Rural Development

Adam Pain, Kjell Hansen

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317682035
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Ciencias físicas
• Sous-sujet: Geografía

Rural Development is a textbook that critically examines economic, social and cultural aspects of rural development efforts both in the global north and in the global south. By consistently using examples from the north and the south the book highlights similarities of processes as well as differences in contexts.

The authors' knowledge of Afghanistan and Sweden respectively creates a core for the discussions which are complemented with a wide range of other empirical examples. Rural Development is divided into nine chapters, each with a thematic focus, ranging from concepts and theories through rural livelihoods and natural resources to discussions on policy and processes of change. The book sees rural development as a multi-level, multi-actor and multi-faceted subject area that needs multidisciplinary perspectives both to support it and to analyse it. Throughout the book examples of rural development interventions are discussed using analytical concepts such as power, discourse, consequences and context to grasp rural development as practices that are more than what is presented in policy documents.

The book is written in a way that makes it accessible for undergraduates while at the same time caters for the kind of deeper reading used by master students and Ph.D.'s. Every chapter is linked to discussion questions as well as suggested further readings and useful websites.

Chapter 1

What is rural development?

Key themes

• The complex nature of the rural
• Rural development as intentional practice and immanent processes
• Key ideas and approaches in rural development
• Comparative analysis and the use of case studies

Introduction

In 2005 activities in the first village under the Millennium Villages Project were launched in a remote part of Western Kenya. As one of a planned series of Millennium Villages it was designed to showcase economist Jeffrey Sachs’ vision that poverty should be attacked on all fronts with a massive injection of money to address what were seen to be the development deficits: of education, mother and child health care, business and entrepreneurial activity, gender equality, technology availability, environmental management, water and energy availability and food production. This, so Sachs thought, would bring about development so that poverty traps could be escaped. Development was expected to happen within these villages in five years but nearly ten years later and despite massive levels of funding, the scheme has yet to deliver on the vision of its architect. As Angus Deaton (2014) in his review of Munk’s (2013) fine account of the project made clear, this has been just one in a long line of projects (Box 1.1) with grand ambitions that have failed.

Box 1.1: The failure of grand schemes: the case of the Millennium Villages

Modern technology, with its models and manuals, has an irresistible fascination for social engineers, and has done so for most of the past century. New knowledge and new ways of doing things have indeed been the source of much of human progress. Yet the schemes of the planners have rarely brought the improvement in the human condition that their well-intentioned architects had hoped for, and have often brought disaster. Thousands of years of painstakingly accumulated local knowledge cannot be incorporated into such plans. Nor can technocratic methods make up for bad politics, or provide a substitute for the two-way contract between politicians and people that provides public goods in exchange for taxes and that underpins development.

The Millennium Villages come with none of the coercion that accompanied the rural development projects of Stalin or of Nyerere, let alone the murderous horrors of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. For that we should be grateful. Yet the crying shame is that while the hubris came from Sachs, the nemesis came to the villagers.

(Source: Deaton, 2014: 298)

The interventions in the Millennium Villages – health care, education, agricultural inputs and infrastructure – might have created, relatively speaking, small islands of prosperity in the villages because of a flow of funds effect. But the logic of the intervention failed to take account of the wider context within which these villages were located and the expected village development did not happen. This example identifies the key themes of this introductory chapter. These include the questions of what development is and who defines it. Why is it that externally designed schemes to develop the ‘rural’, and other examples that will be found in this book, have so often failed to achieve what they set out to do? The chapter starts first by examining the idea of the ‘rural’ before going on to consider what we mean by rural development. It explores some of the key themes or narratives that have framed the subject of rural development and examines how these have evolved over time. The justification for the book and its comparative approach is then outlined and the question of how we can ‘know the rural’ is addressed before the book’s structure and how it is to be read are explained.

What is rural?

If one were to ask this question of the general public many could describe the rural in a very practical way and would know when they were in a rural environment. If pressed for a definition many would suggest that rural is what is outside the towns and cities, i.e. it is not urban. Indeed, the common definition of rural population is the total population of a country minus the urban population. If pressed even further for a more specific answer many would say that what is distinctive about rural areas is that they are where agriculture, forestry and other landscapes (e.g. mountains, deserts) are to be found, where many people work in agriculture and people live in isolated households or in relatively small settlements. But the moment one seeks comparisons between what is rural in one country and what is rural in another then it becomes very clear that distinctions between rural and urban vary (Box 1.2) and that there is no single internationally accepted definition of rural.

There are three reasons for the variation in how the rural is defined. First, there are culturally different perceptions of what makes an area rural rather than urban and what natural and economic criteria are useful to describe the rural. There are often intermediate areas that can have both rural and urban properties. Second, the moment one starts identifying criteria then you need data to match them. These are often not available or disaggregated at the basic level of geographic unit (of administration, location, etc.) required. Third, it is often the purpose behind an interest in the rural that determines how the rural is defined: thus it is the policy concern or the problem, e.g. rural poverty or accessibility to services, which will determine the definition of rural. So one will often find that different government agencies within the same country will define ‘rural’ in contrasting ways (see box 1.3).

Box 1.2: Country contrasts in the definition of what is rural: five examples

• Kenya: The Kenya National Bureau of Statistics define rural as a locality with a human population of less than 2,000
• Madagascar: Rural areas are districts in which the proportion of agriculturally economically active population (as defined by the Agricultural Census) exceeds 50 percent
• Mexico: A rural locality is defined by the national statistical system as a place with fewer than 2,500 dwellers
• Morocco: Rural areas are defined by default as any areas that are not included in the scope of an urban area
• Nicaragua: The official definition of rural areas is districts with fewer than 1,000 dwellers

(Source: Losch et al., 2012: 39)

Box 1.3: What is rural in Sweden?

In Sweden the rural is defined as that which is not urban. For administrative purposes the definitions used by both Statistics Sweden and by the Swedish Board of Agriculture (SBA) classify at the level of municipalities, and 67 percent (194) of the 290 Swedish municipalities are defined as rural. On the other hand, according to Statistics Sweden, 85 percent of the total population live in towns and cities. The decisive factor in the definition of whether a municipality is rural or not is the number of inhabitants in relation to the area. A rural area is one in which the population density is at least five inhabitants per square kilometre and a total of less than 20,000 inhabitants. In a sparsely populated municipality there are less than five inhabitants per square kilometre.

(Source: Swedish Board of Agriculture’s database Allt om Landet (Everything about the Rural) www.jordbruksverket.se/etjanster/etjanster/etjansterforutvecklingavlandsbygden/statistikdatabas.4.6a459c18120617aa58a800010)

The European Union (2010) in its attempts to provide a consistent basis for the description of rural, intermediate and urban areas developed a new typology. The method drew on population data at a square kilometre resolution. However, actual census data was only available from five of the EU countries; for the remaining 22 member states the data had to be constructed from remote sensing images and local administrative unit level assessments. The lack of specific data, even within the EU, points to the more general challenge that the rural in many countries is often unknown or poorly measured, making precise definitions difficult to construct.

Whatever the challenges are of how to define the rural, a comparison across contrasting countries points to key dimensions of similarity and difference. For all the countries of comparison in table 1.1 the rural occupies over 90 percent of the physical area of the region or country. It is also, in many countries, where most people live, although not all, as the Swedish example showed. However, it is the contribution of primary production to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and to employment that provides the point of contrast between the nature of the rural in low income countries and in high income countries. Low income countries are characterised by a higher percentage of the work force being employed in agriculture and a greater contribution of primary production (agriculture) to gross domestic product than in high income countries. For Sweden less than 0.5 percent of its GDP comes from agriculture and only about 2 percent of the labour force works in agriculture.

A complementary approach to understanding the rural is to look at it in terms of the multiple meanings and functions that have been given to it. Michael Woods (2011) explores these diverse dimensions and his key attributes of what is rural are summarised in box 1.4.

Table 1.1 Comparison of three dimensions of rural in contrasting countries by region

Region and country with the highest and lowest share of non-agriculture in GDP (%)	Share of non-agriculture in GDP (%) 2010–2014*	Rural poverty headcount at country poverty line 2010–2014*	Employment in agriculture**
Asia & the Pacific
China	90.6	7.9	2.5
Lao PDR	71.1	28.6	71.3
Latin America & the Caribbean
Brazil	94.7	31.1	14.5
Paraguay	79.0	40.3	22.8
East and Southern Africa
Botswana	97.3	24.3 (2005–09)	26.4
Ethiopia	55.2	30.4	72.7
West & Central Africa
Congo	95.9	74.8	***
Central African Republic	44.2	69.4 (2005–09)	***
Near East & Central Asia
Jordan	96.6	16.8	1.8
Tajikistan	74.3	25.7	***

* (Source: IFAD, 2016)
** (Source: UNDP, 2016, Human Development Report, Table 11, 237)
*** No data

Box 1.4: Attributes and functions of the rural

• The rural as a place of imagination: the specific images of the rural are all based on the contrasts between rural and urban: the rural is everything that the urban is not. There is no consistency in what kinds of stories these narratives tell: they can focus on the rural as backwards; as idyllic and pristine; as a field for future wealth and well-being; as a place for recreation, adventu...