The effectiveness of rural management practices in the context of local self-government reform (post-agrarian vector of rural development)
The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that the 2022 reform of local self-government (based on Federal Draft Law No 40361-8 “On the General Principles of the Organization of Local Self-Government within the Unified System of Public Authority”), which shifts the system to a single-tier model of municipal districts, radically transforms governance of rural territories and exacerbates the tension between institutional centralization and the sociocultural specificity of local communities under a post-agrarian development trajectory. The research problem lies in the discrepancy between the regulatory and theoretical model of local self-government reform, which promiseы increased governance efficiency and closer ties between authorities and the population, and actual governance practices in rural areas, which are characterised by centralisation, growing distance between authorities and the population, and a decline in local community agency. The methods of the study include a theoretical and methodological analysis of the concepts of “governance practices” and “governance efficiency”, as well as an empirical investigation based on 26 in-depth expert interviews with representatives of the administrative structures of the Gorodetsky District of the Nizhny Novgorod region and the Babaevsky District of the Vologda region. The results of the study show that the transition to a single-tier governance model was accompanied by a weakening of horizontal ties, an increase in the distance between authorities and the population, a “deficit of governance sensitivity”, a reduction of resources and personnel on the ground, and the emergence of a communication gap, which is only partially compensated by practices of self-organization and participation in regional programs. The conclusions of the study indicate that the local self-government reform in its current form reduces the social effectiveness of governance practices in rural territories due to the desynchronization of the normative and sociocultural logics of governance, thereby negatively affecting the movement towards a post-agrarian development trajectory of rural territories. At the same time, an increase in the effectiveness of governance practices is possible only if the agency of local actors is preserved and a comprehensive assessment of the quality of interaction between authorities and the population is introduced.
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The research was funded by the Russian Science Foundation grant No 24-68-00055 “From the Past to the Future: Rural Communities in a post-agrarian transformation vector” for 2024-2028.