Rural Development Strategies Research Paper

These observations apply equally to discussions of rural development. That is, some discussions have understood rural development as the further unfolding of capitalism in rural areas; others have focused on policy and project interventions in rural areas that aim to foster socio-economic change and human improvement. Among the latter work, some authors have understood such interventions as attempts to deepen rural capitalism (and particular relationships of power and dependency understood to go with it); others have aimed to understand the conditions under which progressive social change might derive from such interventions. As a result, under the broad banner of rural development studies, one encounters work on: theories of peasant economy informed by Chayanov and Marx (e.g., Harriss 1982); policy analyses informed by both dependency (de Janvry 1981) and neoclassical theory (Eicher and Staatz 1984); critiques of rural development discourses drawing on poststructural theory (Ferguson 1990; Escobar 1995); feminist interpretations of gender bias in the institutions and languages of rural development (Deere and Leon de Leal 1987); analyses of the encounters between development professionals and rural people drawing on both actor-oriented sociology (Long and Long 1992) and pragmatist approaches (Chambers 1983); and so on. In short, there is diversity in both the theoretical approaches taken and the substantive topics pursued.

Still, within this broad field of study, one can discern some pattern. First, writing on rural development has often followed broader trends in social theory. Second, theory and practice have informed each other. Policy innovations have often been informed by particular bodies of theory; they have then gone on to generate new bodies of research and theoretical development as scholars begin to reflect critically on these shifts in practice. Third, debates on theory and practice have been informed by broader shifts in the global economy. This reflects the interactive nature of the relationship between rural development as capitalist development and rural development as intervention. This is a relationship in which political economy clearly patterns practice, and where practice not only reproduces the broad structures and effects of capitalist political economy, but can sometimes change them. The remainder of this research paper tries to capture some of these interactions. It focuses on rural development over the last three decades of the twentieth century.

1. A Brief History Of Rural Development Policy: 1970–2000

While colonial administrations pursued programs to foster rural economic change (Cooper and Packard 1997) both in their colonies as well as in their own countries, the apogee of rural development interventions came in the 1970s with the invention of ‘integrated rural development programs’ or IRDPs. An important factor in the expansion of rural development programs during the 1970s was the push by the then President of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, radically to redirect the Bank’s finance towards poverty alleviation. As poverty—at that time— was deemed a primarily rural phenomenon, IRDPs became one of the principal means through which the Bank increased its poverty lending. In some cases (especially in Latin America), such initiatives came in the wake of programs of land reform and redistribution, and aimed to increase yields on the properties of new post-reform landowners; in other cases, they were targeted at an already existing peasantry.

While these programs had many components, they aimed above all to increase the physical and economic productivity of smallholder productions systems. Agricultural development was therefore a central theme, and IRDPs often disseminated high yielding crop varieties, promoted agrochemical use, provided credit, built irrigation systems, and in general fostered agricultural modernization. Subsidiary components included support to health and education, rural road building, and—occasionally and marginally—efforts to strengthen rural people’s social organizations.

In retrospect, many IRDPs were conceived on the basis of insufficient knowledge of rural conditions: they were too large, designed too hastily, and were often hijacked politically (de Janvry 1981). They became highly bureaucratic, overly complex, and often ineffective affairs (Grindle 1986). Worse still, the era of large scale rural development programs also spawned a series of ‘development disasters.’ Examples here include programs of small farm development and colonization in the Amazon basin (which often led to deforestation and usurpation of lands from indigenous groups), and a range of programs introducing Green Revolution and other modern crop technologies into environments for which they were not appropriate.

It is important to note that the urge for rural development was not only a phenomenon of broadly capitalist economies. Socialist regimes also launched programs, often linked closely to large-scale and stateled efforts to organize collective forms of agricultural production and marketing (e.g., Soviet kolkhozes, Cuban state farms, Tanzanian ujamaa). While the wider policy and political context of these programs clearly differed from that in capitalist economies, in many respects rural development programs in these two broad contexts shared many similarities: the state played a strong and central role in their implementation; agricultural modernization was a primary objective; and the rural economy was seen as a producer of surplus to be transferred for investment (via the state) in industrial and urban activities. In all cases, these programs worked with highly simplified views of rural economy and society: simplifications that were necessary in order to make rural areas legible and manageable by a centralized state (cf. Scott 1998), even though they meant that the programs would inevitably encounter problems and often engender resistance (Scott 1985).

While this mix of routine problems and stunning failures did not necessarily undermine the broader argument for poverty-reducing interventions in rural areas, it did nourish a body of critical writing aimed at trying to understand why it was that such programs had taken the form that they did, and had such mixed results on the ground (see Sect. 2). Parallel to this more analytical writing, a more applied literature has also developed over time, asking many of the same questions, but with different languages and with the primary goal of rethinking appropriate strategies for rural development (see Sect. 3).

2. Theoretical Approaches To Understanding Rural Development

Just as the 1970s were the high point for large-scale rural development programs, so too was the period of the 1970s to mid-1980s one of particularly vibrant intellectual production on rural development. Much of this work was driven by the empirical observation that the great investments made by governments and international agencies in land reform, integrated rural development, and the Green Revolution seemed to have had little impact on rural poverty, nutrition, and welfare—and that in some cases they had indeed had quite negative effects on rural people and their environments.

This was a period when dependency theory, world systems theory, and modes of production theory were very influential in writing on the ‘Third World.’ Not surprisingly these same theories were marshaled by many to try to explain this limited impact. Alain de Janvry’s (1981) landmark study of rural development in Latin America stands out in this context—indeed, it has had intellectual impacts well beyond Latin America. De Janvry argued that in practice rural development and land reform were rarely intended to do much more than further the maintenance and expansion of dependent capitalist economies. In those cases where they had more radical objectives, he suggested, they were quickly reined in by dominant national and international social forces. De Janvry argued that the underlying logic of Latin American economies was one of ‘functional dualism’—a dualism in which a core of capital accumulation benefited from and required the existence of a rural economy that supplied cheap food and cheap temporary labor. Indeed, this argument had wider resonance, paralleling for instance those made by scholars of Southern Africa who insisted that the South African economy required the existence of labor reserves based in rural areas to provide cheap labor to the urban, mining, and industrial economy. Rural development was, in these frameworks, understood primarily as a mechanism through which these functionally dual relationships were maintained.

In Africa, a similarly formative piece was Henry Bernstein’s (1978) notion of the ‘simple reproduction squeeze’ in which African peasantries are enmeshed. Bernstein suggested that peasant economies in Africa were slowly decapitalized by adverse terms of trade, themselves grounded in exploitative social and political relationships. This implied that interventions that did not address these underlying social relationships would have little effect on rural poverty. A significant debate in this early period was that on the question of ‘urban bias.’ While scholars such as Michael Lipton argued that rural areas were underprivileged largely because policy was biased to urban areas, more critical scholars insisted that any such policy bias was in turn a reflection of more deeply seated, and far more pervasive, sets of sociopolitical relationships that sustained the privileges of classes (rather than cities) and that constituted the primary obstacle to any significant change in rural areas (Corbridge 1982). Work such as that of Bernstein and Byres was emblematic (and formative) of a broader body of work in this period that linked rural development to theories of peasant economy (Harriss 1982). This work hooked up to the broader debates within peasant studies on how to understand the peasant mode of production (a debate crystallized in the creation of the Journal of Peasant Studies).

Neoclassical approaches to rural and agricultural development shared many similar concerns to those of political economic analysis (Eicher and Staatz 1984). Questions of peasant economy (in particular agricultural decision making), policy formulation, rural markets, poverty, and food security were thus prominent in this literature. Perhaps the principal difference was that such approaches were less concerned with the social relationships underlying decision-making processes, market transactions, and policy formulation and implementation. Put another way, they were less concerned with questions of social power, and even less with theories of social power. Analytically, this led to analyses framed in terms such as peasant rationality, or market and policy distortion; practically it led to recommendations that in earlier periods laid considerable faith in government as an autonomous and potentially beneficent social force, and in later periods have emphasized the beneficial role that liberalized markets (of diverse types) ought to play in rural development.

In frameworks such as these, the desirability of rural capitalism is not an issue. Indeed, what is deemed a problem with rural development when viewed within more critical frameworks, is deemed its overall purpose when viewed neoclassically. As they emphasize notions of efficiency over issues of equity, empowerment, or rights, neoclassical approaches have increasingly argued that significant parts of the rural population ought leave agriculture, and in many cases rural areas more generally. The contemporary challenge of rural development when viewed this way is therefore to facilitate this outward movement of people, and to foster a more efficient allocation of resources to those producers able to use them most effectively. The empirical support for such a position appears to come from recent research that suggests that many peasantries are already ‘disappearing’ (Bryceson et al. 2000) even if much of this research would not invoke a neoclassical interpretation to understand such steady disappearance (Bebbington 1999).

Falling somewhere in between such political economic and neoclassical positions, approaches drawing on institutional economics have become more popular in the 1990s, if more so in academic than policy realms (Carter 1997). Such approaches have also emphasized the need to understand rural markets (and household decision making) as embedded in social institutions, and emphasize the extent to which these institutions structure patterns of access to and participation in such markets. The implication is that rural development strategies ought to work on these institutional questions, a lesson not unlike that of political economy approaches. However, institutional economists insist on using the more formal methodological procedures of economics and econometrics to address these questions, and also hold back from assuming that any particular social theory (of power, class, race, or otherwise) can necessarily explain the particular forms of embeddedness of given markets.

Certain sociological and anthropological approaches have also emphasized such institutional questions, though they hold questions of politics and power at the forefront of their analyses; indeed their concern for these questions predates the emergence of such a concern in economic analyses of rural development. While the 1960s saw work on the management of rural development, it was perhaps only in the 1970s and especially the 1980s that a more coherent body of analytical work on the institutional and organizational dimensions of rural development began to emerge (e.g., Esman and Uphoff 1984). Much of this was also inspired by the question: why had land reforms and rural development programs been so disappointing? Work drawing on Weberian notions of the state began to demonstrate the effects of bureaucratic structure, incentives, and politics on the implementation and outcome of rural development programs (Grindle 1986, Hart et al. 1989). Other work, drawing more on theories of peasant resistance to development suggested that much of the explanation lay in the ways in which rural people subverted institutional interventions designed to foster forms of modernization that people did not desire (Scott 1985).

Though focusing on different parts of the rural development puzzle, taken together, these two approaches helped open up a body of work that has emphasized questions of human agency in rural development. Some of this work, drawing more on notions of resistance, has emphasized the extent to which rural development programs constitute negotiations between state and citizen, and between different notions of modernity (Long and Long 1992, Peet and Watts 1996). Other authors have linked a concern for social power with the goal of devising improved management systems. Much of this work has focused on the roles of particular types of organization in reworking power relationships between rural people, the state, and market, and in simultaneously initiating and managing rural development programs that might be more poverty oriented and responsive than were the IRDPs. Local organizations (Uphoff 1992), nongovernmental organizations (Farrington and Bebbington 1993) and social movements (Peet and Watts 1996) have figured prominently in this work—linking up discussions of development with broader theoretical debates on civil society, power, and identity.

These concerns for questions of power and identity also underlie a more recent line of analysis focusing on questions of discourse in rural development and using poststructural approaches to address ways in which power is embedded in the very ways in which rural development is talked about and conceptualized (Escobar 1995, Ferguson 1990). Such authors have also focused attention on the often-underemphasized theme of culture in rural development: both by addressing how notions of development are now often constitutive of both rural and institutional cultures, and by interrogating the cultural underpinnings of the very concept of rural development. This approach has linked discussions of rural development up with debates in Foucauldian social science, and has been particularly prominent in anthropology, geography and the subfield of political ecology, which has been one of the most vibrant areas of research on rural development in the 1990s (Peet and Watts 1996). While such poststructurally informed work has been criticized analytically (especially for its weakness in addressing issues of agency and of variation) and practically (for its failure to address how the practice of rural development might be made more effective), it has been the most fruitful and dynamic of the subfields of rural development research in the closing years of the century.

Running across these broad theoretical traditions one encounters a series of more substantive foci. One of these has been an ever-increasing attention to issues of gender and rural development, and the frequent exclusion of women from the fruits of rural development, sometimes as a direct result of the forms taken by projects and policies (Boserup 1970, Carney and Watts 1990). Much work on rural development and peasant economy remained largely silent on issues of gender—a silence that became even more untenable the more it became apparent that the rural economy could only be understood by making explicit the shifting roles of and relations between women and men (Deere and Leon de Leal 1987, Carney and Watts 1990). The central importance of women as rural producers has also become ever clearer as periodic out-migration from rural areas continues to increase. A concern for gender issues has cut across a range of theoretical positions: it has appeared in both neoclassical and Marxian analyses of household decision making and bargaining; in more institutionally focused analyses of ‘women-in-development’ and of women’s social movements; and in poststructurally informed analyses of the ways in which rural development discourses create particular notions of gender, and then act upon these.

Given that rural development is closely linked to production, and that much rural production depends directly on natural resources, environmental issues have also been a recurrent theme in analyses of rural development. Perhaps more significantly, many of the ‘disasters’ of rural development have involved grave and negative impacts on the environment, spawning many critical studies. More generally, analyses of rural development experiences with irrigation, dams, agrochemical use, soil erosion, and high-yielding crop varieties have inspired work that has made critical contributions to the more general discussion of sustainability and sustainable development (Adams 1990, Peet and Watts 1996).

Finally it ought to be noted that, while much of the analytical (and practical) work on rural development has focused on Africa, Asia, and Latin America, there has also been important work conducted in the USA, Europe, and post-reform Soviet Union. Much of this work has drawn on similar theoretical currents, though, arguably, it has been more descriptive than the often quite theoretical work conducted in the ‘Third World.’ One of the important contributions of this body of ‘First World’ work, however, has been to raise questions about the longer-term future of rural societies and environments as agricultural production becomes ever less important within national economies, and as the agricultural labor force continues to decline. This work has addressed some of the ways in which rural landscapes change as they move from being areas of production to areas of reproduction, leisure, and consumption; it has also addressed the acute poverty of those areas (in the developed world) that have simply become unnecessary to the wider economy. Though apparently peculiar to developed country settings, these issues will become relevant for other regions of the world. For even if small farmer production becomes increasingly uncompetitive in the global economy, rural areas will not disappear. In some cases, they will be populated by some of the most excluded groups in society, unable to find work in a rapidly modernizing economy—in other cases they will be colonized by retirees, commuters, tourists, conservationists, and new enterprises. Such demographic, economic, and social shifts will continue to raise acute questions for the ways in which societies understand themselves, their lifestyles, and their environments, and, indeed, for the different forms that modernity will take in the post-peasant era. Rural development is likely, then, to continue generating important theoretical and empirical debate that will have relevance beyond the purely ‘rural.’

3. Applied Research And Rural Development Strategies

Alongside these vigorous theoretical debates, a lively and creative body of applied research has also evolved over the last thirty years, dedicated to addressing issues of rural development strategy. While there are some journals dedicated to applied research in which this material can be published, much output remains in institutional publications, working papers, and gray material produced by nongovernmental organizations, nonprofit and international research centers, some university institutes, and development organizations. Though applied in focus, and often undervalued by academia, such documents have often been at least as important as more formal academic publications in pushing forward debates on themes as varied as definitions of poverty, participatory and populist approaches to development, systems analysis in rural areas, indigenous technical knowledge, sustainability, and empowerment. Furthermore, perhaps because much of this work has been conducted from within nongovernmental organizations, it has also raised important questions about relationships between state, market, and civil society in rural development programs, and as a result about the institutional foundations of sustainability.

Of the various themes that have been dealt with in this work, two merit particular attention. The first has been the discussion of rural development administration. A long-standing discussion, this has helped illuminate the different ways in which state, nongovernmental, for profit, and popular organizations might participate in the management and implementation of rural development. An overarching and recurrent theme in such discussions has been how to deal with the complexities and uncertainties that inhere in rural development, and how to design and structure management systems that can best address these complexities without becoming bureaucratic and top-heavy, as so many IRDPs did. One of the general themes to emerge from this sustained inquiry is that increased popular participation must be central to rural development: both in order to handle these complexities, as well as on its own democratizing merits.

The second body of work worthy of note is that which has attempted to understand the logic of rural production, livelihoods, and ecologies in order to elaborate more appropriate forms of rural intervention. In the 1970s, systems-based analyses of agriculture and rural development occupied a prominent place in this applied research. The more that this work made explicit the complexity of these systems, the more it bled into work on popular participation in rural development. The implication, perhaps more implicit than explicit, was that in the face of such complexity, effective management of rural development necessarily had to involve the knowledge of local populations and other local actors. Thus, while earlier statements suggested that the only way in which development interventions could be adequately finetuned was through comprehensive ex ante systems analysis, later work concluded that such analysis could never be sufficiently comprehensive. Instead, it has suggested the need to shift emphasis from exhaustive ex ante analysis to more systematic participation in the process of managing, implementing, and governing rural development.

These reflections from applied research have thus linked discussions of rural development with a far longer-standing concern in activist social science for questions of critical pedagogy, popular education, and empowerment (Freire 1970, Fals-Borda and Rahman 1991). Indeed, beyond the specific themes addressed in such applied work, perhaps more important are the questions of epistemology (and methodology) that it has raised. Applied researchers have, in effect, suggested that practice generates different forms of knowledge from those that emerge from more basic social research. As such they have echoed questions raised by post structural approaches to rural development (and knowledge more generally) in suggesting that researchers need to be far more modest in the knowledge claims they make, and that the process of generating knowledge about rural development (as theory or as strategy) must be far more inclusive and participatory than it has traditionally been (Blaikie 2000). The relationship between research and practice, and theory and praxis, in rural development is likely to be a hotly debated, and fruitful, theme for many years to come.

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