A Proposed Framework for Rural Resilience – How can peripheral village communities in Europe shape change?

Abstract

Rural communities and villages across Europe currently face great challenges imposed by the social, economic and ecological transformations of the Anthropocene. Despite this, some of them successfully adapt to processes of change and develop positively, even though they are situated in regions where demographic change or the structural transformations in the agricultural sector promise an uncertain future for rural population. In search of plausible explanatory approaches, practitioners and academics fall back on the fuzzy concept of resilience. Can the concept of rural resilience explain this surprising adaptive capacity? What attributes does a resilient rural community or village possess? This article presents a conceptualisation of rural and village resilience inspired by three long-standing disciplines in this area of research: psychology, social ecology and community development. The conceptual framework developed will then be tested by means of a mixed-methods approach, combining questionnaires, interviews and participative observation in three potentially resilient villages in the following European peripheral rural areas: Oberndorf (Oste) in the Federal Republic of Germany, Wooler in the United Kingdom and Albarracín in Spain.