Heading down to the local? Australian rural development and the evolving spatiality of the craft beer sector Neil Argent c/o Division of Geographyand Planning, University of New England, Armidale, N.S.W. 2351, Australia article info Article history: Received 17 October 2016 Received in revised form 24 January 2017 Accepted 29 January 2017 Available online xxx abstract Rural geographical and regional development scholarship over the past two decades has increasingly focused on the capacities of local towns and regions to overcome chronic spirals of employment, busi- ness and demographic decline. In this context, this paper assesses the local development impacts of a once ubiquitous industry in rural Australia e beer brewing. Via a case study of 16 rural Australian craft breweries, the paper examines the factors underlying their establishment, and investigates the contri- bution that these new firms make to local and regional development. Applying evolutionary economic geography concepts such as place dependence and lock-in, and related ideas of embeddedness and ‘regulatory space’, the paper finds that the 16 brewers follow a variety of business models and most are small scale producers. For most, place dependence manifested as a form of embeddedness, reflected in their attachment to place, a desire to foster local and regional development and, for a minority, to create beers from local ingredients as far as possible. Evidence from the case study reported on in this paper suggests that local craft breweries are playing positive roles in engendering social, symbolic and, to a lesser extent, financial capital in their home towns and regions. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction During the 1990s and early 2000s an academic and lay discourse emerged regarding the troubling circumstances facing rural com- munities in Australia and New Zealand (Le Heron and Pawson, 1996; Pritchard and McManus, 2000; Gray and Lawrence, 2001). Central to this body of work was a concern to understand the causes and impacts of farm restructuring, demographic decline and the withdrawal of public and private services such as banks, doctors and schools from the lower rungs of the regional urban hierarchy. Rural geography research from other parts of the so-called devel- oped world generally echoed these sentiments (see, for example, Woods, 2003). Since this time, scholarship has focused on the subsequent experiences of rural communities following the removal of key planks of their economic and social bases, and the extent to which towns and regions possess the ‘capitals’, including innovation and creativity, needed to resist or at least rebound from these shocks (Gibson and Klocker, 2005; McGranahan et al., 2011; Argent et al., 2013). Given the political and ideological tenor of the time, with neoliberalist ideals of ‘locally-led’ and ‘bottom-up’ development fashionable in contrast to the state-led ‘smokestack chasing’ approaches prior to the 1980s, many academics have experimented with ‘new regionalist’ or ‘capitals’ interpretative frameworks to make sense of these changes and their impacts (e.g. Cocklin and Dibden, 2005; Rainnie and Grobbelaar, 2005). Such approaches have recognised the role of local entrepreneurialism, innovation and leadership in fostering the development of new businesses and industries in select rural locations, and highlighted attendant demographic and socio-cultural dividends. Often, such accounts focus on new businesses or industries that capitalise on different features of local resource endowment and a constructed comparative or competitive advantage (Kroehn et al., 2010; Halseth et al., 2010). In a variation on this theme, this paper assesses the local development impacts of an industry that was relatively ubiquitous across much of rural Australia during the 19th and early 20th Centuries but almost completely disappeared following the 1930s. Since 2000, and particularly over the past five years, though, beer brewing has re-emerged in rural Australia. It is in this context that this paper: a) describes the numerical growth and spatial expan- sion of craft breweries across Australia from the early 1980s; b) via a case study, examines the factors underlying the establishment of a number of breweries in rural Australia; and c) assesses the E-mail address: nargent@une.edu.au. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Rural Studies journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2017.01.016 0743-0167/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Rural Studies xxx (2017) 1e16 Please cite this article in press as: Argent, N., Heading down to the local? Australian rural development and the evolving spatiality of the craft beer sector, Journal of Rural Studies (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2017.01.016