Rural Development Systems: Lessons from Europe and Northern Michigan

Abstract

Fragmented economic development efforts that are not coordinated either strategically or operationally have limited impact. Across rural America, individual economic development agencies have lacked the capacity to use their complementary strengths to shape a vision of how to develop a region. Often, these efforts do not relate to the real customers of rural development, the existing firms that create most new jobs. The projects that are implemented are of short term and limited scale, and the real systems that influence the direction of an economy are ignored. Many European countries seek to improve the competitiveness of a region through accelerating the modernization of firms. It takes a systems approach to enhance the private initiative of firms by improving the relationship between firms and the supporting relationships of institutions involved in training, technology, and finance. Lessons can be drawn from this approach, and a new rural model for taking a systems approach to improving the competitiveness of firms in northern Michigan is discussed.

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References

1. See Stuart A. Rosenfeld , “Technology Innovation and Rural Development: Lessons from Italy and Denmark,” A Report of the Rural Economic Policy Program Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, 1991).

2. Ibid., p. 34.

3. Prince Napoleon-Louis Bonaparte , Napoleonic Ideas (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 62.

4. Letter to the author from James Malnight of the Malnight Company, Grand Haven, MI, 20 July 1992. See Commission of the European Communities , Industrial Policy in an Open and Competitive Environment: Guidelines for a Community Approach, 16 Nov. 1990.

5. Roger J. Vaughan , “Framework for Economic Development in Michigan's Upper Peninsula” (Report prepared for Michigan Department of Commerce, 1989), pp. 1-13.

6. For a description of another rural development program affiliated with Shorebank, see Brian Kelley , “Rebuilding Rural America: The Southern Development Bancorporation,” this issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

7. Philip Shapira , “Strategies for Rural Manufacturing Modernization: Assessing Best Practices” (Paper delivered at the Modernization Forum, Detroit, MI, May 1991).

8. Larry Rosenstock , “The Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Overdue Reunification of Vocational and Academic Education,” Phi Delta Kappan (Feb. 1991).