The premise and promise of citizenship and civil society for renewing democracies and empowering sustainable communities

State regimes have launched policies to "reinvent' government and "regenerate" communities in peripheral impoverished rural and urban areas to build sustainable communities and reduce poverty. We investigate the impact of policy concepts-the empowerment paradigm, citizenship as citizen participation and inclusion, and associations between the state and civil society-on local areas' success in leveraging dollars to foster sustainable economic and community development in persistently poor rural areas of the US. The thirty-three rural sites of the Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Communities Initiative of the Clinton-Gore Administration comprise our database. We find that empowering area-based, low-income residents through the election mechanism to choose their representatives on the local sites' governing board is strongly and significantly related to both inclusion and citizen participation. Also, the presence of elected citizens with connections to civil society on the governing body contributes strongly to later success in leveraging dollars.