Land, Empowerment and the Rural Poor: Challenges to Civil Society and Development Agencies
March 30, 2006
Three-fourths of the world’s 1.2 billion poor are rural poor. Lack of access to and control over land and water resources is largely the cause of their economic poverty, social exclusion, political subordination and cultural marginalization. Recent global campaigns to end poverty, however laudable, have tended to avoid the issue of democratizing access to and control over
productive resources. When such campaigns have addressed the issue of access to resources, they have tended to avoid public policies that explicitly confront the structural and institutional causes of rural poverty. But if poverty is to be ended worldwide, anti-poverty campaigns have to focus on the rural world. If rural poverty is to be eradicated, democratizing access to and control over land and water resources must become central.
Summary
Three-fourths of the world’s 1.2 billion poor are rural poor. Lack of access to and control over land and water resources is largely the cause of their economic poverty, social exclusion, political subordination and cultural marginalization. Recent global campaigns to end poverty, however laudable, have tended to avoid the issue of democratizing access to and control over
productive resources. When such campaigns have addressed the issue of access to resources, they have tended to avoid public policies that explicitly confront the structural and institutional causes of rural poverty. But if poverty is to be ended worldwide, anti-poverty campaigns have to focus on the rural world. If rural poverty is to be eradicated, democratizing access to and control over land and water resources must become central.
Four existing views about agrarian reform strategies are discussed, i.e. market-led, state- led, poor people-led, and state/society-driven. Taken together, they underscore the importance of civil society organizations in the pursuit of agrarian reform. A market-led view emphasizes land sales and rental transactions, the voluntary attitude of landlords (the sellers), and the formally articulated demand from and willingness of the rural households (the buyers) to participate in land transactions. Recent experiments, however, show results far below the promised outcomes. A state-led perspective emphasizes the role of government to carry out expropriationary land
redistribution, but gives a complementary role to ‘beneficiaries’ associations’. Under certain conditions historically, this approach has delivered pro-poor outcomes that varied nonetheless between and within countries over time. A poor people-led view gives the key role to strong and independent peasant movements for successful agrarian reform. Under certain limited
circumstances, this approach has also resulted in positive outcomes, but has nonetheless proven to be, on its own, insufficient to carry out large-scale restructuring of agrarian societies. A state/society-driven perspective considers the interactions between state, market and civil society
actors as a crucial factor that largely determines the processes and outcomes of agrarian reform. More specifically, it shows why and how mutually re-enforcing state-society interactions positively influence the processes and outcomes of redistributive land reforms.
It is not the objective here to argue which of these four perspectives on agrarian reform strategies is most desirable. Rather, the aim is to clarify the contemporary context for civil society-related campaigns for redistributive land reform, and for a discussion about a possible set of guiding principles for a poverty-reducing agrarian reform. Three key features of a poverty-
reducing agrarian reform are identified, i.e. poor people-initiated, livelihood-enhancing/creating, and state-supported. These are three broadly distinct but interlinked components of a ‘tripod’ agrarian reform framework that are likely to contribute to empowering the rural poor and to enabling them to overcome their long-standing economic poverty, social exclusion and political subordination. These three factors should not be de-linked from each other, analytically or empirically.
Poor people-initiated. A ‘tripod’ agrarian reform framework assigns the greatest role to organizations and movements of the rural poor, but resists romanticising their power. Alone, poor people’s organizations are less able to significantly change the terms and conditions of pre-existing social relations. Certain types of civil society organizations, however, under certain conditions, are more likely to play a positive role in promoting agrarian reform than others. Civil society organizations can be highly heterogeneous, based on constituency, ideology, strategy and level of operation, and include poor people’s organizations (POs), intermediary NGOs, and academic and research institutions. The more effective types are those that have high degrees of capacity and autonomy – the twin dimensions of organizational power. But in examining civil society and its potentially positive role specifically in redistributive agrarian reform, it is crucial to take an even more differentiated view. Different kinds of groups have a distinct role to play in
rural poor people’s struggles for land and livelihoods, and so would entail different types of support. Here, the term ‘rural poor’ refers to the rural (semi)proletariat, (sub-)subsistence owner-cultivators, share tenants, pastoralists, fisherfolk, indigenous peasants and rural women.
Development undertakings aimed at enhancing the power of the rural poor can begin by providing assistance that is explicitly autonomy-promoting and capacity-enhancing. Repeated development initiatives by many agencies tend to be overly focused on technical capacity-building and often end up producing outcomes that are more of the same. In order to achieve a more
balanced and improved impact, interventions in development undertakings, however difficult and complex these may be, ought to be more autonomy-enhancing. It is also important to develop better linkages between levels of civil society organization (i.e. local, national and regional/international) in terms of increasing the degree of representation and accountability within and between them. An important question for civil society and development agencies on the issue of promoting poor people-initiated campaigns is whether and how and to what extent their views on civil society and their assistance to the latter have been differentiated and balanced in terms of capacity-enhancement and autonomy-improvement efforts, and properly focused on the critical linkages between different levels of organization.
Livelihood-enhancing/creating. Land reform can potentially be exclusionary, benefiting the relatively better-off and non-poor rather than the rural poor (and thereby excluding usually women, farmworkers and indigenous communities).
Livelihoods that have subsequently emerged could thus also mean a subsequent loss of livelihood for others. There is therefore an urgent need to ensure that the character of land policies is truly inclusive and pro-poor. Development undertakings should build on the empirical reality that the livelihoods of the rural poor, even poor farmers, on most occasions, are not solely agricultural. Rural poor people’s livelihoods are far more diversified than usually understood. The key to sustainable, diversified livelihoods is access to five types of capital assets (namely, financial, human, natural, cultural, and social), which in real life are rarely democratically controlled and equitably distributed. The challenge here is how civil society and development agencies could assist rural poor people to gain effective access.
In the context of agrarian reform, it is crucial that the initiatives to gain access to and control over land and water resources are incorporated in the overall pursuit of getting access to or building other capital assets. Ensuring poor people’s access to key natural resources would entail significant reforms at the macro, (inter)national policy level, such as policy reforms affecting the
input (e.g. credit) and output (e.g. trade) markets, and other labour-oriented policies (e.g. trans/national rural-urban labour linkages). Social capital is critical to the poor people’s ability to mobilize to gain access to and/or build these different types of capital assets, and under certain conditions, civil society organizations and development agencies may be able to assist the rural poor in social capital-building. An important question for civil society organizations and development agencies that have been involved in agrarian reform is whether and how and to what extent they have systematically gone beyond the struggles for land access to incorporate other struggles to gain, and initiatives to build, the other capital assets important to the rural poor.
Finally, pro-poor land policies in most contexts in the developing world today entail the redistribution of land-based wealth and power. Truly redistributive land policies need to be state-supported because it is the state that has the authority to command compliance from recalcitrant landed elites. One of the key factors for a successful redistributive reform is the institutionalization of progressive legal reforms, such as pro-poor land laws, and here, state actors have a critical role to play. Like civil society organizations, state actors, under certain circumstances, may be able to undertake autonomous actions ‘from above’ that run counter to the interests of dominant social groups. But alone, they are far less likely to actually accomplish far-reaching and meaningful redistributive reforms. Mutually reinforcing interactions between state reformers and autonomous civil society organizations are crucial if the obstacles and constraints are to be overcome, and the opportunities for redistributive land reform are to be harnessed. Unfortunately, this kind of ‘state-society’ interaction is not a common phenomenon in the world today. The key challenge therefore involves figuring out how to create the conditions necessary for progressive coalitions between reformers within governments and autonomous civil society organizations to emerge and expand.
In response to these issues, questions and challenges, civil society organizations and development agencies, including IFAD, must build on what they have so far accomplished in these areas. And there are indeed significant achievements to date. But the extent of the problems that needs to be addressed demands more, in terms of the quantity and quality of initiatives that contribute to the building of autonomous spaces for civil society and progressive interface between the latter and (inter)governmental agencies. Moreover, if pro-poor land policies were to be carried out more significantly in the future, then development agencies and civil society organizations, including IFAD, will remain confronted by the most fundamental question of all, i.e. whether and how can civil society organizations and development agencies actually expand and deepen their support for rural poor people in their contentious political struggles for land and livelihoods and the redistribution of wealth and power?
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Land, Empowerment and the Rural Poor: Challenges to Civil Society and Development Agencies
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