Jørn Cruickshank

THE LOGIC OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF RURAL POLITICS: POLITICAL DISCOURSES ON RURALITY IN NORWAY

Abstract. Two competing discourses emerge from a careful reading of parliamentary debates in Norway on rural development. One regards rural values as intrinsic, while the other regards the rural as an actor in a play about economic growth. The ‘growth’ discourse has economic growth as its nodal point and fo‐cuses on the freedom of an individual to establish a business wherever he or she wishes, and to migrate to any preferred destination. The ‘intrinsic value’ discourse places the value of rural settlements and cultures as its nodal point and focuses on allegedly forced migration, a nature‐based economy, and local freedom of action. During the neoliberal period, starting about 1980 the strength of the intrinsic value discourse has been increasingly displaced by the growth discourse. The latter seems to match general social changes such as neoliberalism and globalization more than the former. However, analysing the fight between these two discourses is not exhaustive. A broader analytic perspective is needed if we want to understand the logic of how the meaning of rurality comes about. The meaning of rurality in Norwegian politics is made through the way the competing discourses link up to ‘nondiscursive’ topics that originate and evolve outside the discourses on Norwegian rural politics. We claim that topics which include economic safety and national identity/nation‐state are more or less fundamental to understanding the logic of the production of the concrete discourses of rurality in Norwegian politics. We provide evidence that rural change is contingent not only on the meaning‐making process in parliamentary debates, but on the way truth claims made by politicians are linked to general national and global issues.

Market, commodity, resource, and strength: Logics of Norwegian rurality

Rurality as a distinct category and rural identity grew out of a widespread mobilization of rural issues in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the idea that Norway can be split into two categories in a meaningful way, i.e. rural and not rural, is no longer hegemonic. Today, researchers and politicians conceptualize rural issues such that the rural as a category seems to dissolve. Through programme notes published by the Research Council of Norway since the early 1990s, we have tracked some of these new ways of conceptualizing the rural. Most evident in the underlying structure of reasoning is the logic of market, which is said to spring up in every Western economy in the neoliberal era. From this, rurality is understood in the context of globalization – again being linked to cultural complexity and innovation. Further, in this global context, rurality is being subordinated to the category region. The logic of market has also rendered possible a turn in the rural category from having a value of its own to being a commodity. All these changes have ultimately made it possible to use the structural metaphor of resource on rurality.

Creating Attractive Places for Whom? A Discourse-Theoretical Approach to Knowledge and Planning

We aim to find a way to produce knowledge of attractiveness of place that is representative of the variety and complexity of what attractiveness entails and the same time productive for place development and planning. On the basis of a study of an INTERREG IV A-project in Norway, we question how and by whom the discourse regarding what is attractive about places is constructed and how the implicit or explicit knowledge is treated in local planning. We find that planning must produce knowledge in which the different narratives about place confront each other, and highlight differences and mutual debate between adversaries. We conclude by arguing the case for applying a model of agonistic pluralism where the coproduction of discursive knowledge from ‘a logic of difference’ is at the heart of planning.

Protest against centralisation in Norway: The evolvement of the goal for maintaining a dispersed settlement pattern

Norwegian regional policies emphasise geography and demography more than structural factors such as business development, unemployment or income conditions, which are more important in the rest of Europe. The background for the particular Norwegian case is revealed in this article, through a discourse analysis of selected political and academic texts. During the 1960s a rural movement surfaced, articulating demands on behalf of the rural population. The mismatch between the rural mode of living and the government policy was revealed, mainly through the work of the sociologist Ottar Brox. This new approach to rurality, where an alternative modernisation scenario was introduced, formed the academic and political basis for claiming better protection of rural communities against the hegemonic strategy for modernisation. However, the articulations of this movement triggered other symbolic issues in Norway in the radical 1970s and policies came to be about much more than rural communities and particular rural interests. Working against centralisation became synonymous with working to preserve Norwegian culture and nature. In this article the widespread and continued support for a distributed settlement pattern is explained on the assumption that meaning springs from the representation of rurality to the represented rural condition, more than the other way around.

Is culture-led redevelopment relevant for rural planners? The risk of adopting urban theories in rural settings

In the paper, the author argues that cultural strategies and theories about urban planning may be irrelevant or even counterproductive outside urban and suburban contexts. In many rural settings the problem is not the destruction of the cultural heritage or how to counterbalance the influence from corporate interests, but rather the absence of such interests in the first place. From a study of two rural municipalities in southern Norway, the author demonstrates that culture-led strategies may be more of a distraction than an instrument for creating economic growth. Measured by the common goals for rural development in Norway, the cultural strategy has only been a success in one of the cases, whereas in the other case ideas about culture-led redevelopment have not prevented economic and demographic decline. The author concludes that while culture can be instrumental in creating growth in rural municipalities, it might also hamper their development.

A CRISIS OF DEFINITION: CULTURE VERSUS INDUSTRY IN ODDA, NORWAY

Abstract This article addresses the influence of dominant and traditional ways of grasping the reality in social and economic processes of change. Our point of departure is how the perception of crisis in Odda, a small industrial community in Norway, influences the course of the process of change. The analysis focuses on a heated debate over the exploitation of a large site in the centre of Odda, left after the closure of the key factory. Rather than the economic and social consequences of the closure, the main challenge that arose from the crisis was related to the emergence of ambiguity in the local conceptual framework. Coming to terms with the situation stimulated various attempts to rearticulate the discourse of local development, with the result that industrial and culture‐based perspectives on development came into conflict. The economic crisis became a crisis of definition. In Odda, the industrial discourse finally domesticated the competing cultural discourse, ending years of conflict and inaction. In its explicit focus on the importance of local struggles and the way discourse structures such processes this story about recent developments in Odda complements literature on post‐industrial development.

Local hegemonies resisting a green shift and what to do about it: the introduction of a regional park in southern Norway

ABSTRACT In the Lister region in the southern part of Norway, attempts are currently being made to facilitate for a green shift. The paper discusses two different approaches towards such a challenge. The first is procedural, where success or failure hinges on the methods applied in the effort to convince locals to incorporate climate considerations. The alternative is to reflect upon how a green ideology blends into pre-existing ideological elements in the region. It is claimed that an important reason for the failure so far to place the environment at the core of regional development, is that too much emphasis has been put on the first approach, on procedure and dialogue, whereas few efforts have been made to understand the structure of the discursive terrain in the region. What prevents a green shift has less to do with methods and is more connected to the dominance of a logic of economic growth and the fact that locals are confident that nature is already dealt with in a sensible manner. The conclusion is that we need to understand what people are concerned about and what prevents them to change, before we start telling them how to think and do development.