Rural areas provide critical consumption goods for metropolitan residents and businesses, such as food, energy, lower cost land and labor, and unique natural and cultural experiences. In return, metropolitan areas constitute the end markets for rural production, provide specialized services, offer diverse job opportunities, and generate resources for public and private investment in rural America. Examining and enhancing these rich and complicated interactions between rural and metropolitan America, while recognizing their distinctiveness, provides both the context and the incentive for deeper and more sustainable regional collaboration.
There are strong arguments in favor of regional collaboration, particularly in a rural context, where governments, businesses and nonprofit organizations find common ground and cross real and imaginary boundaries to tackle complex problems or to take advantage of opportunities. There is a rich history of collaboration and a range of institutions in place that have a regional perspective on policies and programs. The economy and well-being of rural America is vulnerable to ever-tightening fiscal constraints, to weakening civic and institutional capacity, and to increasingly metropolitan-centric policy framing, all of which move thinking and acting regionally from the desirable to an absolute necessity. Moreover, there are incentives coming from federal agencies and foundations to work regionally and collaboratively in order to be eligible for funding.
OUR WORK
RUPRI Rural Futures Lab Research & Policy Brief, January 2012
By: Brian Dabson, with Colleen Heflin & Kathleen Miller
This research & policy brief was commissioned for the National Association of Development Organizations (NADO) Research Foundation
with support from the
U.S. Economic Development Administration.
RUPRI Rural Futures Lab Foundation Paper, July 2011
By: Brian Dabson
This Foundation Paper provides an overview of the benefits and challenges of regional collaboration together with some examples of regional collaboration in action.