Social Innovation and Collective Action in Rural Communities

Rural regions are said to be areas where people are rather conservative and backward-looking than innovative and open-minded. Rural communities seem to maintain a traditional lifestyle and to be reluctant to change. Of course, these stereotypes ignore the many initiatives and new developments existing in these areas. Like in other places, in the countryside innovation and inventions come into being every day. People in villages and small towns constantly search for new ways of dealing with challenges and opportunities. This is also reflected by recent studies which direct attention to social innovation in rural regions. (Dax et al. 2013, Bock 2016, Neumeier 2016) However, innovative solutions and new developments remain still underrepresented in research in a time when demographic change and dying villages dominate the debates (Christmann 2017).

By means of two qualitative case studies and by applying social innovation theory (Rammert 2010) I will show how communities in a village and a small town proceed to deal with challenging situations in innovative ways. Even though the circumstances in both places differ (the investigated community in East Germany jointly constructed a wastewater treatment system, the observed community in Mid-West Ireland established a civic and sports centre which made the town an attractive place for in-migrants) both developments have some characteristics in common: in both cases an innovative idea promised to solve a need in a better way than the solutions already at hand, in both places the local community actively supported the idea and in both places persons with specific expertise and shaping power were crucial for the success and the sustainability of the initiative. My presentation wishes to contributes to a new rural sociology by focussing on rural innovation (instead merely on rural adaptation) and on collective action and community spirit (instead on villages as “mono-functional dormitory settlements”).