The politics of rural educational leadership are both intense and concentrated. Rural educational leaders need to be savvy and politically skilled if they are to inspire educational stakeholders and accomplish organizational objectives. The local school system is an organization with a political culture that can be characterized as a competitive environment in which various groups from both within and without are competing for power and limited resources. Local school systems are entrusted with both children and tax dollars, two precious resources. Coupled with such entrustment is political input from all points within the political continuum. Schools and politics are inseparable.
With respect to the prepared accession of the Czech Republic into the EU it is necessary to identify oneself with trends and rules of the EU in the field of rural development. The new demarcation of regions (of rural districts in the Czech republic) in harmony with the common methodology of OECD and Eurostat demarcating rural municipalities and regions according to the density of population per 1 km2 means changes in the spatial collocation of rural population in the Czech Republic. The increase of the proportion of rural population is achieved especially in mountainous and sub mountainous areas with low density of population. On the contrary, the decrease is achieved in Central Bohemia and Southeastern Moravia where there is the high concentration of population in municipalities in the background of industrial towns and regional towns. The contribution values the demographic situation in rural district of the Czech Republic for this is one of essential factors influencing the rural advancement. The rural development of the Czech Republic must be in harmony with structural policy of the EU which is one of basic stones in the reform of the Agenda 2000.
This paper studies local social capital in two Swedish rural districts. It concentrates on the relations between local political/public bodies and local development groups. The political bodies have acted somewhat differently towards local development initiatives in the two districts. This has resulted in differences in the number of development groups and in the social capital of local culture, leisure and service environments. There are, however, few examples of social capital in these environments spreading to changes in production environments, in the form of e.g. attitudes to entrepreneurship, risktaking, etc. The study supports the view that private and public actors can change local social capital. Local organizations who act as intermediate nodes between the local groups and the political bodies seem to be of special importance. However, our results suggest that changing local social capital is a long-term mission that demands sustainable work.
The paper examines capacity building in Zimbabwe's Rural District Councils (RDCs) from 1994 to 2001 and the resultant erosion of capacity during Zimbabwe's protracted political and economic crisis that followed. It is prudent to ask whether there was 'capacity building' or 'capacity erosion'. The paper establishes that the capacity building was piecemeal and that there was no genuine desire to build capacity, but that Councils embarked on these programmes to access the funding that came with the programmes. In some cases, the design of the Rural District Councils' Capacity Building Programme (RDCCBP) was too rigid, derailed by the central government's half-hearted attempts towards decentralisation, and failed to allow RDCs to learn-by-doing. Because of Zimbabwe's politico-economic crisis, national level politicians were peremptory in their demands for better RDC results and an opportunity to learn was lost. The plethora of other rural development projects coupled with the project-based approach of the RDCCBP condemned capacity building efforts to the rigidities of projects and programmes, yet capacity building is better perceived as a continuous process with experiential learning. The paper concludes by arguing that capacity building efforts in RDCs were largely unsuccessful, and were derailed by the 'Zimbabwe crisis'; the result can only be described as 'capacity building that never was'. Internal efforts by RDCs to build their own capacity are more sustainable than efforts prompted by the 'carrot and stick' approach of external actors, such as central government (in a bid to 'hive off' responsibilities) and funding agencies.
