CfP: AAG 2018, New Orleans
Politics and realities of EU-financed rural development in Eastern Europe
Many Eastern Europe (EE) governments are increasing their national-level anti-EU rhetoric even as their rural areas remain closely entangled with, and dependent upon, financial streams and programmes of the EU itself. EU rural development programmes have widely and popularly been promoted as a means for enhancing development prospects, employment and livelihood opportunities in marginal areas, both in order to maintain ‘traditional’ livelihoods, but also to protect rural landscapes and socio-ecological systems. The effects of these financial streams are significant as they compose not only a notable portion of some EE states’ GDPs, but are also often the predominant source from which rural infrastructures have been constructed and livelihoods sustained over the past decade, particularly in the sphere of agriculture.
Despite standard depictions or assumptions of marginalised, passive rural dependents as lacking agency, and of European institutions as distant and unknowing, the continued availability of European funds and programmes is today contributing to and consolidating processes of privatisation and neo-feudal relations over land, augmenting state power and oversight in new sectors, and giving rise to new governance forms and means, including clientelism and ‘mafia-state’ configurations (Magyar, 2014; Innes, 2015; Kovacs, 2015). Indeed, allegations of localised and grand corruption with EU funds are now beginning to be undergirded by demonstrated cases, and even databases (Fazekas & Toth, 2016). Against this backdrop, rural transformations in the EE region need to be examined through greater engagement and heightened awareness of how local elites and land users have strategically made use of, ‘captured’ and mobilised European financialisation streams, with far-ranging and long-term ramifications for society and the environment.
This call for papers and session therefore seeks to explore and unpack the historically embedded yet contemporarily relevant networks through which particular ways and means of ‘getting by’ (Saitta et al., 2013; Kovacs, 2016) are developed and sustained in rural Eastern Europe today. In so doing, it hopes to gather together scholarship that focuses specifically on understanding the ways in which European programmes and financialisation are generating and transforming these survival strategies in unforeseen and often undesired ways. We are particularly interested in research, experience and insights into how land, natural resource access and conservation fare, and are being impacted by, widespread graft, petty and formal corruption of state and EU processes.
Please send 200 word abstracts that explore, challenge and interrogate the following themes:
§ Environmental management transformations resulting from EU financialisation;
§ The unique and emerging political place of the ‘rural’ in Eastern Europe
§ The nexus between local-level informality and associated practices and networks, and multi-level tender or decision-making processes
§ The emergence of neo-feudalist relations within European rural space;
§ Unpacking “dependency” logics and the role of state financing in rural relations (including welfare)
§ Comparative cases and links to rural financialisation forms in other parts of the world also welcome
Please send 200-250 word abstracts to [log in to unmask]