Rural opportunities: Minimalist policy and community-based experimentation

Rural America's experiences with federal policies provide lessons on both t he benefits and liabilities of minimalist policy attention and community-ba sed policy experimentation. Prior to the New Deal federal rural policies pr omoted incentives to settle vast territories, subsidize private development of internal market structures, and invest in the benefits of higher educat ion. The New Deal redirected rural policies to more narrow foci on the farm economic and environmental crises. These new, more centralized policies we re built upon the rapid expansion of the Department of Agriculture into the first modern federal bureaucracy, politically legitimized on the basis of community-based policy experimentation. The seemingly unintended consequenc e of these emergency efforts to rescue farming was the marginalization of m ost non-farm policy concerns. The resulting minimalist federal approach to rural America was due to the absence of a unified national constituency for rural concerns. Understanding rural America's inadvertent experimentation in minimalist policy attention and in community-based policy structures can inform current policy initiatives to decentralize federal authority.