Created, Initiated and Maintained: Rural Residents’ Agency in (Re‐)Producing Social Infrastructure and Participative Practices in Their Villages

The centralisation of public and private services in many rural areas has led to a loss of local spaces for social interaction and community engagement. In light of these changes, we investigate residents’ agency in (re-)producing social infrastructure and participative practices in their villages. Our analysis of semi-structured interviews revealed four distinct activities: ‘creating social infrastructure’, ‘maintaining social infrastructure’, ‘initiating participative practices’ and ‘maintaining participative practices’. Notably, incomers were more involved in creating new social infrastructure, while life-long stayers and returnees focused on maintaining existing social infrastructure and participative practices. Drawing on Bourdieu's forms of capital, we argue that residents’ agency is positionally distributed, reflecting varying capital compositions including access to resources and social networks within the community. Conceptually, our paper emphasises maintaining existing social infrastructure and participative practices as a central form of agency in rural communities.