Discourses of sustainability: Grassroots organizations and sustainable community development in Central Appalachia

This dissertation examines Appalachian struggles for sustainable community development in three Central Appalachian counties: Letcher County, Kentucky; Lee County, Virginia; and Athens County, Ohio, former coal-economy counties where nonprofit grassroots and community-based organizations are leading the efforts to achieve economic, environmental and social sustainability. This study focuses on issues of sustainable community development, specifically on how grassroots organizations (GROs) construct a discourse of sustainability, the intersection of nonprofits, social capital, and community development and assesses the success of community sustainability programs in the case study counties.;This study examines four (4) central research questions: (1) How do Appalachian grassroots and community-based organizations discursively define "sustainability?" How do these discourses differ from or resemble mainstream discourses of sustainability, specifically discourses of sustainable community development, in current academic theory and government programs? (2) What are the roles of grassroots organizations (GROs) and community-based organizations (CBOs) in this process? In other words, how do they affect and/or are affected by sustainable community development efforts? (3) how are GRO and CBO sustainability efforts hampered or enabled by governmental efforts and policies? How is power employed in this context to affect discourses of sustainability and community development? (4) Why have some GROs and CBOs and their projects been more successful at sustainability efforts than others? That is to say, why have some of these organizations been able to articulate a sustained and coherent discourse of sustainability, and then been able to achieve to some extent the goals to achieve this vision of sustainability that they have set for themselves?;I utilize several qualitative methods in this study: discourse analysis, interviewing, participant observation and comparative case study analysis. Participant-observation of grassroots organizations involved in the struggle for sustainability allowed me to observe first-hand the actions and internal discourse(s) of these groups as they engaged in local struggles for sustainability, and to some extent, experience the "lived reality" of these struggles. The study concludes with five principles for GRO success in struggles for sustainability which emerged from a grounded theory developed from the research.