In the US, places that have experienced a lack of investment over a long period of time are often referred to as being “left behind”. Looking closely at the structural forces behind why some places struggle, Ann M. Eisenberg argues that the term is misleading. Calling places “left behind”, she writes, obscures the agency of the institutions and decision-makers who create and worsen rural disadvantage and of people in those locations who fight for better conditions. Rather than through market-based capitalist interventions and ideas about growth, restoring these places from decades of exploitation might involve new ways of looking at meeting needs and measuring progress.

We often hear people say that certain regions have been “left behind.” But what does it mean for a place to be “left behind”? If we dig deeper into the structural forces that have made some places thrive while others struggle, we can see that this label is misleading. Regions aren’t merely left behind; they are oppressed. More attention has turned to questions about so-called “left behind” regions due to rising geographic inequality in the United States and beyond. In my research, I study socioeconomically distressed rural regions in the United States, who are often labelled as left behind.

Looking more closely at “left behind” places

The notion that distressed rural regions have been left behind does have a basis in fact. Patterns of uneven development in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have exacerbated rural disadvantage. Since the 1980s, large cities like New York have accounted for a greater share of economic activity and population concentration.

Approximately 14 percent of the US population lives in rural areas—down from about twice that in 1980—while the 86 percent majority now lives in cities and suburbs. In 2019, rural counties accounted for 86 percent of counties the US Department of Agriculture designated as burdened with persistent poverty.

Distressed rural regions face unique challenges. Populations in these regions often struggle with higher rates of poverty and unemployment. They have to navigate population sparseness, distance from population centers, changing economic landscapes, and the specific stereotypes that undermine the political will for potential rural-focused interventions.

The need to move beyond “left behind” as a label

My critique of the left-behind label is that it obscures agency and proactiveness both for the supposed leavers and for the so-called left-behind. This masks institutional and policy decisions that have actively created and exacerbated rural disadvantage, and the local social movements that have often fought for better local and regional conditions.

Commentary on “left behind” places also often suggests that the problem of geographic inequality is unsolvable. We have tried everything and nothing has worked; efforts to intervene are doomed to fail, this narrative tends to say. But I argue that the weaknesses of prior efforts to better the fortunes of distressed places are rather predictable. Just as the “left behind” label is problematic, overly narrow definitions of the problem of geographic inequality have led to overly narrow interventions to address it.

When the expression, “left behind,” is used as an everyday idiom, the term implies movement and the creation of distance between two things. In the sentence, “He went to college and left his hometown behind,” the sentence’s protagonist goes on a journey away from the apparently rejected, static hometown.

When applied to geographic areas, the “left behind” designation implies a sort of failure to advance or move along on the journey toward development goals. Those places that have not been left behind, by implication, have advanced, or progressed. By contrast, those regions and localities that have been left behind are understood as stagnant in some way. Someone else—someone doing a better job, it’s implied—went on a journey. The left-behind regions did not get to go.

But the designation of left behind denies the agency of the institutions, policymakers, companies and other actors, that have actively facilitated the conditions associated with a place being left behind. Often, the better verbs for describing how US structural and institutional forces have treated socioeconomically distressed rural regions include the verbs, “ravaged”, “exploited”, “depleted”, “undermined” and “under-invested.”

Rural places have been oppressed – not left behind

A few places offer good examples of rural localities that would at first glance be deemed left behind due to their regional socioeconomic distress, but upon further investigation, are revealed to be subject to some form of subjugation by structural forces. Three examples of places that fit this description are the West Virginia coalfields, a remote California logging town referred to by the pseudonym “Golden Valley,” and Burke County, Georgia.

The West Virginia coalfields lie within rural central Appalachia, a region known for its coal economy. Golden Valley, the focus of an in-depth ethnography by sociologist Jennifer Sherman, sits at the heart of a rural, northwestern American region formerly known for timber extraction. And Burke County, Georgia, is about two hours inland from the coastal cities of Charleston and Savannah, and plays host to the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, which runs on nuclear power. The area of Burke County near the plant was the focus of an extensive ethnography by sociologist Loka Ashwood.

“Zenith 3” (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by foxtail_1

Each of these areas would likely be considered left behind in some fashion, due to high rates of poverty, struggling local economies, and poor infrastructural conditions. However, they all have a story of being shaped by government and corporate institutions that actively created or made their disadvantages worse.

In West Virginia, federal and state policymakers and legal systems coordinated with coal companies to enable decades of ecological destruction, worker exploitation, economic inequity and the suppression of dissent. In Golden Valley, the designation in 1990 by the US Fish and Wildlife Service of the northern spotted owl as threatened under the Endangered Species Act devastated the regional economy. In Burke County, the local nuclear plant, operating under the auspices of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is understood to dominate local land use, working conditions and political discourse, making it challenging for the local community to thrive.

Local resistance to under-development and exploitation

These institutional interventions were active players in creating challenging conditions in these regions. In turn, the “left behind” designation also denies the agency on the part of the people living there. Another common theme across these regions is that people there have attempted to secure better living conditions for themselves. Each place has a story of some form of local advocacy, uprising, or clash with the institutions and companies that sought to impose some condition on their community.

These are not stagnant regions that have failed to keep up with more dynamic places. These regions are home to populations who have fought for a better future and encountered overwhelming forces that sought to quash their efforts. The geographic, economic, and demographic diversity of these localities, alongside the diverse structural forces that created their conditions, make it start to seem like leaving rural places behind—by exploiting and undermining them—is a feature and not a bug of the American political-legal-economic system.

Skeptics of my argument may want to point out that some of the interventions that hurt rural regions have been pursued in the name of desirable policy goals, like protecting endangered species. But this analysis is not about what collective progress may or may not require. The question is whether passive forces of nature resulted in these regions’ under-development. And the answer to that question is, “No.”

Restoring places through alternative interventions

How might government interventions most effectively address an area’s left-behind status, especially since past programs have not worked very well? This is where diagnosis of the problem matters. If we say in one breath that distressed rural communities have merely been left behind, and in the next that large-scale investments in rural revitalization are doomed to fail, we frame rural regions as bottomless money pits that are beyond hope.

But, if we include the part of the story that involves more direct accountability for the institutions and policymakers that did the ravaging and the exploiting, it suddenly changes the remedy. Exploitation and ravaging require restorative efforts—a deeper reckoning for a deeper harm. Typical proposals for interventions—trying to create a few jobs or lure a company to relocate—start to sound half-hearted and silly.

If the policy mandate is to not merely “create jobs,” but rather to help counteract decades of exploitation, the intuitive policy prescriptions begin to contradict the capitalistic assumptions about competition and dynamism that seem to underlie the left-behind moniker. Capitalist treatment of waste people and waste places to be discarded in the name of progress created the crisis illustrated in the phenomenon of localities being “left behind.”

It is far from clear, then, that capitalist interventions—such as efforts to develop localities to be more like self-sustaining, for-profit businesses—offer something meaningful for efforts to create better futures for distressed localities. Another way to think about this is, if economists keep telling us they do not know how to solve this problem, maybe we should listen to people other than economists.

Rethinking progress in favor of meeting needs

It is true that no perfect suite of potential policy interventions has emerged as a silver bullet for improving living conditions in distressed rural regions. What would meaningful interventions look like we rejected the need for people and places to be “dynamic,” and always moving toward the nebulous target of “progress,” rather than to simply have their needs met?

The rejection of capitalistic assumptions opens the door to a whole new world of possibilities. We could pursue more public jobs in conservation; more aggressive antitrust enforcement alongside support for local business development; ambitious investments in education and healthcare; land reform and restorative racial justice; cooperative, sustainable agriculture; investments in essential infrastructure like high-speed rail; universal basic income; collective bargaining and worker protections; and other options. The possibilities abound.

The response to these proposals is likely to be that they are either not politically feasible or that they are too expensive. But radical new visions should at least be part of the conversation. These possibilities complicate the widespread embrace of the idea that “We have tried so much and nothing has worked.” We have, in fact, tried very little in the scheme of all that is imaginable.

• This article is based on the paper, “What does it mean to be ‘left behind?’’, in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society.
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• Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics. 
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