Road to rural transformation: Part - II

In the first article in this series, I tried to capture the gist of my discussion with Shoaib Sultan Khan on rural development. Rural development programmes (RSPs) have worked well in those countries where governments continued to invest in institutions of the poor created through such programmes.

The conceptual framework of rural development is founded on a set of development principles derived from the experiences of participatory development across South Asia and elsewhere in the post-colonial developing countries. Contrary to the top-down and growth-driven development models, which tend to impose a strict econometric regimen of vertical change, rural development initiatives have focused on unleashing the indigenous potential of transformation.

Growth-driven models are packaged as a panacea for macroeconomic stabilisation, with a classical linear growth path where the focus is shifted from the comparative advantages of inclusive agrarian economies to capital-intensive mega projects and rapid urbanisation. Empirical evidence from fast-growing economies like Brazil, China, India and some Far Eastern countries suggests that growth-driven economic models have resulted in an increased disparity between the rich and the poor.

In a world of opulence, poverty doesn’t go away. In fact, disparity between the rich and the poor has increased over the years. In the age of globalisation, both prosperity and poverty have also been globalised, posing huge challenges to the political and economic stability of the world we live in today. Poverty and prosperity aren’t just restricted to nation-states. They have now become global and are diffused across national boundaries.

In most fast-growing and emerging global economies like Brazil, Russia, India and China, which are also known as the Brics economies, rural poverty has increased by five percent on average during the last decade. The puzzle lies in the fact that despite the economic potential of the Brics economies to become the top four economies of the world by 2050, they have been marred by rural poverty and increasing disparity between the rich and the poor. The neoliberal thesis of equating vertical economic growth with prosperity and equity has failed to deliver inclusive development. Instead, it has further marginalised the rural poor and the dispossessed classes in urban areas.

According to a recent report published by Oxfam, the world’s 26 richest individuals collectively have more wealth than the world’s 3.8 billion people at the bottom of the income pyramid. The bottom billion of the world who live in developing countries are the worst affected and their living conditions have gone from bad to worse in a world of unbridled economic growth.

The poor are not excluded from the neoliberal growth-driven economy, but are adversely incorporated to be the recipients of the ills of vertical growth without benefiting from it. Adverse incorporation rather than socio-economic exclusion is what has created a visible divide in our world. Addressing the adversities of poverty and disparity is a fundamental challenge for policymakers and development practitioners in a world dominated by neoliberal globalisation.

While economies go global, there is an increased realisation among national governments, policymakers and development agencies about the need to focus on the local dynamics of social development. In the gigantic schema of the global economy dominated by oligarchies and large corporate entities, developing countries find it increasingly difficult to leave out the bottom billion who need protection from the adverse flow of globalisation as well as access to socio-economic instruments to participate in prosperity. In Bangladesh and some states in India like Andhra Pradesh, governments have been investing in rural development programmes at a scale that has helped improve the integration of the rural poor in the national economy.

The intrinsic value of rural development programmes for developing countries in a growth-driven neoliberal world has become even more pronounced today than before. The increasing income disparities, deteriorating quality of life in rural settings; and disintegration of social structures have huge political and economic implications for the poor and marginalised communities. Economic growth strategies only work well for the poor if they are inclusive, socially responsible and flexible to the local context of development.

What are institutions of the poor and why do we consider them to be important as structural instruments to empower the poor? We have a number of local institutions and primitive structures of village management that have existed for centuries. We also tend to think that human societies always have some form of structural arrangements for survival, collective expression and coexistence in the face of external threats.

Can we transform these institutions into inclusive, representative and pro-poor local organisations? These apprehensions usually come from cultural revivalists, sometimes from anthropologists, and more often from the advocates of neo-localism. We are often told that human societies don’t operate in vacuums, no matter how primitive they might be.

The traditional kinship-based local institutions are not driven by the philosophy of empowering the poor. They have been evolved to perpetuate the existing power relations. In a rapidly-changing modern world, traditional institutions have neither the capacity and the skill nor the will to become representative forums for the poor and marginalised.

For Shoaib Sultan Khan, the key function of RSPs is to help create institutions that are run and managed by poor communities at a larger scale as conduits for rural transformation. These institutions open up possibilities of change because they create the fundamental values of inclusion, accountability, transparency and sustainability that are contrary to kinship-based traditional institutions. Rich and affluent classes have all the financial wherewithal, networking, high-end forums and social spaces, but the poor have no forums of collective bargaining to assert their economic and political interests in a world plagued with disparity.

In a nutshell, the world we live in today cannot be any better without investing in the poor and helping them become participants and shareholders of the benefits of growth and prosperity. The trickling down of poverty and disparity in the neoliberal economic order has aggravated rural poverty, except in areas where governments have invested to protect and promote local development initiatives.

Local development initiatives cannot be effective without having an enabling policy environment to attain the scale of a countervailing development strategy to offset the adverse impact of economic growth. In this sense, the rural development programmes can only be effective if governments commit long-term support and investment to help them attain the scale to make a dent on multidimensional poverty.

The primary purpose of investment for rural development is to create institutions of the poor at the village level and to merge these institutions into local representative entities at the union council and district levels. These institutions must be capacitated to undertake their own development planning to reflect the real needs and demands for private and public goods and services. Demand articulation through participatory planning at the local level on a national scale can be the most effective national agenda to build a new Pakistan.

In Pakistan, RSPs have already demonstrated this by reaching out to some seven million households across the country and organising them into local institutions. It is time for the new government to engage RSPs to scale up this programme at the national level to effectively combat rural poverty.

Concluded

The writer is a senior socialdevelopment and policy adviser, and a freelance columnist based in Islamabad.

Email: ahnihal@yahoo.com

Twitter: @AmirHussain76