The Role of Community Capital in Rural Renewal
Abstract
The community capitals framework was developed as a way of evaluating community development efforts by taking stock of existing assets and examining how various types of capital are invested within a community. For rural communities with narrow prospects for dramatic, high-dollar development opportunities, the framework provides a promising alternative strategy, allowing communities to focus instead on the smaller, incremental approaches that can slow down economic decline and potentially lead toward sustainable renewal. In this paper, we use a wide assortment of publicly available data sources to quantify each type of capital across a study area of 1,442 counties in 17 states. We then employ a set of OLS regression models to estimate the relationship between community capital levels and county job creation rates from 2010 to 2019. Our results highlight a number of findings with implications for how rural counties may adjust their approach toward community development.
