderly, and developing adaptive responses to climate change in rural industries, required insights from multiple disciplines and areas of practical expertise, including on-the ground local knowledge. Knowledge partnering articulated this insight in the form of a community development approach and a research methodology; these same principles of learning through knowledge dialogue were also embedded in the IRD’s regional development teaching programs.

The experiences of IRD in Tasmania were similar to those later shared with colleagues in regional research centres across Australia and South America as part of the Sustainable Regions Applied Research Network. For instance, the PRAXIS research centre in Rafaela, Argentina uses a range of action-focused methodologies to work directly with local social actors to support regional development and ‘innovation through dialogue’ (Karlsen and Larrea, 2015). Like IRD, PRAXIS has a strong focus on developing capabilities for action in their rural region through dialogue and co-construction of knowledge with social actors (Costamagna, 2015; Karlsen and Larrea, 2015). PRAXIS grew from the experiences of offering a postgraduate regional development course from the National Technology University’s Rafaela regional campus, starting in 2010; it explicitly adopts interdisciplinary action research methodologies based in a Freirean concept of praxis as transformative reflection and action (UTN, 2021). Knowledge-creating activities often involve ‘accompanying’ specific development processes in the Rafaela region (e.g. local initiatives for entrepreneurship, environmental sustainability, inclusive value chains, etc.), as well as undertaking targeted research to inform these activities, and training local development facilitators (PRAXIS, 2018).

While regional research centres in Australia and internationally vary in their specific themes and methodological approaches, they have important commonalities: all represent a form of place-embedded knowledge infrastructure that seeks to create knowledge in, with and by rural people for positive rural futures. Academics based in regional research centres are all, to some degree, locals, and many regional research centres have established research training programs at Master’s and PhD levels to build local research capacity on development topics. Research projects are typically designed with local partners, often at their request, and aim to achieve practical outcomes. Centre teams often include non-academic experts or ‘pracademics’, whose careers cross the boundaries of academic theory and government, industry and/or community practice. Notably, academics and research students in regional research centres are usually social researchers, or researchers with mixed social and technical backgrounds, who understand the value of local knowledge and have skills in navigating the social contexts of knowledge production.

While regional research centres offer a promising infrastructure for cross-boundary knowledge production in rural regions, their work also brings to the surface a number of tensions. Most regional research centres are associated with a much larger university and, while this generates considerable advantages, it raises issues around lack of policy alignment, support, and incentives for academics to undertake regionally engaged knowledge production (Duke et al., 2013; Gunasekara, 2006). Ultimately, universities and regions work differently and tend to value different things (Allison and Eversole, 2008); dedication to regional engagement may have negative career consequences for researchers. Vergara Rojas (2010: 54), writing on regional research centres in Chile, makes a distinction between regional centres that produce regionally relevant research to inform decision-making, and those that merely use the region as a site to produce academic knowledge for scholarly publication. Regional research centres can do both, but there are strong institutional pressures to prioritise the latter. Further, like the rural communities they serve, regional research centres may suffer from tyranny at distance. Rural centres tend to be marginalised in the university system even when their academics are publishing internationally. In some cases institutional invisibility and metrocentric assumptions about the value of rural research have caused even successful regional research centres to close.

Regional research centres are a hybrid organisational form with potential to create powerful connections across universities and rural communities, and generate knowledge ‘with’ and ‘by’ rural people rather than merely ‘on’ or ‘for’ them. Their work often involves intentionally facilitating or brokering knowledge dialogue across geographic, social and epistemological boundaries to help rural communities achieve practical outcomes. Yet the experiences of regional research centres raise questions about the extent to which cross-boundary knowledge work in rural regions can be supported long term within existing university structures, or whether new institutional forms are required to create cross-boundary knowledge for rural development.

Future directions: social research and cross-boundary knowledge for rural futures

This article set out to answer the question: what kind of knowledge is required for positive rural futures, and what role can rural sociologists play in generating this knowledge? Creating practical impacts in complex social settings such as rural communities requires a very different approach to knowledge production than the traditional academic disciplinary mainstream. Nevertheless, the disciplinary tools of the social sciences have an important role to play. Rural sociologists, with their in-depth understandings of rural community dynamics and larger social structures, are ideal brokers of cross-boundary knowledge partnerships that can challenge development ignorance and help rural communities to gain the knowledge they need to progress their own visions of the future.

From a theoretical perspective, social researchers’ understandings of social actors and social dynamics are central to cross-boundary knowledge production. Understanding the dialogue between actors’ agency and social structures allows us to articulate why and how the knowledges and logics of diverse rural actors are systemically marginalised in rural development work. The sociology and anthropology of development demonstrate the relevance of local knowledge to rural development solutions (Brokensha et al., 1980; Sillitoe et al., 2002), and describe how socially situated rural development relationships render rural people’s knowledge invisible (Chambers, 1983; Eversole, 2018a; Hobart, 1993) while privileging external agendas and priorities (Cheshire, 2006; Jakimow, 2013; Mosse, 2005). These insights point to the need for cross-boundary knowledge production on rural issues ‘with’ and ‘by’ rural communities, not merely ‘on’ and ‘for’ them.

Next, from a practical perspective, social researchers’ experiences with methodologies that recognise the social contexts of knowledge production, place us in a strong position to broker cross-boundary knowledge partnerships. Social researchers have developed numerous methodologies to give marginalised groups a ‘voice’ in traditional research, such as in-depth ethnography, narrative life histories, participatory visual methods, artefact elicitation, and many others. Social researchers have also pioneered approaches to knowledge production with and by non-academic communities, such as community-based research and participatory action research (Fals-Borda and Rahman, 1991; Greenwood and Levin, 2007; Munck et al., 2014). There is a strong tradition in social research of working with less visible and less advantaged social groups, recognising and valuing what they know about their lives and social contexts. We are also adept at ‘studying up’ and engaging in research partnerships with structurally powerful development and public policy organisations. Finally, it is not uncommon for social researchers to engage with colleagues in other disciplines, including scientific or technical fields, on interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary projects. These varied research experiences demonstrate that rural social researchers are already skilled at brokering knowledge exchange across boundaries. Nevertheless, in practice these skills tend to be undervalued as ‘facilitation’ or ‘community engagement’ rather than recognised as research skills. Social researchers have lacked a specific methodological framework within which to articulate the value of their cross-boundary skills for knowledge creation.

Knowledge partnering is a methodology that explicitly articulates the value of bringing local and academic knowledges into dialogue across boundaries to address practical development issues. It can therefore provide an appropriate, theory-informed methodology for cross-boundary rural development research. Knowledge partnering is based on a recognition that different development actors have different knowledges and logics about the causes and solutions of development issues. Some of these dominate decision-making, while others are systemically overlooked and ignored (Eversole, 2018a; Hobart, 1993; Olivier de Sardan, 2005). Skilled social researchers, as knowledge brokers, can not only make the knowledges of marginalised groups visible; they can bring these into dialogue with dominant forms of professional and scientific knowledge to generate new insights for theory and new solutions for practice.

Despite its potential, cross-boundary knowledge production is still rare in practice, particularly in rural contexts where there is limited knowledge infrastructure to facilitate it. Nevertheless, institutional structures for knowledge production have emerged in some rural settings in the form of regional campuses, rural extension centres, and regional research centres. Regional research centres are particularly well positioned to generate cross-boundary knowledge on rural development issues through place-embedded research and capability-development that, in at least some cases, has brought academic and practice-based knowledges into active dialogue. Yet regional research centres still face tensions related to their positioning within universities, where different kinds of knowledge work are more highly valued, and where their work in rural places may be barely visible.

If rural development is a cross-boundary knowledge problem, the question of positive rural futures cannot be solved ‘for’ rural communities within existing knowledge frameworks. New methodologies and institutional configurations are required to produce cross-boundary knowledge with and by rural communities. Elements of community-engaged approaches to knowledge production already exist, yet for the most part have remained poorly theorised and easily conflated, with little attention paid to the extent to which knowledge is being produced with or by rural actors, as opposed to merely for or about them, or even extracted from them, with no benefits in return. The experience of regional research centres suggests that it is possible to create new types of institutions that can provide a space for cross-boundary knowledge production in rural communities. These offer the potential not only to generate rural development solutions, but also to contribute to the goal of a more epistemologically inclusive academy. Rural social researchers already have many of the skills required to broker knowledge partnerships across geographic, social, and epistemological boundaries. Nevertheless, it is unclear to what extent they are able to do this within existing university institutions, or whether regional research centres located within universities will necessarily default to more mainstream modes of knowledge production.

Conclusions

A transformative research agenda implies the ability for research to have a practical impact. This article has theorised a ‘cross-boundary’ approach to knowledge production for rural futures. Cross-boundary knowledge works across social and epistemological boundaries, bringing multidisciplinary and local knowledges into dialogue to create research that is practically useful for rural communities. Cross-boundary knowledge production has the potential to overcome systemic ignorances in rural development work led or directed from afar, and to provide ways for rural people to gain the knowledge they need to progress their own visions of the future.

Rural sociologists and other social researchers are well positioned, theoretically and practically, to provide leadership in this transformative research agenda. Sociology and anthropology of development have theorised the dynamics of rural development action and drawn attention to the social processes that render rural knowledges (in the plural) invisible. Rural social researchers are perhaps uniquely positioned to broker cross-boundary knowledge partnerships, because they have a deep understanding of the social dynamics that prevent knowledge flows from happening organically, coupled with the methodological insights and practical methods to make less visible forms of knowledge visible and comprehensible to others.

Unleashing the transformative potential of research for rural futures requires a commitment to research that enters into dialogue with rural people’s multiple, on-the-ground knowledges and equips them to take charge of change on their own terms. Cross-boundary knowledge production for rural development, however, does not yet sit comfortably within mainstream knowledge institutions. The knowledge infrastructure that is needed for cross-boundary knowledge production does not yet exist in most rural places, though rural campuses and centres provide a space where rural and academic knowledges can potentially come into dialogue. Future research can explore the extent to which different institutional configurations and methodological approaches are capable of generating cross-boundary knowledge for rural futures, and how these might be scaled up as a policy strategy for knowledge-driven rural development.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Robyn Eversole

Notes

Author biography

Robyn Eversole is a Professor at Swinburne University of Technology, Deputy Director of the Centre for Social Impact, and Director of its RegionxLink social impact program in North West Tasmania. Her books include Knowledge Partnering for Community Development (2015), Regional Development in Australia: Being Regional (2016), and Anthropology for Development, From Theory to Practice (2018). She is also the author of the Bush Prof blog on rural regional development.

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