The digital divide: Patterns, policy and scenarios for connecting the ‘final few’ in rural communities across Great Britain

The Internet can bestow significant benefits upon those who use it. The prima facie case for an urban-rural digital divide is widely acknowledged, but detailed accounts of the spatial patterns of digital communications infrastructure are rarely reported. In this paper we present original analysis of data published by the UK telecommunications regulator, Ofcom, and identify and reflect on the entrenched nature of the urban-rural digital divide in Great Britain. Drawing upon illustrative case vignettes we demonstrate the implications of digital exclusion for personal and business lives in rural, and in particular remote rural, areas. The ability of the current UK policy context to effectively address the urban-rural digital divide is reviewed and scenarios for improving digital connectivity amongst the ‘final few’, including community-led broadband, satellite broadband and mobile broadband, are considered. A call is made for digital future proofing in telecommunications policy, without which the already faster urban areas will get ‘faster, fastest’ leaving rural areas behind and an increasingly entrenched urban-rural divide

Transactions costs in rural decision-making: The cases of funding and monitoring in rural development in England

Public domain decisions in rural England have become more complex as the number of stakeholders having a say in them has increased. Transactions costs can be used to explore this increasing complexity. The size and distribution of these costs are higher in rural areas. Grouping transactions costs into four - organizations, belief systems, knowledge and information, and institutions - two of the latter are evaluated empirically: growth in the bid culture, and monitoring and evaluation. Amongst 65 Agents of Rural Governance (ARGs) in Gloucestershire, both were found to be increasing over time, but those relating to finance were a greater burden than those of monitoring: the latter can improve ARG performance. Increasing transactions costs in rural decision-making appears to be at variance with ambitions of achieving 'smaller government' through, for example, the Big Society. Smaller government is likely to be shifting the incidence of these costs, rather than reducing them. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

A review of the rural-digital policy agenda from a community resilience perspective

© 2016 The Authors This paper utilises a community resilience framework to critically examine the digital-rural policy agenda. Rural areas are sometimes seen as passive and static, set in contrast to the mobility of urban, technological and globalisation processes (Bell et al., 2010). In response to notions of rural decline (McManus et al., 2012) rural resilience literature posits rural communities as ‘active,’ and ‘proactive’ about their future (Skerratt, 2013), developing processes for building capacity and resources. We bring together rural development and digital policy-related literature, using resilience motifs developed from recent academic literature, including community resilience, digital divides, digital inclusion, and rural information and communication technologies (ICTs). Whilst community broadband initiatives have been linked to resilience (Plunkett-Carnegie, 2012; Heesen et al., 2013) digital inclusion, and engagement with new digital technologies more broadly, have not. We explore this through three resilience motifs: resilience as multi-scalar; as entailing normative assumptions; and as integrated and place-sensitive. We point to normative claims about the capacity of digital technology to aid rural development, to offer solutions to rural service provision and the challenges of implementing localism. Taking the UK as a focus, we explore the various scales at which this is evident, from European to UK country-level