ABSTRACT
Development planning has characteristically sought to address the “deficiencies” of rural regions, such as underemployment and economic insecurity, weak schools, and inadequate infrastructure. The aim has been to introduce the high mass-consumption market economy to rural areas, through some combination of absorbing “surplus” rural labor, bringing industrial production to agriculture and natural resource extraction, and providing advanced infrastructure and services. But many rural peoples, communities, and regions resist the idea that they
are deficient and need to be “developed” in the conventional sense. They accept a reduced material standard of living because they value a rural lifestyle: physical characteristics such as lower population density and closeness to nature, and rural cultural and social influences on their lives (Hibbard & Lurie 2013; Horlings & Marsden 2014). John Friedmann has been a central figure in the critique of conventional
development planning and is responsible for an important set of closely related alternative development ideas. He was among the first scholars to recognize the tension between economic space and life space in development planning (Friedmann 1983). He further observed the wide variation in what is valued across the life spaces of different peoples and the importance of empowerment to enable them to be successful on their own terms (Friedmann 1992). And he identified and explained transformative planning, an approach to tackling the institutional structures that prevent or enable empowerment (Friedmann 1987). This chapter draws on the development experience of two Native American1 communities, one in Alaska and one in Oregon, to probe Friedmann’s ideas on empowerment,
transformative planning, and the negotiations between life space and economic space.
