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The dynamics of rural change are often linked to frameworks of 'rural community resilience', a body of literature associated with various aspects of society including social capital, community initiatives, and governance. Drawing on emergent literature, this study aims to explore how assemblage approaches may disseminate resilience thinking via dissolving structure-agency and bounce-back-transformative divisions. The paper explores how deliberate, and often policy-orientated actions, are intertwined with 'non-intentional' activities and processes that are deeply embedded in daily rural life. The paper further illustrates rural development processes through a case study of the watermelon-producing community of Medgyesegyháza, Hungary: a community that, in recent years, has been praised for its endurance throughout a period of socio-economic turbulence. The aim is to demonstrate how assemblage theory may explain the emergence of intermingling human and non-human agency. It was observed that the resilience of the rural community assemblage is embedded in daily practices, and emerges from relations between two main components: humans and watermelons. By applying the concept of territorialisation, this paper examines how components of the assemblage become aligned as provisional stability is established. The paper contends that the engagement with non-humans establishes community identity, but changes in relations de-territorialise the assemblage and trigger new contingencies. The precarious nature of human-watermelon relationships have repercussions on stability as they may serve as drivers of change. • Structure-agency and bounce back-transformative resilience divisions may be dissolved by assemblage approaches. • Resilience is a system of processes and a phenomenon constantly reproduced by daily practices of agricultural production. • Rural communities are assembled of human and non-human components that take material and expressive roles. • Changing relations between humans and non-humans triggers non-human agency. • Territorialising and de-territorialising forces may unravel how temporal stability and new contingencies are emerging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study provides a method that supports local governments' efforts to develop their economy with a set of instruments built on evidence-based decision making. The authors' first objective is to define the action space and opportunities by examining the relation between environmental factors and internal resources. To achieve this, an analytical tool was designed that discovers - with an indicator system - the network of internal factors of a settlement economy and the external environment affecting it. When studying local economic development, it is important to assess the local economy in situ and its interaction with its surroundings. The second objective is to discover and show the connection between the available tools and environmental factors, and thereby enable decision makers to take development actions based on evidence. The tools provide a quantified relationship between the possible actions and environmental factors made available by these actions. It is essential to determine which actions affect which environmental factors, and which factor they can help adjust. It is assumed that the development tools used by local governments are not equal in their effectiveness when interacting with the different environmental factors. The authors' third objective is to discover the relationship between the tools and internal resources, thereby ensuring a base for planning resources necessary for implementing economic development actions. According to their preliminary assumption, the relations between the available resources and local governmental tools are not of the same strength; therefore, it justifies their analysis. The next assumption is that areas affected by the same environmental factors can be devel oped to different extents with local governmental tools. However, it is also assumed that a settlement can be developed according to a predefined target by a systematic application of appropriately selected tools; thus, every area can be developed. Economic factors are related to each other; they constitute a living fabric. The authors' objective is to discover the hidden relations in a local economy. According to their assumption, understanding these relations allows indirect influence of economic factors that are more difficult to shape. The authors' final objective is to provide structured information for economic development actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to test whether the concept of resilience can be applied to rural communities in postsocialist transition countries such as Hungary. Resilience, a concept engaged with the dynamics of change, has gained popularity in recent years following the post-2008 crisis and has become a core theme of academic, policy and lay discourses in the Anglo-Saxon world. The ongoing processes of socio-economic transition within the post-socialist environment have also attracted wide attention in the past decades, although not within the frameworks of resilience thinking. The concept of resilience is missing from post-socialist discourses and has not been applied to rural communities before in an Eastern European context, although the nature of post-socialist transition characterised by complexity, cross-scalar processes and multiplicity of actors involved make it an especially suitable field for resilience studies. In this paper, we aim to flag the potential directions and successful application of the concept of resilience both as a research topic and as a tool for researchers of the post-socialist space while we caution for the potential pitfalls and misuses of the concept and critically analyse aspects that attracted wide debates. We illustrate how rural community resilience may be conceptualised on the example of the watermelon producing community of Medgyesegyháza, Hungary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]