Abstract

Social sustainability in rural areas is a topic of considerable interest to policymakers. Changing agricultural practices and rural population decline are important issues for social sustainability. This paper investigates recent agricultural, land use, and population trends and considers how these trends are associated with change in communities in the rural Waikato region of New Zealand. A combination of quantitative and qualitative data is used to describe both the current situation and expectations for future change. We show that the region has been subject to considerable changes in agricultural practice over recent decades. These changes have been associated with changes in population dynamics and have implications for social sustainability. While the key drivers of agricultural change have been economic, including changes in the relative returns of dairying, forestry, and dry stock farming, and changes in land values, the consequences of agricultural change have been most keenly felt in the social sphere. For instance, a declining rural population has led to changes in community social support, declining opportunities for socialization through group activities, declining participation in schools and churches, and so on. These effects are compounded by changes in commuting patterns, farm ownership patterns, and changes in the nature of rural service towns.