Essential Definitions for Rural Development

A comprehensive glossary of key terms and concepts frequently used in rural development.

Welcome to Aspen CSG’s comprehensive glossary of key terms and concepts frequently used in our work to advance transformational development through regional collaboration, asset-based strategies, and peer learning.

By understanding these terms, you’ll be better equipped to engage with the challenges and opportunities we address in our reports, blogs, events, and initiatives.

While these definitions provide a starting point, language resonates differently with different worldviews and is always evolving. Please share your thoughts with us if you have any suggestions or feedback.

  • Assets/Capital/Wealth: These terms are used interchangeably to refer to any resource (for examples, see: Community Capitals) that can improve a community and/or generate additional resources.
  • Class Equity: Promoting fairness and justice in economic and social systems to ensure individuals have equal opportunities and resources, regardless of their socioeconomic status. This includes addressing systemic barriers that contribute to economic disparities and working towards an economy where everyone can prosper (informed by PolicyLink). Learn more: Aspen CSG’s Thrive Rural Framework.
  • Civic Infrastructure: The spaces, relationships, and systems that support civic engagement, community participation, and democratic processes. This includes physical spaces like community centers and networks and platforms that facilitate public involvement and collective decision-making. Learn more: How To Organize a Rural Action Infrastructure.
  • Community Capacity: The combined influence of a community’s commitment, resources, and skills that can be deployed to build on community strengths and address community problems and opportunities. Learn more: Measuring Community Capacity Building Workbook.
  • Community Capitals: All the elements in a community with the potential to be resources — they can be invested, saved, or depleted. In the WealthWorks framework, the eight capitals include intellectual, financial, natural, cultural, built, political, individual, and social.
  • Community Development: A process where community members come together to take collective action and generate solutions to common problems. It involves building community capacity, enhancing the quality of life, and fostering economic opportunities to create sustainable and thriving communities. Learn more: Aspen CSG’s Thrive Rural Framework.
  • Community Well-being: The holistic combination of social, economic, environmental, cultural, and political conditions that individuals and communities identify as necessary for flourishing and reaching their potential.
  • Disaster: An event such as a storm, fire, or flood that causes severe damage or death within a community or geographic area. Rural communities and Native nations experience “slow-moving disasters” related to our changing climate, systemic inequity, and/or disinvestment. Learn more: Through Natural Disaster to Prosperity: A Call to Action.
  • Economic Development: Initiatives and policies aimed at improving a community’s economic well-being and quality of life by creating and retaining jobs, fostering a stable and diverse economy, and enhancing the tax base. Learn more: Mapping a New Terrain: Call to Action.
  • Emergent Learning: a set of principles and practices that help people across a system think, learn, and adapt together to overcome complex challenges. This strategy is foundational to how Aspen CSG does our work, and our staff members have been trained to facilitate conversations using this method with the field. 
  • Environmental Justice: The fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies (Environmental Protection Agency). Learn more: Rural Environmental Justice: Community Flooding Case Study.
  • Equity: Fairness and justice in outcomes and impact, rather than just equal access or opportunity. Learn more: Aspen CSG’s Thrive Rural Framework.
  • Equitable Development: Development efforts aimed at achieving fair and just outcomes, particularly for communities and individuals impacted by historical and ongoing structural discrimination. Learn more: Aspen CSG’s Thrive Rural Framework.
  • Equitable Rural Prosperity: The ultimate outcome of Aspen CSG’s Thrive Rural Framework — fostering communities and Native nations across the rural United States are healthy places where each and every person belongs, lives with dignity, and thrives. Learn more: Aspen CSG’s Thrive Rural Framework.
  • Financial Wellness: The state of having both financial security and the freedom to make choices that support one’s well-being, both now and in the future. (CFPB).
  • General Operating Support: Flexible funding that supports an organization as a whole rather than being restricted to a specific project or workstream. Learn more: Funding Rural Futures: Call to Action.
  • Heirs’ Property: Land that has been passed down through generations without a will, resulting in shared ownership among many descendants. This situation limits economic benefits and often leads to involuntary loss of property, particularly affecting underserved groups like women, Indigenous people, Black Americans, and low-income individuals. Learn more: Using Relational Leadership to Build Power Together.
  • Inclusive Growth: Economic growth that is distributed fairly across society and creates opportunities for all, particularly for historically marginalized groups. Learn more: Aspen CSG’s Thrive Rural Framework.
  • Intersectionality: The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, which create overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage. Learn more: Aspen CSG’s Thrive Rural Framework.
  • Narrative Change: The process by which the realities and lived experiences of the diversity of rural people, places, perspectives, and economies become more fairly and fully represented in media information and portrayals. Learn more: What We Learned: Rural Narrative Change
  • Participatory Grantmaking: A funding approach that actively involves the communities and individuals affected by grant decisions in the decision-making process. Learn more: Funding Rural Futures: Call to Action.
  • Peer learning: Learning with and from one another. Aspen CSG uses Emergent Learning as our peer learning approach.
  • Place Equity: Ensuring that all communities, regardless of their geographic location, have access to the resources, opportunities, and services necessary for residents to thrive. This involves addressing disparities in infrastructure, environmental quality, and public services to promote fair and just outcomes across different places (PolicyLink). Learn more: Aspen CSG’s Thrive Rural Framework.
  • Planning: Creating and adopting concrete plans for community development (e.g., economic development, built environment) and/or disaster mitigation. Learn more: Mapping a New Terrain: Call to Action.
  • Racial equity: A process of eliminating racial disparities and improving outcomes for everyone. It is the intentional and continual practice of changing policies, practices, systems, and structures by prioritizing measurable change in the lives of people of color (PolicyLink, Race Forward). Learn more: Aspen CSG’s Thrive Rural Framework.
  • Racial Justice: A vision and transformation of society to eliminate racial hierarchies and advance collective liberation, where Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, in particular, have the dignity, resources, power, and self-determination to fully thrive (Race Forward).
  • Reciprocity: The mutual exchange of resources, respect, or benefits, where actions foster trust and commitment over time.
  • Region: A geographic area spanning multiple jurisdictions (e.g., counties, states) where collaborative initiatives can be aligned for cultural, economic, or logistical reasons. Learn more: Mapping a New Terrain: Call to Action.
  • Resilience: Long-term ability of built infrastructure to withstand disasters. Aspen CSG does not use this term to refer to communities or people, given that rural and Indigenous people and communities have too often been praised for being resilient — at the expense of a real effort to create equitable conditions on the ground. Learn more: Through Natural Disaster to Prosperity: A Call to Action.
  • Rural: Many definitions of rural exist across the health and development fields. Most definitions focus on what rural communities are not—part of large cities or suburbs. Given regional variations in culture and geography, creating an authentic definition of rural that works for all communities is difficult, so self-definition is often the clearest way forward. For this work, Aspen CSG has focused on self-identified rural communities affected by disinvestment and injustice across race, place, and class. For an in-depth discussion of the impact of rural definitions, see Defining Rural America: The Consequences of How We Count, from the Center on Rural Innovation. 
  • Rural Development Hubs: Organizations or networks that coordinate resources, foster collaboration, and drive systemic change to promote sustainable economic and community development in rural areas. Learn more: Rural Development Hubs Report.
  • Social Determinants of Health: The non-medical factors that influence health outcomes. They are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life. These forces and systems include economic policies and systems, development agendas, social norms, social policies and political systems (World Health Organization). Learn more: Collaborative Strategies for Rural Health & Economic Prosperity.
  • Structural Inequity: Persistent disparities embedded in social, economic, and political systems that disadvantage certain groups based on race, class, geography, or other factors. Learn more: Aspen CSG’s Thrive Rural Framework.
  • Social Infrastructure: The essential organizations, spaces, and systems that enable social connections, fostering relationships that help communities thrive.
  • Structural Racism: Formal and informal discriminatory practices that have occurred historically within institutions, governmental policies and laws, social structures, and culture, as well as those still occurring today. These inequities are deeply rooted and embedded in our social, economic, political, and legal systems. Learn more: Aspen CSG’s Thrive Rural Framework.
  • Sustainability: The degree to which an economic activity is both durable, avoiding boom and bust cycles, and equitable, strengthening and preserving the diverse assets essential to the long-term health of rural communities. Learn more: Mapping a New Terrain: Call to Action.
  • WealthWorks: A holistic approach to local and regional economic development that connects a community’s assets to market demands. WealthWorks seeks to build sustainable livelihoods by enhancing prosperity, increasing jobs and incomes for lower-income residents, and strengthening regional self-reliance. Learn more: WealthWorks: A Powerful Tool for Thriving Rural Places.
  • Well-Being: A state where individuals have the skills, resources, and social supports they need to pursue and live a healthy, safe, and fulfilling life. Learn more: Aspen CSG’s Advance Personal Well-Being.
  • Vital Conditions: Properties of places and institutions that all people need for health and well-being. They include a thriving natural world, basic needs for health and safety, humane housing, meaningful work and wealth, lifelong learning, reliable transportation, and, central to all of these, belonging and civic muscle (ReThink Health). Learn more: Collaborative Strategies for Rural Health & Economic Prosperity.

Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group