Second Growth: Community Economic Development in Rural British Columbia

Extract

Second Growth: Community Economic Development in Rural British Columbia, Sean Markey, John Pierce, Mark Roseland and Kelly Vodden, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005, pp. 352.

This theoretically rich, community economic development (CED) work, written by four members of the Centre for Sustainable Community Development (formerly the Community Economic Development Centre) at Simon Fraser University, is the product of a three-year participatory-action-based research project involving four “forest-based” British Columbia communities. Two Aboriginal communities and two municipalities were case studied as part of an action-learning exercise in order to gain “insight into the apparent conflict between the economic imperative and fluidity of capital versus the lived worlds of rural and small time places” (3). Through their empirical studies of the four communities, the authors argue that CED, fostered at the local level, can allow for the kind of capacity building that is needed to create diversified, sustainable economic futures for resource-based rural and small-town communities. They are careful, however, to distinguish between the use of CED as a “localized and palliative strategy” for marginalized communities caught in the throes of political and economic dependency, and the possibilities for a more robust (theoretically balanced) version of CED, which can become part and parcel of rural and small-town locally-based planning and development. While recognizing the appropriateness of CED in either situation, they argue that a host of negative economic and political factors, which are intensifying under the direction of neo-liberal ideological thinking, have resulted in a pressing need for the more robust form of community development and corresponding revitalization strategies.