CASE STUDIES

Human Capital: Personal Asset Mapping.
Keystone Sectors.

1. Human Capital Case: Personal Asset Mapping.

"Never doubt that a small group of people can make a difference. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has" (Margaret Mead).

This case comes from Liz Charles (2003/4) and concerns an "Personal Asset Mapping" exercise conducted in a "somewhat isolated" rural community in Nova Scotia, Canada. The final report (Phase I) is attached as a Word file.

What is Personal Asset Mapping? (Note, your tutor has no direct experience, and no other information on this approach, though it sounds similar to the approachs now being widely adopted in developing countries, though here the emphasis tends to be on identification of the major problems being faced by the community and attemtps to develop community based solutions to them)

It is led and conducted by community members for the community as a whole
The assets or positive aspects of the community are sought and documented
Community involvement and participation is encouraged
The process is intended to be continuous.
Promotion and publicity (and the associated organisation and management) is an important part of the exercise.

Essentially it appears to consist of documenting peoples' Interest, Ability and Experience in the full range of activities, both potentially economic and commercial, as well as community support and care. A team of asset mappers was recruited from within the community, and trained in the necessary interview and small group techniques for collecting the data. The local RDA already has business, organisations and agencies databases, to which it is itended that the PAM (personal asset map) be added and made available.
Asset mapping is seen as a process, not a product - the activity of persuading people to talk about and consider their skills, experience etc. from a positive angle is seen as the most productive of the potential outcomes. The process consists of:

Community awareness campaign
Mapping individual assets (interest, ability, experience), through

one to one interviews
per-arranged appointments
groupd settings (with groups of similar interests, experience etc.)

Some notes from this report:

"The team had a difficult time creating community buy in to the asset mapping process"
"The collective belief is that the onus is on the invisible 'they' to creat positive benefits to the community. Further the community believes that their personal efforts will result in frustration and disappointment." (a dependency culture is difficult to overcome)
However, "the process of asset mapping served as a catalyst for several individuals who wanted to move ahead with their ideas."
378 personal asset maps were prepared (from a total population base of 2,000, and from 600 contacted) - "show me that it works before I participate" was the most common reason for non participation, with "i have nothing to offer being a runner up.
"The benefit of using local people as the mapping team is that it is more readily accepted by the community. The drawback is that the team also brings with all the negative baggage that exists woven throughout the fabric of the community."
"Unfortunately many gatekeepers to organisations felt that this exercise was of little use compared to other priorities" (and hence did not cooperate as much as they could).
"The community is beginning to understand and accept the process" (it takes time and effort to mobilise peoples interest and ideas).
"During the interviewing process, some people began to develop their occupational strategies." (The process encouraged more active consideration of alternatives and development of ideas and opportunities). But,"They are cautios about accepting the belief tha they have control over their own destiny and can use this information to help create action plans to move themselves to where they want to be."

Outcomes: The following statistical information is provided by Nik Grewer, Durham Development Office) - from Phase II of the project, I suspect.

On average from the experiences across various projects in Nova Scotia:

A Business counselling intervention for every 42 personal interviewsconducted at the community level was requested
A new business start-up (full or part-time) for every 167 personal interviews
Requests for information on:

Improving educational qualifications to improve employment opportunities (2 requests for every 135 personal interviews)
programmes and services that assist employers to: (1 out of every 5 employers)

increase the size of their workforce
increase the skill level of their employees to improve productivity and competitiveness

programmes and services around the issue of funding small business start-up and expansion (1 every 85 interviews)

Requests by community groups on how they can restructure or reorganize to better meet the interests (and needs) of their community (3 requests for every 23 groups mapped)
Opportunities to start new community based organisations (at least 8 new requests from community members over a six month period. Requests ranged from non-profit to community based for profit enterprises)

Looking at an individual community in isolation, the stats are as follows: The East Hants experience:

1,400 individual maps undertaken
100 local organisations & associations participated
1,000 separate skills & interests were identified
Led to .....

Work with 8 individuals looking to start up a business (with a further 14 on a waiting list).
Matched abilities & interests to current job vacancies
Information was requested on establishing community enterprises, including a Crafters' Guild.
Development of community associations.
Development of voluntary sector.

Moral?? The development of disadvantaged communities in developed countries faces a different problem to those in developing countries. In developed countries, disadvantaged communities comprise those who have not shared in the benefits (or costs) of the development process - they have chosen to (or have been obliged to) remain where they are whilst others have moved on, and often out of the community. To the extent that the benefits of development have spilled over into these communities, it has largely been through the activities and charity of outsiders (including remissions from family members away from home), whilst incoming investment has typically been of either an exploitative (commercial change) or retirement and preservation nature. Both tendencies lead to a strong dependency culture and lack of self-assurance and internal control amongst the indigenous population.

Related Web Sites (courtesy of Google)
Canadian Rural Partnership - Asset Mapping Handbook This appears to be the definitive version
NorthWest Regional Education Laboratory.
Educational Resources Information Centre (US)

2. Keystone Sectors.

Maureen Kilkenny, Professor of Economic Geography at Iowa State University, USA, is one of the leading experts in the development of this approach to rural development. See here for her recent Plenary Address to the Agricultural Economics Society (2004) Conference - which provides a very interesting overview and many insights into "Geography, Agriculture and Rural Development."

She has played a leading role in developing an idea of Keystone Sectors.

A keystone in a brick or stone arch is the stone which ensures the structural integrity and coherence of the arch - remove this stone, and the arch collapses. Ecologists adopetd this concept in the late 1960s as a term, keystone species, for the (those) species in an ecosystem without which the structure and integrity of an ecosystem would be fatally compromised. Kilkeeny and her colleagues coined this concept, as a keystone sector, (group of people/activities: "where sectors are broadly defined to include churches, clubs, associations, and public institutions as well as different types of businesses and industries") without which a socio-economic community will be fatally compromised -without which/whom the community's structural integrity and cohesion will be impossible to maintain.

These authors remark: "Given that the inspiration for this new way to identify key sectors comes from ecological sciences, an appropriate analogy is that industries induced to locate in an area by subsidies and tax holidays are "predators."
In addition to using up tax revenues, the industries may 'feed' on the earning capacity of privately initiated local firms in the same industry.
Subsidized industrial expansion can eclipse the existing industries in markets for local labor, similar inputs, or similar consumers.
Excessive expansion of comparative advantage sectors may destroy natural resources. (and lead to 'imisserising growth' - by either depressing output prices, and/or increasing specific input prices, or over-using scarce local reosurces).
The targeting of a limited type of industry reduces the diversity of the local economy. A less diverse economy is more sensitive to exogenous shocks originating in those sectors.
Finally, especially if it is the major employer, an industry designated as "critical" can more effectively threaten to abandon the community if substrate supplies, subsidies, or other attractions diminish (Wolhgemuth and Kilkenny, 1998).
If such industries succeed in obtaining further public subsidy, the "predator" may be become a "parasite.""

[Wolhgemuth, Darin, and Maureen Kilkenny (1998) "Firm Relocation Threats and Copy Cat Costs" International Regional Science Review, 21(2):139-162.]

Their e-book, see keystone link above, (introduction) gives a brief outline of SAMs and Comparative Advantage (remember the Trade principles?) approaches to identification of priority sectors/actors for encouragement/support in promoting rural development, and then explores the idea of keystone species/sectors/institutions in considerably more detail than can be sensibly explained and summarised here, and is well worth a read.

In particular, they find good evidence for the proposition that social capital, and social embeddedness of firms within the community, relying on non-economic transactions and interactions, relying on trust and reciprocity, are more important in explaining local commercial success than the conventional economic or commercial measures and factors.

The technique they employ for describing and analysing these important social relationships is social network analysis, using graph theory as the mathematical (analytical) device to handle the data. They provide a concise account of how this theory works, and apply it to a large sociological survey of a town in the midwest of the US.

They also describe tests of the concept of "keystoneness" based on this analysis. This is an interesting and potentially very powerful technique and approach, and one which I hope to be able to follow up here in the UK, providing that the ESRC are sufficiently convinced by the approach to supply the necessary funds and resources. Our SCOPE (Sustainable Culture of Productive Environments) project is being developed into a full bid under the RELU (Rural Economy and Land Use) initiative.

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