Innovation and Rural Development: Some Lessons from Britain and Western Europe

Taxibuses, dial-a-ride, Local Exchange Trading Schemes (LETS), telecottages, village design statements, ecomuseums, good-neighbour schemes, green audits, village trusts, post ofŽ ces in pubs, advice shops, train and build schemes, local produce markets ... all are examples of activities designed to help regenerate the local economy of particular rural areas and/or to improve the quality of life of the people living there. And all are typically introduced by local people and organisations as a response to some perceived problem unlikely to be solved by traditional ways of doing things. In short, all are ‘innovations’. This paper will focus speciŽ cally on innovation in a rural development context, pose some questions about its signiŽ cance, review four compendia of innovative initiatives and suggest what they imply both for our understanding of the theory of innovation diffusion in a rural development context and for the practical pursuit of such development. This is timely for two reasons. The Ž rst is that the encouragement of rural development, both in Britain and wider aŽ eld in Europe, is currently dominated by attempts to promote the spread of what is held to be ‘good practice’—be it in the restructuring of the local economy in the face of a continuing decline in agricultural and other land-based employment, in the provision for scattered rural dwellers of such services as healthcare, retailing and transport, in the machinery and processes of local economic regeneration, or whatever. Examples of ‘Good Practice Guides’ are legion and typically comprise attractively illustrated collections of short summaries of successful projects deemed worthy of wider application. They relate, for example, to village retailing, rural transport and childcare (Rural Development Commission, RDC, 1994, 1996, 1998 respectively), to partnership working (Slee & Snowden, 1997, for the Scottish National Rural Partnership), to consensus building (Sidaway, 1998), to the marketing of quality tourism (LEADER Observatory, 1996c), to the execution of ‘baseline studies’ prior to planning a local area development