Role of Grassroots Self-Organization in Peripheral Rural Areas: Conservation or Development?

The article generalizes the practices of self-organization of the population in rural areas of Russia, remote from large cities and local development centers. The municipal reform, which eliminated the lower level of municipalities, led to an increase in distance between the authorities and rural areas. Local development began to rely primarily on municipal centers, which complicated access to resources for peripheral rural settlements. The study identifies various practices that exist within the institutional framework provided for by laws on local self-government (participatory budgeting, territorial public self-government, grant programs, etc.), as well as informal and noninstitutionalized forms of participation of residents in the development of their territories. The study is based on materials from field expeditions in several districts of Vologda and Nizhny Novgorod oblasts, where in-depth and expert interviews and participant and covert observations were conducted. The study showed that most institutionalized practices rely on participatory budgeting mechanisms but do not always meet the criteria of participation. By compensating for the work of dissolved rural administrations, most participatory projects are aimed at solving current problems of improvement and infrastructure maintenance. Development projects rely on grant funds or the resources of the initiators themselves, the availability of which largely depends on a complex combination of local characteristics and the symbolic capital of the area. The article concludes with a discussion of the role of new rural (former urban) residents in rural self-organization. The latter actively introduce their own meanings into the development of territories, which leads to conflicts with indigenous inhabitants and is understood using the concept of “spatialism.”