ABSTRACT
The restructuring of rural governance in Britain over the course of the last decade has increasingly exposed a tension that lies at the heart of the ascendant mode of governmentality in advanced liberal democracies. On the one hand, the strategy of ‘governing through communities’ (Rose 1996) has been promoted through a rhetoric that implies the devolution of power from the central state to rural communities themselves (Murdoch 1997). Rural communities now have the freedom and responsibility to develop and manage their own responses to their own self-defined challenges, supported by external resources drawn down largely through competitive funding programmes (Edwards et al. 2003; Jones and Little 2000). Some commentators have celebrated these new opportunities for community-led initiatives as facilitating ‘endogenous development’ (Ray 1997), whilst others have observed that devolving opportunity also means devolving responsibility for failure (Woods 2005a; see also Herbert-Cheshire 2000).
