Consensus-based community development, concentrated rural poverty, and local institutional structures: the obstacle of race in the lower Mississippi Delta

During the 1990s consensus-building approaches to community and economic development emphasizing local assets and social capital became dominant. These approaches have since been criticized for failing to pay sufficient attention to structural factors, particularly how variation in local institutional conditions affects implementation and outcomes. In this paper I use data collected through in-depth interviews with 73 leaders in four Mississippi Delta counties to address these shortcomings. The findings indicate that the Delta's racialized social structure systematically obstructs consensus-based efforts to construct interracial and inter-institutional relations of trust and cooperation. The paper contributes to literatures on community development, race, social capital, and persistent poverty by explaining the interaction between consensus-based approaches and the institutional structure of the Delta. It concludes with a discussion of how the findings speak to community development theory.