Second Growth: Community Economic Development in Rural British
Columbia, Sean Markey, John Pierce, Mark Roseland and Kelly Vodden,
Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005, pp. 352.This theoretically rich, community economic development (CED) work,
written by four members of the Centre for Sustainable Community
Development (formerly the Community Economic Development Centre) at Simon
Fraser University, is the product of a three-year
participatory-action-based research project involving four
“forest-based” British Columbia communities. Two Aboriginal
communities and two municipalities were case studied as part of an
action-learning exercise in order to gain “insight into the apparent
conflict between the economic imperative and fluidity of capital versus
the lived worlds of rural and small time places” (3). Through their
empirical studies of the four communities, the authors argue that CED,
fostered at the local level, can allow for the kind of capacity building
that is needed to create diversified, sustainable economic futures for
resource-based rural and small-town communities. They are careful,
however, to distinguish between the use of CED as a “localized and
palliative strategy” for marginalized communities caught in the
throes of political and economic dependency, and the possibilities for a
more robust (theoretically balanced) version of CED, which can become part
and parcel of rural and small-town locally-based planning and development.
While recognizing the appropriateness of CED in either situation, they
argue that a host of negative economic and political factors, which are
intensifying under the direction of neo-liberal ideological thinking, have
resulted in a pressing need for the more robust form of community
development and corresponding revitalization strategies.
The community economic development tradition in Eastern Nova Scotia, Canada: ideological continuities and discontinuities between the Antigonish Movement and the Family of community development corporation
