Ecological Economics 34 2000 301 – 314
COMMENTARY
Putting postmodernity into practice: endogenous development and the role of traditional cultures in the rural
development of marginal regions
T.N. Jenkins
Institute of Rural Studies, Uni6ersity of Wales, Aberystwyth SY
23 3
AL, UK Received 2 February 2000; received in revised form 14 April 2000; accepted 21 April 2000
Abstract
Post-modernity has led to a re-evaluation of tradition. This paper considers one aspect of this re-evaluation — the role of traditional cultures and their implications for a rural development process which is economically, socially and
environmentally sustainable in the marginal regions of Europe. The links between traditional cultures, territoriality and sustainability suggest that a culturally homogeneous world is an unattractive prospect in sustainable development
terms. Actor-network theory is explored as an approach which can be used to inform policy, in particular by conceptualising how a re-valorisation of cultural resources can provide local actors with strategic capacity for
endogenous development and for the harnessing of extra-local forces in a market economy. Against this background, current European Union agricultural policy directions are considered, and an alternative approach is proposed under
which traditional cultures are explicitly treated as resources in the creation of rural development networks. Such networks treat territorial locality as an asset, facilitate the animation of local and regional development, and connect
localities and local actors with wider national and international markets and development frameworks. The rural development path for marginal regions that emerges integrates tradition with the imperatives of the postmodern
world in which economic rationality is combined with an appropriate degree of local developmental control. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords
:
Traditional cultures; Endogenous development; Territoriality; Rural policy www.elsevier.comlocateecolecon
1. Introduction
Max Weber characterised the shift from tradi- tional often religious values to modern ones as
the ‘pervasive rationalisation’ of all spheres of society, and the process of modernisation as the
‘institutionalisation of purposive-rational eco-
Tel.: + 44-1970-622247; fax: + 44-1970-622958. E-mail address
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tnjaber.ac.uk T.N. Jenkins. 0921-800900 - see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
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nomic and administrative action’ Habermas, 1987.
Subsequent theorists
have stylised
modernity into a general model of evolutionary social development Coleman, 1968 in which the
core societal goal is economic growth rather than survival in harmony with natural surroundings,
and the dominant individual goal is achievement through income and consumption rather than
through moral standing. An inevitable character- istic of modernisation for both Weber and his
successors is the dramatic devaluation of tradition through universalisation of norms of action, gen-
eralisation of values, and individual-based pat- terns of socialisation. Tradition has become, at
best, a way of presenting the past as an increas- ingly scarce non-renewable resource and, at worst,
an impediment to progress.
Yet, an important postmodern insight is that tradition also concerns what Halbwach 1980
terms ‘pastness’ — a renewable resource of cur- rent validity Appadurai, 1981; Appadurai et al.,
1991. The human values embodied in tradition are not only the ‘scars of the past’ but also the
‘portents of the future’ Pulliam and Dunford, 1980. One might even define postmodernity in
terms of its separation of the cultural premises of modernity from its functional consequences; by
challenging the validity of the former, post- modernity de-emphasises instrumental rationality
and brings a shift in basic values towards what Inglehart 1997 calls ‘existential security’. The
postmodern emphasis on subjective well-being, environmental protection and other quality of life
concerns has led to a re-evaluation of tradition, reinforced by a tendency towards the removal of
the artificial structures of nation-states in favour of more natural ethnic or spatial communities
within a pluralist framework see Jones and Keat- ing 1995, for the case of the European Union.
Despite the universalising tendencies of mod- ernisation, EU marginal areas retain traditional
cultures
1
, exhibiting varying degrees of vigour, which potentially represent resources for alterna-
tives to the modernist cosmopolitan mode of eco- nomic development. Yet, social analysis has
largely been dominated by rational behaviour models which abstract economic action from its
historical and cultural contexts. Even in early political economy, opinions on cultural diversity
were ambivalent. J.S. Mill, for example, recog- nised Europe’s indebtedness for its ‘‘progressive
and many-sided development’’ to the ‘‘plurality of paths’’ resulting from its cultural diversity Feyer-
abend, 1987, p. 33; yet Mill also assumed that it would be unequivocally beneficial for minorities
in Europe to be brought out of their own ‘‘little mental orbit … into the … current of the ideas
and feelings … of more civilised and cultivated’’ majorities Kymlicka, 1995, p. 5. Furthermore,
the importance of deciphering the structures and processes of the local and the temporal is an
article of faith for postmodernism.
The rest of this paper is in four sections. Some of the links between traditional cultures, territori-
ality and sustainability are considered in Section 2. A powerful reason for the neglect of traditional
cultures may lie in the absence of well-developed theoretical approaches to assessing their role, eco-
nomic potential and policy implications, and one such approach is explored in Section 3. An alter-
native to the direction taken by current EU agri- cultural policy is proposed in Section 4. Section 5
draws some conclusions.
2. Traditional cultures and sustainable development
