The Civic Burden Paradox: When Community-Led Solutions Generate Rural Resentment

Rural communities across Europe increasingly rely on civil society to compensate for retreating public services and market failures (Henning et al., 2023; Stenbacka & Cassel, 2024). While community resilience and grassroots agency are often seen as markers of local empowerment (Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), critical perspectives caution that civic substitution risks normalizing state withdrawal and placing disproportionate burdens on marginalized populations (DeFilippis et al., 2010). Yet less attention has been paid to how these civic responses themselves become sources of political discontent and perceived injustice. This paper examines the paradox whereby civil society simultaneously enables rural survival and generates resentment about unequal urban-rural resource distribution. Drawing on qualitative interviews with residents and organizers in Swedish rural community, combined with analysis of Swedish political attitudes data, this study explores how residents experience the imperative to "do it themselves" when addressing service gaps. Sweden provides a critical case: rural areas exhibit exceptionally high civic capacity rooted in strong associational traditions (Lundberg et al., 2025; Wallman Lundåsen, 2022), yet also show declining trust in local government and rising support for populist parties in areas experiencing service withdrawal (Erlingsson et al., 2023; Wallman Lundåsen, 2024). This combination allows examination of how civic responses operate even under favorable conditions—and why they still generate political grievances. The findings reveal a double-edged civic capacity: while community organizing maintains local life under conditions of demographic aging and service withdrawal (Cras, 2017; von Essen & Ydremark, 2020), it also intensifies feelings of territorial injustice. Residents perceive themselves paying equal taxes for unequal services while simultaneously being expected to volunteer extensive time to maintain community functions that urban residents receive as standard public provision. This dynamic reconfigures what Lawson (2007) terms "moral geographies of care," where responsibility for community well-being shifts from institutions to individuals in ways that residents experience as abandonment rather than empowerment. Importantly, this civic burden falls unevenly. The capacity to organize depends heavily on prior professional experience and organizational skills, creating stratification even among rural residents in their ability to respond to service gaps. The paper makes three contributions. First, it theorizes the relationship between civic substitution and place-based resentment (Cramer, 2016), showing how reliance on civil society generates perceptions of structural neglect that fuel rural political discontent. Second, it demonstrates how local-level urban-rural divides within municipalities—particularly in communities absorbed through municipal mergers (Erlingsson et al., 2023)—shape experiences of civic burden as residents compare themselves not to national averages but to their own municipal administrative centers. Third, it reveals how the same activities that scholars code as "high civic capacity" may be experienced by participants as evidence of institutional failure, suggesting that governance strategies emphasizing community-led development may inadvertently deepen rather than resolve the political cleavages associated with rural depopulation (Ansell et al., 2022; Bolet, 2021).