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Page 1: From risky to responsible: expert knowledge and the governing of community-led rural development

Journal of Rural Studies 20 (2004) 289–302

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doi:10.1016/j.jr

From risky to responsible: expert knowledge and the governing ofcommunity-led rural development

Lynda Herbert-Cheshirea,*, Vaughan Higginsb

aSchool of Social Science, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Brisbane, Qld. 4072, AustraliabSchool of Humanities, Communications and Social Sciences, Monash University, Gippsland Campus, Churchill, Vic. 3842, Australia

Abstract

Rural development policy and practice in the ‘advanced’ Western nations is based increasingly on community-led strategies that

seek to manage risk and facilitate change at the local level with minimal direct state intervention. It is widely assumed that such

development strategies enable local people to have a greater say in transforming the fortunes of their communities, and are therefore

a means of empowerment. Drawing upon the literature on governmentality, this paper argues with specific reference to Australia

that such a view depoliticises the significant role played by expertise in defining, governing and setting limits on community-led rural

development. We suggest that the notion of risk provides a crucial focal point for exploring sociologically the expert knowledge,

categories and techniques through which communities are encouraged to think of and manage themselves as ‘self-governing’,

‘empowered’ and ‘responsible’. Additionally, foregrounding the concept of risk enables a critical analysis of the power-knowledge

effects of expertise on rural development practice. Thus, we argue through the use of two case studies that while the use of various

forms of rural development expertise creates opportunities for some communities, it enhances inequality for others who either fail to

conform to the risk-minimising forms of conduct prescribed by experts, or who pursue alternative forms of development. The paper

concludes by considering the implications of these arguments for rural development policy and practice in Australia and in other

nations.

r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

In recent years it has been recognised that many ruralcommunities in the ‘advanced’ Western nations arefacing a crisis. Continued population decline, thewithdrawal of public and private services, agriculturalrestructuring, and policies based on economic efficiencyhave progressively undermined the economic and socialbasis of these communities (e.g. Everitt and Annis, 1992;Hoggart et al., 1995; Tonts, 2000). As a consequence,it is feared that such communities no longer havethe capacities to effectively manage change and needto be assisted in reversing their fortunes to avert thenegative impacts of problems such as unemployment,poverty and poor health. Community-led ruraldevelopment is widely regarded in the US, Europeand Australia as the key to improving the sustainabilityof disadvantaged regions and providing local people

ing author. Fax: +61-7-33-65-1544.

ess: [email protected]

eshire).

e front matter r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

urstud.2003.10.006

with the capacities to respond positively to change(e.g. Murray and Dunn, 1995; Ashby and Midmore,1996; Day, 1998; Marsden and Murdoch, 1998; Wardand McNicholas, 1998; Herbert-Cheshire, 2000; Sharpet al., 2002).

While at face value such development increases localautonomy and control, a number of scholars haverecently located community-led development as part ofa broader shift from government to governance. Here,new institutional and administrative arrangements andactors extending beyond formal state authorities play anincreasingly significant role in ensuring that commu-nities have the capacities to take a more active role intheir development. This shift to governance implies thatin order for communities to successfully take charge oftheir own development, they must first become en-meshed in a network of relations that assists them inacquiring the capacities to govern themselves respon-sibly. Where previous research has explored the chan-ging, albeit still significant, role of the state in suchforms of governance (see, for example, Goodwin, 1998;Marsden and Murdoch, 1998; Ward and McNicholas,

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1998; Herbert-Cheshire, 2000; Higgins, 2002), thepurpose of this paper is to consider other kinds ofrelations that may be established within the networks ofpower. Drawing upon the recent Foucaultian-inspiredliterature on governmentality, we argue in this paperthat the knowledge and techniques of expertise, and therelations of rule established between rural developmentexperts and local communities, are central to theoperation of these networks of governance. While theterm expert is a broad one, we focus specifically on ruraldevelopment experts who promote active citizenship,entrepreneurship and capacity building as a way ofachieving change in declining rural communities. Thisform of expertise creates the discursive and technicalconditions through which communities are able to‘know’ themselves, identify the problems they face,and take the proper steps to ensure sustained long-termdevelopment. Rather than being a radical force forsocial change, therefore, or even a neutral agent ofempowerment, these experts are a constitutive part ofcommunity-led development strategies, and what Rose(1996a) calls governing through community. Withspecific reference to Australia, we demonstrate thecentral role of such expertise in defining, governing,and setting limits on, the capacities of rural communitiesto respond to change. In addition, we suggest that a keyeffect of expert knowledge is the production ofcategories of risk in which those communities thatfollow the prescribed paths of development are repre-sented as ‘active’, responsible and worthy of governmentfunding, while those who do not are marginalised andtargeted as risky and irresponsible.

2. Expertise, governance and community

According to Rose (1996a), the emergence of ‘thecommunity’ as an object of knowledge in public policy,formal political discourse and development initiatives isindicative of a fundamental shift in the spatialisation ofgovernment. Unlike previous forms of government thatsought to achieve national security through state-basedsocialised forms of intervention and responsibility, thisnew type of rule—governance through community—seeks ‘‘to govern without governing society, to governthrough regulated choices made by discrete andautonomous actors’’ (Rose, 1996a, p. 328). Suchgoverning through community is advanced liberal inthat it seeks to de-socialise and individualise risk, withsubjects encouraged to ‘‘shape their lives according to amoral code of individual responsibility and communityobligation’’ (Rose, 1996a, p. 347). Governing in anadvanced liberal way portends a fundamental rethinkingof citizenship as social responsibility through a criticismof the inefficiencies and dangers of state involvement insocial and economic life. The ethical basis of advanced

liberalism is that ‘‘it is a part of the continuous businessof living to make adequate provision for the preserva-tion, reproduction and reconstruction of one’s ownhuman capital’’ (Gordon, 1991, p. 44). That is to say,instead of citizenship constituted in terms of socialobligations and collectivised risk, it becomes individua-lised based on one’s capacities to conduct oneself in anentrepreneurial and responsible manner. Such entrepre-neurialism forms the basis for governing throughcommunity. The claimed passivity that socialised formsof government are said to foster is now to be overcomethrough residents taking a more active role in their self-governance. Thus, as Rose (1996a, p. 335) argues,‘‘[g]overnment through the activation of individualcommitments, energies and choices, through personalmorality within a community setting is counterposed tocentralizing, patronizing and disabling social govern-ment’’.

As part of the shift from society to the community asthe object of rule, the knowledge of expertise becomescrucial in ‘empowering’ people to manage their lives andadopting a prudent and calculative approach to self-governance. According to Rose and Miller (1992,p. 188), expertise translates the political concerns ofgovernment—efficiency, industrial productivity, lawand order, normality—into the politically neutraldiscourse of management, social science, accountingand so forth. Armed with techniques that promiseimproved financial management, a better lifestyle,efficient work practices or, in the case of ruraldevelopment, empowerment to improve communityeconomic fortunes, these expert knowledges seek toenhance self-regulatory capacities and thereby aligncommunity preferences and choices with broaderpolitical objectives. Expertise is considered by manyrural development practitioners to be a crucial, yetlargely neutral, mechanism in enabling communitymembers to ‘know’ their capabilities and developpositive entrepreneurial attitudes through which theyare able to build their leadership capacities, reducegovernment dependency and create sustainable devel-opment (e.g. Murray and Dunn, 1995). In contrast, weargue, using the analytical approach of governmentality,that expertise seeking to achieve change in an advancedliberal way acts as a key ‘centre of calculation’ (Millerand Rose, 1990; see also Latour, 1990) in making‘community’ knowable, and in constituting the discur-sive framework through which communities can reflecton their conduct and transform themselves into activeagents in their self-governance. As Rose (1996a, p. 348)notes in support of this point, empowerment isconcerned primarily with experts providing the tutelageand technical means for individuals ‘‘to conductthemselves within particular cultural communities ofethics and lifestyle according to certain specified arts ofactive personal responsibility’’.

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1Higgins (2002) makes a similar point in relation to agricultural

governance.

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Rationalities and technologies of rule represent thesubstance by which expert knowledge seeks toshape self-governing capacities in an advanced liberalway. Expertise is an essential element in linkingrationalities of rule to the technologies or technicalmeans for putting them into effect. Rationalities areconcerned with the proper ends, means and limits ofgovernment. Following the work of Foucault, rational-ities can be conceptualised as more or less systematicdiscursive means for organising social life on the basis ofknowledge deemed to be truthful (Rose, 1999, p. 28).Technologies comprise what Dean (1999a, p. 31)calls the technical means that enable rule to bepractically possible. They comprise a loose and shiftingset of techniques for transforming rationalities of ruleinto a technical means for shaping conduct ‘at adistance’. These technologies may be conceptualised ascomplex assemblages of knowledge, expertise, calcula-tion, representation and inscription that seek to shapeconduct in particular directions for particular purposes(Dean, 1996).

While community-led development strategies seekingto change attitudes can be conceptualised as anassemblage of rationalities and technologies for govern-ing in an advanced liberal way, it is also important toexamine how such a modality of rule achieves effects onrural development practice. We argue that the notion ofrisk provides a conceptually coherent means of analys-ing the productive consequences of expert knowledge.Risk represents a rapidly growing area of sociologicalinquiry that is no longer confined simply to environ-mental issues (see Lupton, 1998; Adam et al., 2000).While not discussed specifically in the rural restructuringand development literature, it seems to us that commu-nity-led development is concerned fundamentally withrisk through forms of knowledge, practices and writingthat make sense of particular harms, dangers or threats(see Adam and Van Loon, 2000, p. 2). Rather thanexisting as an external and incalculable threat, asscholars such as Beck (1992) suggest, risk can better beunderstood, through the lens of governmentality, as anoutcome of the ordering practices through whichcommunity is rendered visible and calculable. Thisrequires moving beyond orthodox modernist notionsof community as a pre-given, fixed space beyond therealm of the state (Schofield, 2002, p. 679), andconsidering the various ways in which governingoperates through community to produce and order risk.As Dean (1999a, p. 177) argues:

Risk is a way—or rather, a set of different ways—ofordering reality, of rendering it into a calculableform. It is a way of representing events in a certainform so they might be made governable in particularways, with particular techniques and for particulargoals.

This definition suggests that risk is an effect ofparticular knowledge practices. In other words, certainphenomenon, sets of events or types of conduct aredeemed risky as a consequence of being rendered visiblethrough forms of representation and calculation. Forinstance, as Levi (2000, p. 599) notes, making acommunity visible ‘‘is a central element in being ableto implement risk management strategies that go beyondthe state’’.

One of the main effects of advanced liberal forms ofrule noted in the governmentality literature is thedivision between those who are deemed unable toadequately govern themselves, and those who have thecapabilities to ‘properly’ engage in practices of self-governance. Dean (1999a, p. 167) (see also Dean, 1999b,p. 147) argues that, on this basis, an emergent divisioncan be identified between active citizens (capable ofgoverning themselves with minimal assistance) andtargeted populations (‘high risk’ groups who requireextensive expertise and tutelage). However, rather thanexisting as a strict divide, this categorisation representsmore of a continuum where risk ‘‘can be minimized,localized and avoided, but never dissipated’’ (Dean,1999a, p. 167). From this perspective, all rural commu-nities are effectively ‘at risk’, but those who have takensteps to ‘properly’ diagnose this risk through expertise,are most likely to be regarded as having demonstratedthe capacities for effective self-governance. As aconsequence, we argue in the remainder of this paperthat those communities who seek to manage risk bycalling upon experts in capacity building are representedas having ‘demonstrated’ an entrepreneurial attitude toimproving their sustainability and therefore ought to berewarded with government funding. Conversely, failureto manage risk in this way is represented as a problem inadjusting to the demands of a global economy and indeveloping sustainable solutions to rural decline.1

3. The production of rural communities as sites of risk

In early 1999, Deputy Prime Minister of Australiaand leader of the National Party, John Anderson, issueda statement to the National Press Club in Canberra thatAustralia was in danger of being divided into twonations (Anderson, 1999a). Where the metropolitan andlarge provincial centres were thriving under improvedaccess to telecommunications and infrastructure, An-derson was concerned that the traditional heartland ofrural and regional Australia faced the prospect ofdeclining services, low commodity prices, high levels ofunemployment and a fall in living standards. Thegreater part of a decade of neoliberal-style thinking

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amongst the major political parties had clearly hastenedthe decline of services in country areas, yet it was globalpressures combined with technological change in agri-culture, and not government policy, that Andersonconsidered the principal cause of the rural downturn.Indeed, he insisted that governments were just aspowerless to resist these changes as rural peoplethemselves:

We are moving—inexorably and unavoidably—fromthe industrial age to the information age. We cannotstop it. We cannot turn our backs on it. We cannot goback. Indeed, we cannot even stand still. Govern-ments have not caused this change, and governmentscannot stop it. Governments are just as much caughtup in the vortex of change as are the communitiesthey serve (Anderson, 1999b).

The claim that globalisation is an unstoppable andinevitable phenomenon is a common one that has longbeen challenged by academic commentators (Koc, 1994;Kelsey, 1995; Hirst and Thompson, 1999; Larner andWalters, 2002). Nevertheless, it forms part of a powerfuladvanced liberal rationality that represents Australianrural industries and associated communities as havinglittle alternative but to accept the necessity of adjustingto these changes. In other words, the risks of agricultur-al restructuring, unemployment and community declinethat are associated with globalisation come to be seen asan unfortunate, but largely inescapable, characteristic ofcontemporary rural living.

It is ironic, therefore, that the same trends that areseen to threaten the viability of many rural towns andregions in Australia should equally be regarded asbringing them new opportunities. According to a 2000House of Representatives inquiry into the future ofregional and rural Australia, however, this very conclu-sion was drawn (House of Representatives StandingCommittee on Primary Industries and Regional Ser-vices, 2000, p. 2). Rural regions, it was argued, are well-placed to advance their own future in the expandingglobal economy by identifying and capitalising on theircompetitive advantage through value-adding or nichemarketing in existing industries, or by diversifying theireconomic base through the pursuit of new ‘postmodern’industries such as tourism. Consistent with the trends ofthe last decade (Wright, 1990; Kearns, 1995; Garlick,1997), these opportunities were seen as best capturedthrough strategies of community ‘self-help’ wherebyrural people and their communities adopt an entrepre-neurial and innovative approach to their own develop-ment by exploiting ‘‘a range of opportunities to befound in their own back yards’’ (Sher and Sher, 1994,p. 35). This belief is characteristic of an advanced liberalform of governing (see Rose, 1993).

If the claimed risks associated with globalisation areseen as an unavoidable threat to the viability of rural

community life and/or a source of opportunity waitingto be captured, the key issue to emerge is howcommunities should ensure that they benefit from,rather than become casualties of, these changes. Thecontemporary advanced liberal emphasis on ‘bottom-up’ or community-led development means that themanagement of these risks is no longer an activity ofthe state, but the responsibility of rural citizens and theircommunities. The outcome is that Australia’s ruralcommunities are not merely constituted as sites of risk,in which the detrimental impacts of globalisation are feltmost acutely (Organisation for Economic Cooperationand Development, 1993, pp. 26–27), but also as theappropriate managers of such risk (Levi, 2000, p. 581).This shift in responsibility for risk management renderscommunities as key sources of risk, for it is their ownresponse to (or management of) these challenges thatultimately determines their fate. Put another way, it isthe conduct of rural people in light of changingeconomic and political circumstances that constitutesthem as more or less ‘at risk’ from the rural downturn.

It is here that expertise assumes importance in makingcommunities knowable as sources of risk, and inenabling rural people to shape their conduct in orderto implement ‘proper’ risk management strategies. Thesignificance of expertise in rural community develop-ment is illustrated most clearly when we consider howchecklists of sustainability have been formulated inrecent years to identify the key ingredients of what itmeans to be a ‘sustainable’—and therefore an ‘unsus-tainable’—community (see Fig. 1). These checklists arelargely provided by development experts as a way ofassisting rural residents in measuring the sustainability‘performance’ of their own communities, and indetermining whether remedial measures to improve thatperformance are necessary. However, the constructionof checklists is not the neutral process that it mightappear. Instead, they are a type of governmentaltechnology that attempts to constitute, represent andshape community and risk in an advanced liberalmanner. This occurs in a number of ways.

First, sustainability checklists are a technical means ofproblematising rural communities and rendering visibletheir ‘pathologies’. Much has been written in the ruraldevelopment literature on the importance of communityaudits for promoting local ownership of developmentinitiatives (see, for example, Ashby and Midmore, 1996;The Aspen Institute, 1996; Ward and McNicholas,1998). Sustainability checklists ease this process byproviding local residents with a yardstick for measuringtheir own strengths and weaknesses. At the same time, ithas also been recognised that the collection of factsabout rural communities in response to these checkliststranslates them into a form that can be made calculableand amenable to intervention, not only by others butalso by themselves (Ward and McNicholas, 1998, p. 35).

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Healthy Communities Unhealthy Communities

Optimism, hope, ‘we are in this together’ Cynicism

‘We can do it’ ‘Nothing works’

Value intangibles of vision, value Emphasis only on tangibles

Consensus building Polarisation

Collaboration Confrontation

Focus on the future Debate the past

Interdependence Parochialism

Broad community participation Few do everything

Leadership renewal Same old faces

Think and act in long term Short-term thinking

Listening Attacking

Reconciliation Holding grudges

Win-win solutions Win-lose solutions

Politics of substance Politics of personality

Patience Frustration

Diversity Exclusion

Challenge ideas Challenge people

Problem solvers Blockers and blamers

Fig. 1. Healthy/unhealthy communities balance sheet (The IDEAS Group, undated).

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Indeed, if rural community members are to manage theirown risks in a sustainable and responsible manner, it isimperative that they should subject themselves totechnologies of self-examination and self-reflection(Rose, 1998, p. 156–160; see also Foucault, 1985, p. 29)in order that they come to ‘know’ themselves (Foucault,1988, p. 22), the risks they face, and their ability tomanage those risks appropriately.

A second point may be drawn from this. By their verynature, these checklists create a distinction betweencommunities that are unsustainable or ‘at risk’ andthose that are comprised of ‘active’ and entrepreneurialcitizens (Dean, 1999b, p. 147) who manage their ownrisks in a ‘healthy’ (The IDEAS Group, undated),‘responsible’ (Wise, 1998) or ‘sustainable’ (Shaffer,1995) way. As Fig. 1 shows, the basis for the calculationand classification of this risk is not so much the state ofa community’s decline—such as population levels or thepresence or absence of essential services—but how thatcommunity conducts itself in the face of economic andsocial change.

According to the balance sheet in Fig. 1, healthycommunities are deemed to exhibit such positivecharacteristics as optimism, consensus, collaborationand interdependence, while unhealthy communities arethose that are cynical, parochial, frustrated andconfrontational (The IDEAS Group, undated). Theseso-called unhealthy communities can minimise their(attitudinal) risk only by subjecting themselves to theintervention of experts who can assist them in develop-ing the ‘right’ attitude to development. Similarly, Wise

(1998, p. 90), an economic development expert fromNew Zealand, argues that non-responsible communitiesare those that exhibit the following beliefs andbehaviours: blaming others, an unagreed vision andpurpose, a reliance on out-of-town experts and re-sources, an emphasis on hope rather than results,competition for scarce resources, and repeating mistakesrather than learning from them. Responsible commu-nities, one would presume, exhibit the opposite: accept-ing responsibility for their own problems, coordinatingtheir efforts, visions and purposes, relying upon theirown skills and resources, getting results, collaboratingover resources, and learning from their mistakes. Theoutcome, as argued above, is that rural communities arenot merely constituted as managers of risk, but as thevery sources of that risk.

Third, particular ‘truths’ about the risks facing ruralcommunities are constructed and normalised in such away that certain risk management techniques becomeself-evident. Thus, the constitution of rural communitiesas sources of risk means that strategies put forward toavert these risks involve the reconstruction of non-responsible or risky communities into active citizens(Rose, 1996b, p. 60). This, in turn, relies upon theimplementation of what Dean (1999b, p. 147) calls‘technologies of agency’, which seek to build the self-governing propensities of rural dwellers in the followingways:

ytraining to equip them with the skills of self-promotion, counselling to restore their sense of

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2Pseudonyms have been used for the two communities to maintain

confidentiality.

L. Herbert-Cheshire, V. Higgins / Journal of Rural Studies 20 (2004) 289–302294

self-worth and self-esteem, [and] programmes ofempowerment to enable them to assume their rightfulplace as self-actualising and demanding subjectsy(Rose, 1996b, pp. 59–60).

Within Australian rural development, the adoption ofthese technologies is very much in evidence as pro-grammes of farm financial counselling, motivationalconferences, leadership training schemes and generalself-help strategies are established and circulated toaddress the assumed demoralisation, powerlessness andnegativity of rural people.

Fourth, central to this process are communityeconomic development officers, international and na-tional motivational speakers, professional facilitatorsand other rural development ‘experts’, many of whomhave achieved near-celebrity status for their knowledgeand opinions on how rural development should best beapproached (see, for example, Kenyon, 1999; Allen,1999). The seemingly independent advice and assistancethey offer rural communities in the absence of statedirectives is regarded as vital to the success of local self-help initiatives. At the same time, however, experts arealso well placed to shape and guide local developmentstrategies according to rationalities that specify good,normal or responsible ways for communities at risk toconduct themselves (Rose and Miller, 1992, p. 175). Notonly do they expose rural people to the norms ofconduct that are said to characterise responsible orhealthy communities, they also facilitate the process inwhich rural people act upon and transform themselvesaccording to these norms, through the provision ofsupport and training.

Fifth and finally, the distinction between risky andresponsible communities created by checklists gives riseto what Foucault (1984, p. 276) calls ‘functionaldiscriminations’. We have already argued that theclassification of communities is an outcome of thecalculability of risk from which judgements aboutnecessary remedial solutions can be made. The furthersignificance of these classifications, however, lies in theway they are also acted upon to bestow punishment andreward upon communities that either ignore or conformto these ideas. In 2000, for example, the CommonwealthDepartment of Transport and Regional Services re-leased the Regional Solutions Programme, allocatingAU$90 million to assist regional and rural communitiesexperiencing high levels of economic and social dis-advantage (Commonwealth Department of Transportand Regional Services, 2000). While specifically for-mulated to assist communities at risk, the purpose ofRegional Solutions is not to provide a welfare safety netto all disadvantaged groups, but to support commu-nities who are able to make a case that their capacity toidentify and implement development opportunitiesneeds building. Indeed, eligibility for the programme is

not simply a matter of the Department targeting areasthat it considers in greatest need of assistance, but forresidents of those places to identify themselves as highrisk and to demonstrate the nature and extent of thatrisk in their application. Those able to do this are‘rewarded’ with the opportunity to access Common-wealth government funding for the design and imple-mentation of community development activities. As aresult, the Regional Solutions Programme applicationform represents a technological means for communitiesto reflect and act upon their conduct in an advancedliberal way. The following two sections of this paperoutline two case studies that explore the role ofexpertise, and associated governmental technologies, inconstructing risk. While the community described in thefirst case study actively involved experts in attempting totransform its fortunes, the community in the second didnot. We examine specifically the consequences of thesedecisions in terms of how each community wasrepresented as a site of risk, and the ‘functionaldiscriminations’ imposed.

4. Risky and responsible communities in Queensland: a

case study of Austin and Blackton

The arguments raised in the previous section of thispaper are illustrated most clearly through an examina-tion of two rural towns in Queensland,2 which haveresponded to the pressures of decline in quite differentways. As with many parts of rural Australia, both havebeen vulnerable to drought, fluctuating commodityprices and agricultural change and restructuring, andhave witnessed the rationalisation, centralisation orprivatisation of services by State and Commonwealthgovernments according to arguments of efficiency andeconomic necessity. Such policies have not beenrestricted to country areas (McManus and Pritchard,2000, p. 3), yet their impact upon the two commu-nities—Austin and Blackton—are such that the futureviability of these communities has been called intoquestion on more than one occasion.

In spite of these broad similarities, importantdifferences exist between the two towns, which havecontributed to Austin being discursively constructed bystate agencies and rural development experts as a self-help rural success story and Blackton as one whereapathy and negativity prevail. Consistent with thearguments put forward in this paper, the basis for theseapparent differences lies in the representation of eachtown as having managed risk with greater or lesserdegrees of success. Where Austin is represented as oncebeing a town with a negative and unhealthy attitude to

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the problems it faces, the establishment of the Woomer-oo Action Group in 1991, and this group’s engagementwith expertise (and its subsequent exposure to advancedliberal rationalities and technologies of rule) has steeredthe town towards a more entrepreneurial and self-reliantform of risk management.

For Blackton, in contrast, the so-called turnarounddoes not appear to have occurred. Instead, the town isconstituted as a community ‘at risk’, as residentsdemonstrate a capacity to do little more than reactangrily to processes of restructuring and change, whichthey interpret as threats to their established way of liferather than opportunities to be explored. While thelabels attached to these two towns are largely discursiveconstructions, the implications are profound when actedupon through the functional discriminations discussedearlier in this paper.

The research upon which the following case studiesare based took place over a 3-year period from 1999 to2001 and involved several visits by one of the authors toboth towns. As well as drawing upon local newspapers,history books, demographic records, community strate-gic plans and local government publications, theprincipal source of data was a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews combined with short periods ofparticipant observation at community events. In total,41 interviews (20 in Austin and 21 in Blackton) wereconducted with community leaders, members of localorganisations, Shire councillors and state and localgovernment employees. Participants were asked a rangeof questions about the kinds of issues their town faced,the various ways in which residents had responded tothese issues, their relationship with government andnon-government expertise, and any challenges oropportunities they had encountered in formulating theirown development initiatives.

4.1. Austin: a ‘responsible community

Located over 500 km west of the Queensland capitalof Brisbane, Austin is the principal township of the ruralshire of Woomeroo, which covers an area of 27,793 km2

(Austin Tourist Brochure, undated, p. 1). In June 2001the resident population of Woomeroo amounted to 1806people (Queensland Office of Economic and StatisticalResearch, 2001a), more than half of whom live inAustin. The remainder of the population is dividedamongst the surrounding rural area and the smallertownships of Doveton and Tullumbungee. Consistentwith the trend of negative growth that characterisesmuch of inland Australia, the shire’s population hasbeen declining steadily since the 1950s. Nevertheless,Woomeroo remains an important primary productioncentre for Queensland, with well over half of allbusinesses in the shire falling under the category ofagriculture, forestry, fishing and mining (Queensland

Office of Economic and Statistical Research, 1999, p. 3).The rural sector is dominated by sheep and cattlegrazing, while the principal crops in terms of agricultureare wheat, barley and oats. Timber is also an importantsource of income for Woomeroo and the shire holds twoof the biggest cypress pine crown licenses in Queensland(The South-West News, 1997, p. 3).

Highly dependent upon the pastoral pursuits of wooland cattle, Austin has suffered in recent years from theeffects of agricultural restructuring and rural commu-nity decline. Although these processes have beenongoing since the 1950s, the shift by Australiangovernments towards neoliberal policies of competitionand efficiency has made the impacts of such changeseven more pronounced over the last two decades. In1991, for example, Austin was one of a number ofQueensland country towns identified, in a special reportby the state newspaper, The Courier Mail (1991, p. 3), as‘‘dying’’. This diagnosis was confirmed in the same yearby the then Deputy Premier of Queensland, who wasreported by participants to have informed them during avisit to Austin that the town would cease to exist within10 years.

A decade later, Austin continues to be featured innewspaper and government reports, but no longer as atown that has no future. Instead, it is seen to exemplifythe virtues of a self-help rural recovery and the qualitiesof a responsible and sustainable community. With anumber of new industries such as tourism now in place,Austin is considered as having successfully transformeditself by changing its attitude and ‘‘taking responsibilityfory[its] own destiny’’ (The Courier Mail, 2000).Indeed, according to the Queensland State Strategic

Plan: Regional and Rural Development Strategy of 1998,where once the population of Austin had a negative, ‘‘itwon’t work here attitude’’, now it takes an ‘‘anything’spossible’’ approach to its own development (QueenslandGovernment, 1998, p. 14). Of central importance in thisapparent transformation is the Woomeroo ActionGroup, established by local residents in 1991 in responseto a decision by the Queensland State Government todowngrade Austin’s railway and remove its court andlegal services. Reactionary in nature, the WoomerooAction Group initially operated as a lobby group topressure the State government into reversing its deci-sions through public protests, petitions and mediacampaigns. Over time, however, it has gradually movedaway from these kinds of activities and now operates asa vehicle for economic development in the town.

In spite of its various successes, the WoomerooAction Group has not been able to address the shire’sfalling population, which is now even lower than the1991 figure of 2239 (when Austin was said to be dying).As the Chief Executive Officer of the Woomeroo ShireCouncil pointed out during his interview, neither has itbeen able to improve the viability of agricultural

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producers in the shire or to overcome the sense ofalienation felt by many local residents. That theseconcerns are ever present implies that the apparenttransformation of Austin from a dying town to one witha future has little to do with any apparent reduction inthe kind of problems it faces and more with the changesthat have taken place to the Woomeroo Action Groupin constituting the nature of risk. The way in which thistransformation has occurred, the kind of interventionsand expertise deemed necessary, and the techniques ofself-examination through which the group came to‘know’ and act upon itself are outlined below.

While Austin had been experiencing diminishingeconomic fortunes for a number of decades, it was notuntil it was officially, and publicly, diagnosed as a dyingtown that any action on the part of local residents wasconsidered necessary. Even then, the label of ‘risk’ hadbeen imposed by others, rather than self-diagnosed, andthe response it cited from the already disenchanted localpopulation was not the kind of action expected of aresponsible community. In this sense, Austin was clearlya high risk category: a targeted community (Dean,1999a, p. 147) whose capacity for effective risk manage-ment needed building. This process of capacity buildingoccurred, in the first instance, through a series of FutureSearch Workshops held in Austin shortly after theformation of the Woomeroo Action Group. Jointlysponsored by the Woomeroo Shire Council and theQueensland Department of Business, Industry andRegional Development (now Department of StateDevelopment—DSD), the purpose of the workshopwas to stimulate self-help solutions to the problemsAustin faced. With the assistance of an expert facil-itator, participants were required to consider some ofthe strengths and weaknesses of Austin (see Fig. 2) and

What’s Unique?

Why do you like living here?

Safe place to live

Beautiful water

Low-cost community housing

Job availability (e.g. at council)

Hotels/pubs (5)

Beautiful gardens and tidy landscapes

Less chemicals and pollutants

Friendly people

Integration between races

Famous for bushrangers

Good education

Good small town feel

Fig. 2. Community appraisal of Austin

to examine ways of capitalising on those strengths whilstreducing any risks that arose from its limitations.Participants were also encouraged to identify neweconomic opportunities for Austin and develop theirown action plans for the implementation of these ideas.Eight potential projects were identified as worthy offurther investigation, which included a sand mining andbrick making industry, a meat processing works, a low-security jail, a wool scour and various tourisminitiatives. Only two of the eight—brick making andtourism—ever yielded positive outcomes, yet the FutureSearch Workshop was still seen to be an important eventin Austin’s turnaround because it provided the necessarycatalyst for the town’s transformation. As the Mayor ofWoomeroo noted:

I missed the first workshop but it was inspirational.That’s the best way of describing it. The transforma-tion of the attitudey People moved from beingnegative to being positive. They were so enthusiastic.

For rural towns and regions seeking to improve theirown conditions of existence, Future Search Workshopsand similar capacity building activities have become acrucial centre of calculation for effective rural riskmanagement. As well as convincing rural residents ofthe need for self-help solutions to the rural downturn,such programmes of appraisal, audit and self-assessmenthave also been shown to render communities calculablein an advanced liberal way, and to make them knowableto themselves. In Austin, for example, the exposure ofFuture Search participants to these ‘modes of subjecti-vation’ (Foucault, 1985, p. 28) induced a process of self-reflection amongst local residents about the risks theirtown was facing—some of which they began to‘recognise’ as arising from their own negativity, apathy

What don’t you like?

What challenges Austin?

Distance in terms of services and goods

Disunity (not really a true

representative body of the community)

Negative reactions (apathy)

Vandalism and lack of respect for the law

and property

Extreme variations in climate

Lack of cultural activities

Lack of upper and tertiary education

Lack of incentive for people to better

themselves

Lack of vision

(Woomeroo Action Group, 1996).

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and disunity. Under the tutelage of visiting expertswho attended the workshops, participants were en-couraged to see that having a positive and ‘can-do’attitude was far more important for securingAustin’s future than either proximity to services orgreater levels of government investment. In learning ofthe positive, entrepreneurial and ‘active’ forms ofconduct necessary for rural regeneration, the Woomer-oo Action Group began to examine its own conduct inlight of these norms and found its ability ‘‘to get thingsdone’’ wanting. The result was that the role of theAction Group as a political lobby group began todiminish:

The Action Group then recognised that we needed todo more than just protest, we needed to take chargeof our own future and make things happen, for if wedidn’t, no one else would and our area would surelydie (Woomeroo Action Group, 1996, p. 13).

What this meant, as another participant put it, isthat the Woomeroo Action Group could no longerafford to ‘‘get on the wrong side of government’’.Instead, members of the group began embracinga politically subdued, but economically productive,form of action by accepting that the risks their townfaced could only be managed by changing their own

conduct and not by attempting to reverse that ofgovernments.

It was also through this process of subjectivation thatthe Action Group came to realise, of its own accord,that it could not progress with this new entrepreneurialform of action unless it received additional training orassistance. Indeed, in what Rose (1993, p. 296) terms the‘‘reversability of relations of authority’’, the WoomerooAction Group began to seek expert advice as a matter ofchoice by inviting motivational speakers to facilitate itsworkshops, by participating in programmes of capacitybuilding such as leadership training schemes and,ultimately, by recruiting the assistance of paid profes-sionals. In the first instance this involved the appoint-ment of an Economic Development Officer (EDO) in1995 who was partly funded by the Action Group andpartly by the Woomeroo Shire Council. Since then, theEDO has been joined by a host of paid experts who nowmake up the Woomeroo Shire Council’s EconomicDevelopment Unit: a Tourist Development Officer, aRural Youth Worker, a Cultural Development Officer,and a Manager of Entrepreneurial and MarketingServices. The kind of assistance the Woomeroo ActionGroup receives from these experts is also substantiallydifferent from the kind of capacity building expertise itonce required. Increasingly practiced in effective riskmanagement, the Action Group has become quiteselective about the kind of expertise it now needs andis far more likely to draw upon its paid officers forresearching and preparing grant applications than it is

upon the motivational speakers and facilitators it onceenlisted:

What really turned this town around was a womancalled XX. She came to Austin as the first EDO andwas just the loudest, pushiest person. But I think youneed people like that to get you going. Once you’regoing, you’re fine. Because XX left at just the righttime I think. This town doesn’t need anyone like XXany more. It’s got to the point where we can keep ourown energy levels up (Member of the WoomerooAction Group).

In summary, the transformation of Austin from arisky to a responsible community is virtually complete.Over the past decade, the town has received a great dealof attention in Queensland for its local developmentactivities and it is now showcased as a triumph incommunity self-help. The Woomeroo Shire Council hasreceived three management excellence and tourismawards for its role in turning Austin around, and morethan A$920,000 has been injected into the town since1997 through successful grant applications to suchprograms as the State government’s Rural LivingInfrastructure and Local Government DevelopmentPrograms, and the federal government’s Networkingthe Nation and Regional Assistance Programs. Mostimportantly, Austin is an outward manifestation of thissuccess with its new tourist industry and otherinitiatives, which provide concrete ‘proof’ that entrepre-neurial action and a positive mindset does, indeed, makea difference to declining country towns. The implication,however, is that the principal determinant of Austin’sregeneration was a change in attitude of the peopleliving there and a shift from a reactive to a proactiveform of action. In other words, the risks facing Austinwere not so much the withdrawal of services from thetown, or even its marginalisation from the globaleconomy, but the failure of local residents to managethese risks effectively. Exposed to the message ofexperts, technologies of self-assessment, and capacitybuilding activities, the Woomeroo Action Group sooncame to realise that adjustment was the only solution.Once this occurred, Austin was no longer deemed to bean at risk community that was unlikely to exist within 10years, but a sustainable, responsible and healthy towncapable of taking control of its own destiny (see Dean,1999a, p. 168).

4.2. Blackton: a community at risk

The experiences of Blackton, a rural shire locatedapproximately 500 km north of Brisbane, are somewhatdifferent from the rural success story of Austin. LikeAustin, Blackton has a low, and declining, populationbase of just 2641 people, approximately 35 per cent ofwhom are employed in the agricultural, forestry and

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fishing industries (Queensland Office of Economic andStatistical Research, 2001b). Although these industriespredominantly consist of beef and dairy cattle, pork,lucerne, grain and timber, some new enterprises invenison, red claw and grapes are beginning to emerge.This has diversified the agricultural base of Blackton inrecent years, yet the shire continues to rely heavily ondairying as its principal primary industry. One of thefew remaining industries in the shire with (until recently)a regulated and stable pricing structure, dairying hasalso provided important value-adding and employmentopportunities to Blackton through its butter makingfactory. The effect of this dependence is that thederegulation of the dairy industry in Australia, whichtook effect in 2000, has had an especially severe impacton the shire. Indeed, an inquiry by the AustralianBureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics(ABARE) into the impacts of deregulation identifiedBlackton as one of a number of localities in Australiawhere deregulation would have a high on-farm adjust-ment impact (ABARE, 2001). The off-farm impact hasalso been pronounced, with flow on-effects to localbusinesses and residents through lost income and jobs.Of greatest significance was the closure of the Blacktonbutter factory in March 2001, leaving 23 full timeemployees without work.

Aware of the risks to their viability that these changesposed, a group of dairy farmers established theConcerned Dairyfarmers of Blackton group in anattempt to address the social and economic fallout ofderegulation. Unlike Austin, the diagnosis of Blacktonas a community at risk was not imposed by externalobservers, but constructed by the Dairyfarmers group asa way of attracting attention, sympathy and governmentaction to their situation. This they did through mediacampaigns, letters to state and federal governmentministers and public meetings. While the region’seconomic development organisation spoke of thevalue-adding opportunities to dairying in Blacktonthat arose from deregulation (Southern CountryEconomic Development Organisation, 1998), the Con-cerned Dairyfarmers group could only point to thedetrimental, and often painful, impacts that deregula-tion was having upon the Blackton farming and towncommunity. In May 2001, for example, the ConcernedDairyfarmers group released the following statement tohighlight the effects deregulation was having upon thetown:

With the closure of the factory, it has forced apopulation decline which also impacts on the wholecommunity. One local Real Estate Agent has saidthat there are now at least 40 houses available to rentin Blackton and 102 houses for saley Somebusinesses within the town have already closed.Businesses previously supported by the dairy industry

have had to either amalgamate, downsize, close orbranch out into another field, just to survive.

The group also argued that a deregulated milk marketwas generally more suited to the Victorian dairyindustry, which had a better comparative advantagethan its Queensland counterpart (ABARE, 2001, p. 29).Unable to see how the benefits arising from deregulationapplied to Queensland, therefore, the Concerned Dairy-farmers group believed the risks associated with dereg-ulation in Blackton could not be managed withoutgreater levels of government intervention.

With this in mind, the group set out to obtaina government-funded rescue package for Blackton,requesting the provision of exceptional circumstancesor other forms of support payments to local dairyfarmers, and the establishment of a single desk pricingsystem for the dairy industry. The Mayor of Blacktonrationalised this course of action on the argumentthat he could not understand how governments‘‘could throw money at new businesses while the dairyindustry collapsed for want of help’’ (The Courier Mail,2001, p. 1). In his opinion, Blackton had a well-established industry that had always provided the shirewith a reasonable income, and could continue to do so ifonly governments were willing to help. ‘‘Throwingmoney’’ at new businesses was effectively seen as aninappropriate use of resources. To a certain extent, thecampaign was successful in that it prompted the FederalMinister for Agriculture to announce a A$1m fundingpackage to the broader Blackton community in the formof the Dairy Regional Assistance Programme for newbusiness and industry creation. Unable to address thespecific issues affecting the shire’s dairy farmers,however, the Concerned Dairyfarmers of Blackton sawitself as having little alternative but to cease functioningin mid 2001.

Unlike the Woomeroo Action Group, therefore, theConcerned Dairyfarmers of Blackton did not movetowards the entrepreneurial and proactive form of riskmanagement desired by governments. Instead, theyresisted on the basis that energies should be channelledinto protecting Blackton’s dairy industry. Once thegroup realised that its demands for a dairy rescuepackage were not going to be met and deregulationwould not be reversed, there was little else it could do,and the group subsequently disbanded.

For the Woomeroo Action Group, on the other hand,it was this very process of realising its protest andlobbying tactics had limited effectiveness which inducedthe group to adopt its positive ‘‘anything’s possible’’attitude. In attempting to explain why this change in riskmanagement strategies has occurred in Austin and notBlackton, one issue of interest here is the nature andextent of the relationship each community has estab-lished with expertise, and the implications of this. As the

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previous discussion indicates, the relations of rule thatexist between the Woomeroo Action Group and variousrural development experts have been significant inbringing about the town’s transformation from a riskyto a responsible community. This kind of engage-ment has not occurred in Blackton and the communityhas not come to realise that ‘getting ahead’ requires apositive and entrepreneurial attitude to change; thatthe capacity for this kind of conduct is presentlyabsent in Blackton; and that the support and encour-agement of experts is essential to this capacity buildingprocess.

The construction of Blackton as a negative andundeserving community has occurred in response tothe community’s frequent bouts of resistance againstprocesses or policies that undermine its viability. Indeed,one of the first lobby groups to emerge in the shire wasestablished in 1924 to pressure the Queensland Govern-ment into completing a missing rail link into the town(Johnston, 1982, p. 91). More recently, this activism hasre-emerged as Blackton residents have attempted toreverse a number of government decisions including thethreatened closure of their railway in the early 1990s bythe Queensland Labor Government. While Blacktonwas not the only town to face the loss of its railway,participants reported how they sought to prevent theclosure by holding public meetings, lobbying local andstate governments, forming a Rail Action Group and,ultimately, attracting the attention of the national mediathrough their ‘Claim a Train’ scheme. When the rail linewas placed under threat again in the late 1990s by aproposal to upgrade a nearby dam and flood part of theBlackton rail link, a petition from local residentsconvinced the State Government that the line shouldbe moved rather than closed. Similar demonstrationsalso took place in 1999 in response to the restrictionsplaced on the local timber industry by the RegionalForest Agreement, with two coaches of Blackton timberworkers, community members and shire councillorstravelling to Brisbane to join a mass rally (The CentralNorth Times, 1999, p. 1). In March 2000, local residentstook to the streets again and marched through theBlackton township to protest the withdrawal of theshire’s rural youth worker.

This history of activism in Blackton Shire hasprompted one participant to describe Blackton as acommunity that has always ‘‘got out and done things’’.Similarly, another observed that:

ywe’ve had our knocks but we still haven’t saidwe’re going to lay down and die and I don’t think weever will. Blackton is a town that fights for what itwantsy Yes, sure, we have our internal disagree-ments; what community doesn’t? But when it comesto the crunch line everyone comes together and worksfor what we want.

As a risk management strategy, however, this reactive,confrontational approach to change is no longer deemedacceptable from the perspective of advanced liberalrationalities of active citizenship and reduced govern-ment dependency. While their capacity to ‘fight for whatthey want’ has instilled a degree of pride in some of theresidents interviewed for this research, state agents andexperts are not so approving and have referred toBlackton as an ‘‘angry, resentful and bitter’’ communitythat is ‘‘unable to move forward’’. At a communityeconomic development seminar in 1999, for example,rural development experts from the DSD and DPI(Queensland Department of Primary Industries) identi-fied communities in Queensland that they considered tohave a healthy attitude, and others—including Black-ton—that they preferred not to work with because oftheir disillusionment, resistance and negativity. Similarperceptions of Blackton were articulated during inter-views for this research by a DPI officer who spoke of thelow opinion his colleagues had of the shire, andthe warnings he had received not to attempt to engagewith it.

The fairness or accuracy of these perceptions, andthe extent to which they (inaccurately) define Blackton’snegativity as a cause, rather than a consequence,of its present difficulties is problematic. So too is theway in which these perceptions have been madefunctional and acted upon to marginalise Blacktonfor its non-responsible and risky conduct by denyingit the expert assistance that rural communities havecome to rely upon. Fatalism anger and mistrust areall logical reactions to the uncertainty of contemporaryrural living in Blackton. A high level of dependencyupon government and an angry reaction when govern-ment ‘fails’ to deliver is also understandable insuch places such as Australia where there has been ahistory of government intervention via settlementschemes and large scale infrastructure provision. Yetif, as governments are arguing, the benefits ofrural change and restructuring are premised uponlocal people changing their attitude and thinkingdifferently about their problems (Cavaye, 1999), andif, as we have shown here, expertise is crucial to thischange, communities such as Blackton that constructand define their risk without expertise will continue tomiss out on support, and face criticism, disadvantageand marginalisation.

5. Conclusion

This paper has argued that particular forms ofexpertise are central to an understanding of howcommunity-led development operates as a form of ruralgovernance. Expert knowledge that focuses on thebuilding of ‘active’ and entrepreneurial citizens is more

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than simply a neutral means of empowering commu-nities to change their fortunes: it also constitutes andshapes community in an advanced liberal way. Thisproduces communities as sites, sources and managers ofrisk who need to engage in practices of self-reflectionand risk management in order to ‘properly’ develop.Significantly, it also creates functional discriminationsthat categorise communities according to their ‘attitude’to risk. Those that pursue the ‘wrong’ developmentstrategies, or that respond through such inappropriatemeans as protest, are consequently deemed asnon-responsible communities undeserving of outsidesupport.

Through the two case studies, we have demonstratedhow the categorisation of communities according totheir ‘attitude’ to risk and expertise creates functionaldiscriminations that may enhance inequality. By draw-ing upon expertise, and associated governmental tech-nologies, the town of Austin was able to make the risksit faced visible in an advanced liberal way, and to pursuestrategies that conformed to such representations. Aconsequence of this was that its developmental practiceswere progressively aligned with the rationalities of ruleunderpinning state agencies. Hence, Austin was con-structed as a success story and worthy of governmentsupport. In contrast, Blackton sought to construct andmanage risk in a very different way. While these localconstructions of risk were proactive in creating a senseof community, and facilitating collective action, theyalso served to marginalise the town because thecommunity did not draw upon the appropriate assis-tance of experts to make its risk visible in an advancedliberal way, or attempt to manage that risk in themanner required. By arguing that the problems facingthe community were external in nature, and thus couldnot be addressed by a simple ‘change of attitude’,Blackton was represented as a community that was notprepared to help itself and should not be worthy ofgovernment support.

These conclusions, while based on Australian casestudies, can also be seen as applicable to other nationswhere similar advanced liberal strategies of self-help,self-reliance and entrepreneurship are articulated. Thearguments canvassed in this paper suggest alsothat more attention needs to be given to the rationalitiesand technologies through which communities aremade to ‘think themselves into existence’ (Ward andMcNicholas, 1998) in order to be eligible for govern-ment support. While this issue is beginning to beaddressed in the rural governance literature, wehave argued that expertise and expert knowledgerepresents a key centre of calculation in thisprocess and, moreover, that this has practical implica-tions for community well-being. The effects of suchknowledge mean that rural researchers will need toincreasingly study the role of experts in rural governance

in terms of how they produce categories of riskyconduct, how those categories are acted upon, andwhat the consequences of this might be for ruralcommunities.

Acknowledgements

The research on Blackton was conducted as part of anAcademy of the Social Sciences Special Project in 2000under the leadership of Professor Chris Cocklin. Theauthors would like to acknowledge the support of theAcademy and other team members—particularly GeoffLawrence—during the course of the research.

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