Governing development: Discursive practices of self-help in contemporary rural Australia

Faced with declining terms of trade, drought, population decline and a corresponding withdrawal of federal and state government support, Australia's rural towns and regions have been experiencing increasing difficulty since the early 1990s. Where earlier responses to these problems took the form of industry assistance accompanied by welfare payments, politicians, public servants and rural development experts now advocate a more contemporary approach to rural revitalisation which may best be described as 'self-help'. Under this new strategy, the responsibility for tackling rural decline is placed firmly in the hands of rural people and their communities: a move which has prompted criticism that self-help is merely an excuse by governments who are attempting to relinquish their responsibilities. However, while declarations of empowerment may still be largely rhetorical, it is not the case that Australian governments have abandoned their rural citizens. Rather, in their new role as 'facilitator' of rural development, governments are attempting to provide the necessary support structures for local people through a range of mechanisms designed to build their capacity for self-help. The thesis draws on a FoucauldianlLatourian framework to explore how the power of the state continues to be deployed through the discursive practices of self-help to ensure local development initiatives remain consistent with the advanced liberal principles of enhanced competition and entrepreneurship. To begin with, the thesis undertakes a 'problematics' of power and government to consider how rural communities, and the problems they face, are constituted, through discourse, in such a way that they become amenable to particular forms of (non)intervention. While this problematics is achieved through a macro-level appraisal of government documents and policy state-ments, an analysis of how the will of the state is translated into more practical mechanisms takes place through a case study of two governmental technologies: the Queensland Government Department of Primary Industries' Building Rural Leaders Program and Positive Rural Futures Conference. These two sites may be understood as providing, respectively, the disciplinary and bio-political mechanisms for shaping the conduct of rural people in their pursuit of community economic development initiatives. Precisely how the activity of government is played out in rural areas can only be determined through micro-level analysis. For this reason, fieldwork has also been conducted in two rural communities in Queensland where local residents are taking a collective approach to addressing the problems they face. Importantly, it is through this primary analysis that the agency of the governed has become apparent. Local people do have the capacity to actively negotiate, resist and ultimately transform the discursive environment they find themselves in, and some have learnt to 'play along' to their advantage. The consideration that is given in this thesis to the will of the governed, as well as that of the state, has important implications. Not only does itchallenge conventional sociological accounts of rural areas in Australia that are characterised by decline, but it also creates the potential for a more comprehensive governmentality approach by supplementing notions of resistance with the Latourian model of translation. The research concludes that accounts of community agency are important to the sociological enterprise because they reveal rather than hide the possibility that exists for change and contestation in declining rural areas. At the same time, however, it warns against naIve celebrations of self-help which have a tendency to heighten the division between so-called 'healthy', entrepreneurial communities that have learnt to conform to the demands of the state, and those 'unhealthy' communities that have not. With those falling into the latter group increasingly seen as responsible for their own decline, the effect is a channelling of resources into 'healthy' communities at the expense of those who need them most. Bypassed in the race for funding, towns which are in greatest need of assistance continue to face an uncertain future.