Crisis and Post-Crisis in Rural Territories: Social Change, Challenges and Opportunities in Southern and Mediterranean Europe

214 Pages·2020·3.26 MB·English

by  Fatma Nil Döner, Elisabete Figueiredo, María Jesús Rivera

Fatma Nil Döner
Elisabete Figueiredo
María Jesús Rivera  Editors
Crisis and
Post-Crisis in
Rural Territories
Social Change, Challenges and
Opportunities in Southern and
Mediterranean Europe
Crisis and Post-Crisis in Rural Territories
Fatma Nil Döner • Elisabete Figueiredo
María Jesús Rivera
Editors
Crisis and Post-Crisis in
Rural Territories
Social Change, Challenges and Opportunities
in Southern and Mediterranean Europe
Editors
Fatma Nil Döner Elisabete Figueiredo
Department of International Relations Department of Social, Political and
Istanbul Medeniyet University Territorial Sciences
Istanbul, Turkey University of Aveiro
Aveiro, Portugal
María Jesús Rivera
Department of Sociology and Social Work
University of the Basque Country
(UPV/EHU)
Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
ISBN 978-3-030-50580-6 ISBN 978-3-030-50581-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50581-3
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
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Contents
1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Fatma Nil Döner, Elisabete Figueiredo, and María Jesús Rivera
2 Foreign Immigration to Rural Spain: An Exploration
of the Precarious Rural Cosmopolitanism
in the Post-Crisis Scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Rosario Sampedro and Luis Camarero
3 The Contribution of Mobilities to the Social Sustainability
of Rural Areas in a Context of Crisis: Structural Conditions,
Social Diversity and Inequalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Elvira Sanz Tolosana and Manuel Tomás González Fernández
4 New Rural Residents, Territories for Vital Projects
and the Context of the Crisis in Spain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Jesús Oliva and María Jesús Rivera
5 Respatialization of Migrations and Differentiated Ruralities
in Times of Crisis in Southern Italy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Alessandra Corrado, Giulio Iocco, and Martina Lo Cascio
6 Return to the Land in Times of Crisis: Experiences, Policies
and Narratives in an Inner Periphery of Southern Italy . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Carlotta Ebbreo
7 ‘No Choice’ or ‘A Choice’? – An Exploratory Analysis
of ‘Back to the Countryside’ Motivations and Adaptation
Strategies in Times of Crisis in Greece and Portugal . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Elisabete Figueiredo, Maria Partalidou, and Stavriani Koutsou
8 Transformative Mobilities and Resilience Dynamics
in Rural Coastal Greece in a Time of Recession . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Apostolos G. Papadopoulos and Loukia-Maria Fratsea
v
vi Contents
9 Solidarity and Justice in Local Food Systems:
The Transformative Potential of Producer-Consumer
Networks in Greece . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Sofia Nikolaidou
10 Villages at the State/Society Interface During the Crisis:
Toward New Territorial Boundaries
in Metropolitan Municipalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
Fatma Nil Döner
11 Concluding Remarks: What Is Next for Rural Areas
in the Aftermath of the Crisis? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
Fatma Nil Döner, Elisabete Figueiredo, and María Jesús Rivera
Chapter 1
Introduction
Fatma Nil Döner, Elisabete Figueiredo, and María Jesús Rivera
At the beginning of twenty first century, countries of Southern and Mediterranean
Europe were immersed in an uneven process of modernization and globalization,
both in the material and cultural sense. This restructuring process has taken a radical
hit since the deep crisis faced by Europe over the recent years was particularly harsh
in Southern European countries and in its rural territories, already affected by a long
lasting process of abandonment and political neglect. The new risks and impacts
presented by the financial and economic crisis on rural territories of Southern and
Mediterranean Europe emphasise the pertinence of conducting and promoting a
network of research and study focused on the analysis of the transformations, chal-
lenges, and opportunities for rural territories, in both the crisis and the post-crisis
contexts. The European Society for Rural Sociology (ESRS) Research and Study
Group (RSG): ‘Southern and Mediterranean Europe: Social Change, Challenges
and Opportunities’ (created in 2014), bringing together researchers and scholars
from Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Turkey, aim to contribute to foster research,
debates and findings on those topics. Born out of the RSG members’ research and
debates, this volume wishes to contribute further the so-far limited debate on the
processes and dynamics of rural change and on the opportunities and challenges
brought by the crisis.
F. N. Döner (*)
Department of International Relations, Istanbul Medeniyet University, Istanbul, Turkey
e-mail: [email protected]
E. Figueiredo
Department of Social, Political and Territorial Sciences, University of Aveiro,
Aveiro, Portugal
e-mail: [email protected]
M. J. Rivera
Department of Sociology and Social Work, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU),
Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
e-mail: [email protected]
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 1
F. N. Döner et al. (eds.), Crisis and Post-Crisis in Rural Territories,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50581-3_1
2 F. N. Döner et al.
Globalization is not a new phenomenon for the rural areas (Figueiredo 2013;
McCarthy 2008; Woods 2007, 2019). Contrary to popular belief, rural spaces have
already been connected to global world through mobilities, market forces, gover-
nance and emancipation practices for decades. Within the interplay of local,
national, and global actors, new interactions, new political frames of state and soci-
ety relations, hybridization, and new resilience strategies have emerged (Camarero
and Oliva 2016; Scoones 2009; Scoones et al. 2018). Uneven development, mobili-
ties, and rising inequalities through the use of land, labour and financial resources
for more competitive and efficient economic activities are the main impacts of glo-
balization on rural areas. However, concurrently these processes operating on mul-
tiple scales pose opportunities and manoeuvring spaces as well as constraints and
challenges for rural territories (e.g. Scott et al. 2019; Woods 2019; Taylor 2015).
Within the context of globalization, economic and financial crisis emerged in 2008
and the global recession afterwards has affected the economically vulnerable rural
places enormously (Ragkos et al. 2016). In other words, global processes of crisis
led by the priority of neoliberal policies have redesigned the uneven territories of
Europe (Papadopoulos 2019). The length and depth of the crisis and the impacts of
neoliberal austerity have also reverberated on academic research to investigate con-
straints and opportunities created by the economic crisis as a major external shock.
Due to a well-known set of transformations, especially to the recent economic
and financial crisis, rural areas in Southern and Mediterranean European countries
immersed in an uneven process of globalization and neoliberalization have been
facing numerous challenges. It is clear that the economic recession has instigated
the decrease in production, the loss of income, competitiveness, and jobs in the rural
areas (e.g. Anthopoulou et al. 2017). Even worse, by following international direc-
tives (namely European Union and International Monetary Fund), policies imple-
mented by countries have implied a severe reduction of public support to social
welfare and development in rural territories, along with the implementation of a
new model of governance (e.g. Ragkos et al. 2016; Murphy and Scott 2014). The
outcome is an increasing number of rural areas experiencing a deterioration of liv-
ing conditions: the closing of schools and health services, depatrimonialization and
degradation of commons, impoverishment of population, reduction of public trans-
port facilities, increasing social inequalities, and so forth. Hence, a new scenario is
shaped where the sustainability of rural areas and rural population are at stake.
These conditions lead to fundamental questioning of how rural areas survive
under the destructive effects of external disruptions of the crisis. In a nutshell, the
adaptive capacities of rural spaces in the time of crisis through mobilities, resilience
strategies and various land use and marketing practices, together with the percep-
tion of rural spaces as a “sheltering and protection buffer”, are offering safety nets
not only for rural dwellers but also for ex-urbaners (Anthopolou et al. 2017;
Figueiredo et al. 2019; Hilmi and Burbi 2016; Kasimis and Zografakis 2012;
Remoundou et al. 2016). Discussions on new residents, newcomers, counterurban-
isation, and return to countryside illustrate peoples’ search for security or better
quality of life in rural areas against the current economic downturn (Anthopolou
et al. 2017; Gkartzios 2013; Remoundou et al. 2016). Therefore, it is crucial not
1 Introduction 3
only to understand the main challenges against the survival of rural territories, but
also to scrutinize the manoeuvring and resilient strategies of rural communities and
its old and new populations during the crisis and in the post-crisis (Marsden
et al. 2019).
The preliminary results of the book highlight how economic crisis has affected
the different dynamics of ruralities, such as mobilities and social change, economic
diversification and resilience, land use, and access to services and governance.
While some of the dynamics in rural territories are challenged by the effects of cri-
sis, some of these factors can develop opportunities and deploy new resources and
capacities for rural areas to face the consequences of the crisis (Sánchez-Zamora
et al. 2014), bringing new actors, new visions and practices together. Therefore, this
book intends to identify, analyse, and discuss the main processes underlying the
recent changes and restructuring of rural territories in Southern and Mediterranean
European countries, within the scenario of crisis and its consequences. Especially,
this work expects to illustrate the adaptability of rural areas to the externally induced
shocks while contributing to discussion on the challenges and the opportunities
these processes represent for those areas.
The five countries – Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Turkey – examined in this
volume, despite sharing some common characteristics, equally present some speci-
ficities in terms of rural territories, population, employment structure and economic
relevance of agriculture. Furthermore, while Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain are
full members of the European Union, also subjected to the implementation of its
directives, policies and strategies (as the Common Agricultural Policy – CAP)
Turkey is still negotiating its accession after a long lasting and complex process of
dialogue. Regarding the totality of the European Union territory, rural areas1 cur-
rently represent 44.1%, while intermediate areas represent 44.3% and 11.8% are
urban areas. Predominantly rural areas represent the majority of the territory in
Portugal (79%) and in Greece (66%) while in Italy and in Spain they correspond-
ingly represent 24% and 16.9% with the intermediate areas occupying, in both
countries, the larger part of the total territory (correspondingly 54.4% and 59.8%).
In Turkey, predominantly rural areas represent just 5.2% of the country’s whole ter-
ritory, intermediate areas representing 74.2%. While these differences may be
explained, in the case of the EU countries, mainly by different settlement patterns,
in Turkey they are more directly connected to the recent changes in legislation and
governance of the rural territories (as Döner well explains in Chap. 10).
In 2018, 19.2% of the EU population lives in predominantly rural areas, 36.1%
in intermediate and 44.7% in predominantly urban ones. However, the distribution
of the population by type of region varies greatly between European countries and
particularly between the five countries examined in this book. While in all the five
1 Since the middle of the 2000, European Union uses a three-level classification of territories based
on population distribution – the rural-urban typology (Eurostat 2018) that includes Predominantly
Rural Areas; Intermediate Areas and Predominantly Urban Areas. Data used in this introductory
chapter derives from Eurostat (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/home?) and Turkstat (http://www.tuik.
gov.tr/PreTablo.do?alt_id=1007)
4 F. N. Döner et al.
countries more than 45% of the total population is located in predominantly urban
areas, in Greece and in Portugal more than 30% of the total population lives in rural
regions. Conversely, in Italy, Spain and Turkey less than 10% of the population is
settled in rural regions. This again may be explained by the differences in terms of
settlement patterns and territorial administration regulations. Between 2008 and
2018, the variation of the population by type of area also reveals some important
differences between the five countries. In Greece and in Portugal – the two countries
mostly affected by the austerity measures imposed by the IMF and the EU – the
population has decreased (or just marginally increased) in all the types of areas,
indicating the intensification of emigration movements in both countries especially
between 2010 and 2014. Although in Spain emigration equally increased in the
same period, population in the urban and intermediate areas has also increased,
whereas rural population dramatically decreased. Despite some differences, in both
Italy and Turkey the population has increased between 2008 and 2018 in all types of
areas but, especially, regarding urban regions.
The population working in agriculture, forestry and fisheries in 2018 is, apart
from Turkey (14.3%), rather residual in all the five countries considered in this vol-
ume, varying from 3.8% in Italy to 6% in Portugal. However, during the last
decade – and apart from Portugal where there was a decrease of 5.4% and from
Turkey with a decrease of 7.6% (TurkStat, Labour Force Statistics 2019) – the active
population in this sector has slightly increased, especially in Greece (1.2%). This
slight increase seems to be followed by an equally marginal growth (apart from
Turkey) regarding the contribution of agriculture to the Gross Value Added (GVA)
of each country, varying from 1.1% in Greece to 0.1% in Italy.
Overall and despite the abovementioned differences, Greece, Italy, Portugal,
Spain and Turkey share a common and persistent path towards deruralization and
deagrarianization and towards the loss of relevance of agriculture in terms of
employment and generation of income. This path is more evident in the EU coun-
tries in which the CAP had devastating effects, especially regarding small-scale
agriculture and peripheral rural areas (Figueiredo 2008). Although the financial and
economic crisis has reinforced these dynamics and triggered new ones, rural territo-
ries in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain were already going through a long-lasting
crisis. In these countries and contrary to the media and political narratives conveyed
especially between 2010 and 2014 (mainly in Greece, Portugal and Spain), the
recent crisis did not contribute in a significant manner to prevent the persistent
dynamics of rural depopulation and agricultural decline in many regions, in some
cases even reinforced those processes. However, as the contributions included in
this volume demonstrate, in some areas and communities, newcomers and returnees
certainly had an impact, their presence representing at the same time a diverse set of
challenges and opportunities to rural sustainability and development.
The chapters assembled in this volume address a diversity of topics in relation to
the crisis and post-crisis contexts in rural Southern and Mediterranean Europe, often
using a qualitative approach. The greater emphasis on a qualitative methodology is
related to the need of understanding these processes in a comprehensive and deeper
manner also in a context of inexistent or limited statistical data availability