Resisting Marginalisation: The Rise of the Rural Community Movement in Lithuania

In the late 1990s the rural community development movement led mostly by educated, professional women emerged in Lithuania. These were loose organizations, typically made up of 5–10 core activists, engaged in mobilizing local communities in dealing with their social, cultural, political and economic problems. It is argued that the rise of the rural community movement represents one of the responses to the post‐socialist crisis in agriculture as well as a strategy in dealing with growing economic, political, and social marginalization of the rural population in Lithuania. Three interacting developments that contributed to the rise of rural civic activism are analyzed: (a) structural change in the rural economy that lead to a growing stratum of rural population being displaced from commodity agriculture; (b) favorable political opportunity created by the completion of collective farm privatization and the advancement of the process of land restitution, changes in the government's policy, and the rise of NGOs activism supported, in part, by the foreign donors; and (c) innovative strategies and alliances formed by activists, foreign donors, academicians, and local politicians in promoting rural development. Ethnographic research in the village of Balninkai (pop. 496) is used to analyze the dynamics of building of one of the most successful rural community organizations currently active in Eastern Lithuania.