Paper short abstract:

The restructuration of rural development led to the involvement of new actors, who more closely influence the future development of rural areas in Hungary. This paper examines what images these actors draw on and how they influence development and the relation of local inhabitants to their villages.

Paper long abstract:

The LHH program is one of the large development grants in Hungary, aimed at the development of the 'most disadvantaged micro-regions'. This program exemplifies the restructuration of rural development after 1989. While villages received larger autonomy to influence their development, they also have to compete for new grants. The LHH program will be used in this paper to highlight the variety of new actors that appeared and can now more closely influence the development of and life in rural places. Often these actors (such as NGOs, development agents, charity organizations) work on multiple scales ranging from the international to the regional, while not living in the locality, often coming from urban background or even the capital. What are their images of rural areas, how they imagine their future/development and how they reconfigure the relation of local inhabitants to their living place? This paper will engage with these questions by drawing on ethnographic examples from two villages that participated in the LHH project. While both Tarnabod and Szatmarcseke are in remote regions, and both have high unemployment and poverty they have strikingly different strategies. Tarnabod, with its 90% Roma population, was chosen by a large charity organization as a model village to display rural development. Meanwhile in Szatmarcseke, rural tourism is seen as the main strategy for bringing further resources to the locality. This often result in competing images about the place and its future, as well as raising questions about who has the right to determine them.