ABSTRACT
As with many rural and small town places within developed economies, rural British Columbia (BC) has been experiencing an ongoing transformation of its human services and associated infrastructure. Since the 1980s, public policies have increasingly called upon local agencies and providers to devise more integrated or shared service arrangements as a part of ‘bottom-up’ community development (Argent, 2011; Paagman et al., 2015). These policies, however, are challenging the transformative capacity of these same rural organizations by demanding change while withholding adequate funding to support the activities needed to build and maintain partnerships, by not following through with supportive policies or the training and mentoring needed for local groups to assess and successfully launch new service arrangements, and by not delegating an appropriate level of authority to accompany new mandates. Small communities are working through these changes while at the same time being burdened with the challenges associated with aging and inadequate infrastructure – much of which was developed in the period of resource frontier expansion (1950s – 1970s).
