Innovative Regional Partnerships in the Rural Tenth District

small, isolated, and often fiercely independent communities and businesses. In the 19th century, rural towns represented the nation’s frontier, where independence amidst isolation was critical to economic survival. Rural people plowed, mined, and ranched their way to self-sufficiency. In the 20th century, each community found a narrower economic niche to orient its limited resources and compete in a specialized national economy. Today, the new global economy rewards larger blends of human and physical assets. Urban areas and innovative business clusters have these advantages, and so are widening their economic lead on rural areas. From 1990 to 2000, the top 10 percent of U.S. counties, ranked by employment, income, and population growth, accounted for roughly 75 percent of each of these national assets. Rural, or nonmetro, counties accounted for less than 3 percent of these high-growth counties, despite the fact that roughly two-thirds of all U.S. counties are rural. Still, rural economic success stories have emerged recently—not stories of individual communities or businesses, but of novel groupings of them. Regional partnerships can turn new economic advantages back toward rural areas, offsetting the twin obstacles of size and remoteness. For example, one regional initiative helped the struggling Farmington, New Mexico, labor market rise to number three among regions generating high-growth entrepreneurs in the 1990s. New regional groupings can cross traditional boundaries and create new networks that blend complementary assets and shared interests. These groupings can also help rural economies raise their relative scale to compete more effectively against more urbanized areas. Broad regions already exist, often through dated administrative boundaries such as county lines. But the most promising new regions evolve organically—from the landscape and the communities themselves. In short, these new regions combine the unique individual features and shared interests of its people and landscape to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Giving birth to regions and nursing them to adolescence require an unusually innovative and compelling partnership. This article describes how effective regional partnerships can help rural areas overcome the disadvantages of size and remoteness. It also explains why R 2006