Bass connection team finds untold stories of rural development

From shuttered textile mills and furniture factories to dormant tobacco fields, the traditional industries of North Carolina’s Appalachian region have drastically declined.  But new areas have emerged, says Lukas Brun of Duke’s Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness, who set out to show that the Appalachian economy is more than a tale of decline: “There are great stories that are not being told.” In 2015-16, a new Bass Connections team focused on using the value chain framework in one part of the state. “The framework hadn’t been applied to a region before,” Brun noted, “and we wanted to understand what industries were taking root in a disadvantaged rural area. We picked Appalachia because the traditional industries of North Carolina—furniture, tobacco, textiles—all had a historic presence in the region, but had largely gone away. And we had connections with people at the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina who were interested in better understanding the economy of that region.”