Conflicting Objectives for Rural Local Government: Service Provision to Exurban Communities in Israel

Abstract

The delivery of public services in rural areas is a problem encountered not only by declining and peripheral areas but also by newly founded exurban communities. The problems of small size are exacerbated by the demand within these communities for high levels and a high quality of service provision. The existing local government network in these rural and rurban areas is unable to cope with the increased demand emanating from these new communities. This is particularly problematic in Israel, where the rural system of local government, the regional councils, have traditionally fulfilled the role of providing services to agricultural and cooperative communities. In this paper the nature of the service demands made by new exurban communities in Israel, the problems encountered by the regional councils in providing these same services, and the tensions which result from this lack of compatibility are discussed. Proposed functional solutions are presented and compared, ranging from minor modifications to the existing system of rural local government to those which require a change in the formal municipal status of the exurban communities.

Patterns of development and conservation in agricultural lands—The case of the Tel Aviv metropolitan region 1990–2000

“…The expansion of development in rural open spaces towards the end of the 20th was accompanied by additional phenomena, such as increase in non-agricultural occupations in agricultural settlements, suburbanization of residential and industrial areas, and changing patterns of settlement in the rural zones-mainly the establishment of new exurban small settlements (inhabited by non-farmers) in the rural zone (Newman and Applebaum, 1995;Feitelson, 1999;Grossman, 1993;Sofer, 2001;Sofer and Applebaum, 2006).…”

“…For this purpose, urban municipalities aspired to annex adjacent open spaces, mainly farmlands. At the same time, Regional Councils (the municipalities in the rural zone), facing growing demands for municipal services on the part of new exurban settlers, were increasingly involved in development initiatives on farmlands within their jurisdiction, sometimes in collaboration with adjacent urban municipalities (Newman and Applebaum, 1995;Razin, 1998).…”

The politics of place: Official, intermediate and community discourses in depopulated rural areas of Central Spain. The case of the Riaza river valley (Segovia, Spain)

“…As mentioned previously, it is acknowledged that processes of social dismantling and, consequently, reconfiguration processes of community structures have an important spatial re-articulation effect, and especially, the role of the management of cultural and natural resources (Stanley et al, 2005;Newman and Applebaum, 1995;Nelson, 2001). This means that micro-processes linked to the management of space are notoriously complex, even in small areas (Rutherford, 2007;Davenport and Anderson, 2005).…”