policy

The Great Divide – building bridges between cities and their rural hinterlands

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Don’t get me wrong, there are rural investments and there are rural initiatives, but they tend to be sectoral – you can run a project for older people or younger people or business people or just about any other ‘people’ you care to mention. But it’s a hard sell to persuade those holding the purse strings that rural areas deserve an integrated, holistic approach, an approach based on geographies rather than targeted bits of the population. This piecemeal approach to rural development gradually undermines the sustainability of rural geographies and chips away at our understanding of geographical identity and belonging. As a result of this, power and money and skills and resources have haemorrhaged away from rural communities over the decades, to be only partly replaced by the energies and aesthetic of a legion of culturally creative incomers.

State of the Union: Green energy and rural

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Rural resistance has helped slow the development of renewable energy. It doesn’t have to be that way. For the President’s green-energy plans to succeed, he needs to reach out to the rural leaders who are ready to act on climate change. President Barack Obama made urgent calls for new steps to address climate change in his State of the Union address yesterday, “for the sake of our children and our future.” While the focus was on renewable energy, he missed an opportunity to talk about the essential ingredient for addressing climate change: the support of rural communities.

From Green New Deal to New Economy Coalition (Part I)

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Here is a short overview and strategic assessment of the green economy movement, including its organizational makeup.  It concludes with recommendations for transitioning from a double bottom line movement to a triple bottom line one: being more inclusive of historically marginalized communities.