At the beginning of the 21st century, rural policy remains one of the most important areas of the public policy in both developing and most advanced countries. Therefore, significant financial and human resources are made available for the implementation of this policy measures. For instance, in 2007 through 2013the European Union (EU) budget for European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development accounted for EUR 96.2 billion (11per cent of the total EU budget). A similar situation was observed in Lithuania. The amount of the EU support for rural development in 2007-2013 amounted to LTL 6 billion 096million with co-financing from the Lithuanian national budget of LTL 1 billion 799million. A large number of specialists and designated institutions develop and implement rural policy measures and monitor the support programmes. Are the huge financial and human resources assigned for rural development actually used in an efficient way, are rural policy decisions able to adapt to the highly dynamic situation in the business and social life?
Although new ideas keep emerging in rural policy, a deeper analysis of their content and relation with the older ideas reveals that concepts typical of the period of industrial society remain at the reference point of political decision-making. The fact that such concepts are out-of-date and at odds with the reality are attested by a great deal of scientific literature on this topic and the activity of society that entered the process of rural policy decision-making at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries and demanded an essential review of the underlying support principles and a justification of the public value created by farmers that are subject to the support. There were particularly heated discussions among scientists, politicians, farmers, environmentalists, and organisations protecting food consumers' interests when the guidelines for the EU rural policy post 2013 were being produced. Unfortunately, the prevailing forces of inertia prevented an essential shift in the rural policy paradigm by the transition to rural policy objectives and measures that are adequate for the knowledge society situation. Here, a great deal of responsibility should be assumed by scientists because the theory of management, economics, and social sciences still lacks sufficient convincing arguments in favour of the need for such transition based on holistic, evolutionary and systemic methodologies.
The previous rural issues related to the mass migration from rural to urban areas and a fall in the incomes of the rural population owing to the use of new technologies are becoming less alarming. The new post-industrial stage of society's development, which emphasises services rather than production of goods, gives rise to completely different success factors. In the new stage of the economic and society's development, the main focus is placed on knowledge while capital is no longer seen as the key success factor. As a result, the term "knowledge society", which is commonly used nowadays, has gained prevalence over "service society" to refer to the post-industrial stage. The new features of the knowledge society and its economic system can serve rural wellbeing only if they are clearly described and understood. Therefore, whether in the future the situation will become favourable for rural areas largely depends, among other things, on the ability of the rural policy-makers to refocus and to take corrective actions including an extension of the rural development objectives and methods typical of the industrial era by adding instruments pertinent to the knowledge society. Since the main success factor in post-industrial stage is characterised by the ability make use of knowledge, this factor shall also be important for the rural policy. Unfortunately, there are very few works offering new rural policy ideas or paradigms that make an effort to justify the proposed ideas with respect of a broader context or to link them to the differences between the industrial and post-industrial society development stages. If the rural policy decisions keep ignoring the evolution of economic systems and rise of knowledge society with entirely new success factors, it will soon become obvious that rural policy measures can result in not only positive but also negative effect as the outcome highly depends on the compliance of the intended objectives and the mechanism for measure implementation with the realities of the time.
The objective of this monograph is the assessment of the rural policy evolution in advanced countries, reveal of its stages and regularities, and identification of potential improvement areas. The selected research object - the rural policy - is analysed from the perspective of public governance using different methodological approaches: historical, systemic, and evolutionary. That helps to reveal more sensibly the potentials of the most complex - evolutionary - approach and to suggest rural policy-makers management methods that take into consideration the new long-term economic, social, and environmental challenges faced by the society. For the first time the assessment of changes in rural policy ideas and measures relied on the method of qualitative structures. This method does not only help to understand the reasons behind the emergence of new rural policy ideas but also enables to forecast the future trajectory of their content development. Furthermore, the qualitative structure method frames clearer principles of the rural policy measure impact assessment that contribute to a more efficient use of the aid.
The research objectives included:
- assessment of the regularities of changes in the main motivation for rural policy decisions, the objectives and their implementation tools in advanced countries;
- assessment of the evolution of the rural policy measures used for the industrialisation of agriculture in advanced countries with regard of their orientation towards the strategic models defined by the method of qualitative structures;
- assessment of the differences between the industrial and knowledge societies that are important from the rural policy perspective and design of guidelines for future rural policy decisions with a focus on the knowledge society development;
- demonstration of the opportunities of the method of qualitative structures by analysis of the Lithuanian rural policy and submission of proposals regarding the rural policy measures that could be applied in the context of the knowledge society to implement different strategic models defined by the method of qualitative structures.
The first parts of the monograph introduce the analysis of the economic and rural policy in advanced countries, which is aimed at offering a concise description of the rural policy development circumstances and at highlighting the general trends in the rural policy ideas and management model change by making a "map" of such change in time. The research period starts from the ideas prevalent after World War 2, which gave rise to the development of the rural policy as a separate academic discipline as well as its emergence as an independent branch of economic policy, and covers seven decades. The key rural policy ideas are presented by addressing each decade in the second half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century. However, it is self-evident that such classification is pretty much notional since the chronology of the popularity of certain ideas slightly varies in different countries since each country evolves at an individual pace and, as this takes place, the duration of the stages is not necessarily identical.
The research is focused on characteristics of the rural policy covering the overall aim, policy object, desirable impact to national economy, key measures, and main beneficiaries. Both the analysis of the scientific literature and the review of actual rural policy decisions documented in different political instruments of international organisations and most developed countries reveal a conspicuous sequence of the changes in characteristics. The set of the characteristics may be defined as the strategy.
Each strategic model of the rural policy used as tool to industrialize the agriculture in advanced countries may be described as the evolution stage defined by the method of qualitative structures. The cycle of the evolution consists from six strategies:
- Extensive growth strategy.
- Intensification strategy.
- Specialization strategy.
- Risk management strategy.
- Collaboration strategy.
- Innovation strategy.
The process of new strategy emergence and actualization in policy-making goes step by step from simple model to complex one. Furthermore, the ideas of the previous strategies are not disclaimed but rather complemented with new and more sophisticated tools. Therefore the policy measures required to put older ideas into practice can be used in parallel.
The development of knowledge society in rural regions is analysed as the new cycle of the rural policy evolution. The framework of the rural policy which consists from six strategies defined by the method of qualitative structures is presented with recommendations on policy object, key measures, and main beneficiaries for each strategy.
The last part of the monograph introduces the analysis of the Lithuanian rural policy. As the evolutionary approach was chosen as the methodological basis for the analysis, the analysed period starts from the restitution of Lithuania's independence in 1990. Although during the period when Lithuania belonged to the Soviet Union the agricultural sector was industrialised, the privatisation of the economic system gave rise to completely new economic subjects that had to create their own farms and to start the evolution cycle from the beginning. Rural policy measures therefore gained in importance in order to speed up this process. The key rural policies and achievements in Lithuania are viewed from two different perspectives: the measures for the industrialisation of agriculture and the development of the knowledge society in rural areas are analysed separately. The review of the 24-year rural policy experience and a reference to the insights in the previous parts of the research as well as the latest managerial theories served the basis for producing recommendations regarding further rural policies and methods of their implementation, which emphasise the need to concentrate on the promotion of the development of a knowledge society in rural regions.
Keywords: Agrarian policy; Evolution; Rural development; Method of qualitative structure; Lithuania; Regions; Economic development; Strategy; Agriculture; Knowledge economy.
Vidickienė, D.; Melnikienė, R. 2014. Kaimo politikos evoliucija : monografija. - Vilnius : Lietuvos agrarinės ekonomikos institutas. 272 p. ISBN 978-9955-481-44-7.
© Dalia Vidickienė, 2014
© Rasa Melnikienė, 2014
© Lietuvos agrarinės ekonomikos institutas, 2014
