Territorial isolation and the sustainability of local communities: developing the existing approaches

In the 1990s, the public transportation system in provincial Russia shrank significantly. Most affected were the water transport and small aircraft aviation. As a result, many rural local communities, not connected with the “mainland” by all-season roads, found themselves in territorial isolation. The paper deals with the case of villages that have poor transport communication with the outer world, including their district (rayon) center, or none at all (in the conventional sense). It studies the influence of territorial isolation on their sustainability. One can find two opposing views of such influence in the academic literature. According to the first approach, after losing government support, peripheral and especially hard-to-reach villages become economically unviable, unattractive for living in them and doomed to extinction. According to the second approach, the noninterference of the state in the life of the local population enhances the solidarity, self-organization and self-sufficiency of the communities, which makes them sustainable to economic cataclysms. Based on the findings of his field research, which addressed the social structure of territorially isolated settlements, the author attempts to contribute to the development of these approaches. He concludes that under otherwise equal starting conditions at the time when transport accessibility collapsed or deteriorated, those communities that became considerably isolated turn out to be sustainable (viable), and sometimes even more so than their non-isolated counterparts, whereas the resilience of communities that ended up in minor isolation sharply decreases. In other words, with the emergence and increase of territorial isolation, the sustainability curve of communities first declines, and then starts to rise. This is due to the following circumstances. Insignificant isolation manifests primarily its disadvantages - poor transport accessibility and supply, unavailability of any decent labor market, low profitability of business, etc. However, the more isolated a community is, the more such shortcomings are balanced and sometimes even outweighed by the increasing advantages, the principal one being the ability of the locals to use the surrounding natural resources at their discretion and free of any control.

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