Rural Democratisation: (Re)Framing rural poor political action
With two-thirds of the world’s poor rural poor, rural democratisation is clearly relevant and urgent, but at the same time an especially difficult--and underestimated--challenge. If democracy is to be organically rooted in any society, the struggle to “get there” must systematically be opened up to integrate rural poor citizens system-wide, taking stock of their aspirations and, more importantly, their existing efforts to gain control of decision-making affecting their lives.
Introduction
Rural poverty remains a major problem today. “Globally, poverty still
has a rural face with two-thirds of the world’s poor constituted by the
rural poor. Its persistence has defied policymakers for decades despite
sustained efforts by national governments, international institutions
and civil society”.(1)
According to one recent study, “chronic poverty is more prevalent in
rural areas than in urban, and especially so in remote rural regions
(which may include towns and cities)”.(2)
Regions likely to have concentrations of chronic poverty are those that
are ‘remote’ (geographically far from centres of economic and political
activity), with ‘low potential’ (few agricultural or natural
resources), ‘less favoured’ (politically disadvantaged) and ‘weakly
integrated’ (not well-connected in terms of communications and
markets). This means about two-thirds of the rural population of
developing countries. (3)
Widespread chronic rural poverty makes rural democratisation a relevant
focus of activist inquiry and analysis, and involves examining the
collective efforts of the rural poor to overcome the obstacles to
effective participation in decision making that affects their lives.
Rural democratisation is a long and difficult process that involves
struggles to build rural social and political organisations capable of
representing the diverse interests of the rural poor and amplifying
their voices in public policy processes. It also involves struggles to
increase state accountability to previously excluded or marginalised
members of the rural population, especially the landless poor and rural
women. And nowadays especially, it involves deploying strategies for
effectively claiming rights as well.
Despite their potential importance, there has been relatively little
systematic interrogation of a comparative nature of the democratisation
initiatives of the rural poor. This contrasts with a growing activist
scholarly literature on urban-based experiments in popular democracy,
such as the Porto Alegre experience in participatory budgeting (Chavez
& Goldfrank, 2004). But the relative invisibility of rural-based
democratisation initiatives often has more to do with how activists and
researchers decide what counts as meaningful reform or political
“innovation”, than it does with the actual substance or impact of the
initiatives themselves -- seen here, broadly, as potential movements
forward in the difficult political transition from clientelism to
citizenship (Fox, 1994a). A fresh look is warranted.
Central Questions
The transition away from centralised
authoritarian regimes and national one-party rule in many countries of
the global South in the 1980s and 1990s has ushered in a new political
era internationally, one that may be very broadly characterised as
animated by a commitment to elected civilian rule and the
democratisation of local political arenas through decentralisation.
This new era has brought with it promises of more and better
opportunities for amplifying the voices of the rural poor, and so for
increasing state accountability to them, in the development process. At
times, the promises have been backed up by the creation of new,
officially sanctioned and ostensibly more democratic spaces for popular
participation in both electoral and non-electoral processes, especially
at the local level.
Looking back, however, actual political dynamics and their outcomes in
terms of development policy too often have fallen far short of what has
been promised. Underlying inequitable structures, and the flawed
institutions and practices that perpetuated them in the past, have been
maintained and even reinforced in some cases. Too often, the new
rhetoric of democracy and democratic development has served as a veil
for national and local governments, oftentimes in cahoots with foreign
governments and foreign and transnational corporate interests, to
renege on promises, squander opportunities and even block initiatives
of and for reform and change that might have made a difference. For
many social change activists across the globe, this gap between
rhetoric and reality has proven to be a very hard nut to crack. This is
partly because the new policy spaces, however promising they may be,
are not neutral. As John Gaventa (2002: 10) reminds us: “The fact that
public spaces for participation exist, whether in rule of law or social
practice, does not mean that they will always be used equally by
various actors for realising rights of citizens. Rather, such space is
itself socially and politically located, with dynamics of participation
varying across different levels and arenas of citizen engagement, and
across different types of policy spaces”. Some social change activists
who attempt to participate in the new policy and political spaces find
themselves having to give up their political rights and freedoms in
order to access the promised social and economic benefits. Others may
decide that it may be worthwhile to forego their rights and freedoms
for a while in order to grab the social and economic benefits offered
in the short-term, but then find it more difficult than thought to
reassert themselves politically afterward. Still others dismiss the new
policy spaces outright, arguing that they are inherently biased and
immutable to purposive social change interventions from below. But how
to deal with such a situation is not obvious. Especially in the absence
of credible and sustainable alternatives, many poor and marginalised
people simply do not have the luxury to indulge in outright rejection
of new official policy and political spaces that may be opening up.
The underlying issue is how can the new policy and political spaces be
pushed beyond “mere window-dressing”, and instead used and transformed
to effectively serve the needs, demands and aspirations of the poor?
This project is an attempt to look into actually ongoing and
potentially innovative attempts by rural poor groups in six countries
to deal with this crucial issue. In between the orthodox left’s usual
insistence on an “expose and oppose” strategy and outright rejection of
new policy and political spaces on the one hand, and the conservative
mainstream push for quiescent incorporation on the other, there is
still room for innovation. Most discussions of innovative efforts to
date have started from clearly innovative outcomes in urban settings,
and then retraced the processes that led to them, in hopes of
identifying how they could be replicated elsewhere. By contrast, while
appreciative of the need for innovation on the outcome side, this
project starts from the proposition
that innovation can be seen in the process side of efforts themselves,
and not just the (potential) outcomes of such efforts. The efforts the
studied here may ultimately fail to produce the desired outcomes; it
remains to be seen since they are still underway. Yet each has the
potential to produce important innovative outcomes, and so the efforts
are still worth looking at. This project can thus provide insights that
might help to explain when innovative outcomes are achieved, and when
they are not. Moreover, our research is “integrated” into the efforts
themselves, hopefully so that it can contribute to improving them as
they unfold. From the perspective of rural democratisation, the project
will thus look into the emergence and trajectory of innovative
rural-based initiatives or collective campaigns that are currently
underway in six countries, in terms of their substance, political
significance and their impact on development processes. What exactly
constitutes an “innovative” rural-based initiative or collective
campaign will be part of the inquiry itself. The term “collective
campaign” comes from American sociologists Marwell and Oliver (1984:
12), who use it to refer to “an aggregate of collective events or
activities that appear to be oriented toward some relatively specific
goal or good, and that occur within some proximity in space and time”.
Each country team will examine the selected ongoing collective
campaigns or initiatives in their country by addressing a common set of
basic core questions and then also a series of common additional
questions that will help to situate the initiatives in their actual
historical and institutional contexts. Addressing a common set of
questions should facilitate systematic comparative analysis across the
six countries.
Core Questions
What is the main objective of the initiative, what is the main strategy employed and why?
How/when did the initiative first emerge, why/how did it evolve/change over time since?
Why/ how can the selected collective campaign or initiative be considered “innovative”?
What accounts for any progress toward success, what accounts for any setbacks?
To what extent has it made progress in achieving its objectives to date?
What are its prospects for large-scale and/or institutionalised impact on development?
Context Questions
Structural Context – What are the social and
production relations between social classes that characterise
pre-existing agrarian structures in the case study area? How have such
structures emerged historically and how are they perpetuated currently?
Larger Historical-Institutional Context -- What is larger
historical-institutional context as regards democratisation and
development, within which the collective campaign in question has
emerged and evolved; this includes: (i) the main national land and
rural development policies/laws and the scale and nature of state
resources for these; (ii) the role rural activists have played in
shaping and implementing these to date; (iii) the role rural elites
have played vis-à-vis formulation and implementation of these laws and
policies, as well as (iv) the role that has been played by rural
municipalities/state governments in their implementation to date;
Established Social-Political Relationships -- What has been the
relationship between: (i) rural elites in the case study area, (ii)
rural municipalities/state governments, and (iii) organisations
representing the rural poor historically, and how has it evolved to
date; To what extent and how have rural elites tried to distort
national development policies and undermine autonomous rural social
organisation? To what extent and how have local officials made
themselves accountable to rural elite versus rural poor constituents?
And how and to what extent have rural social organisations been tied to
rural elites on the one hand, versus been coopted by local government
officials on the other, versus been able to carve out islands of
political autonomy for themselves? Worldviews “From Below” -- What has
been/is the meaning and experience of ‘democracy’ for residents on
farms and in towns in the selected rural areas (including participation
in elections, policy advocay and rights claim making; membership in
parties and associations; and their expectations of the state);
Organisational Histories -- What has been the organisational character
of the respective rural social movement actors involved in the
collective campaigns in question and their allies (including urban)
historically and at present (e.g. composition, organising approach,
structure and strategy, resources, and main lines of work – including
campaigns spearheaded and to what extent they succeeded or failed);
what are these actors perspectives on the role of rural social movement
leadership in rural transformation (e.g. perceiving issues, identifying
obstacles, exploring opportunities, aggregating demands, framing
proposals etc.)
Methods
The basic unit of analysis and building block of this
project is a particular ongoing collective campaign in a specific
country. Each country team will examine a particular collective
campaign as it unfolds, offering useful and relevant insights wherever
possible, and then bring their country-level insights to bear in a
cross-country comparative analysis of the different collective
campaigns. The collective campaigns examined in this project are all
attempting to engage state law and processes while at the same time
attempting to transform them into something more meaningful that goes
beyond “mere window dressing”. In short, they are all geared toward
opening up access and increasing the effective participation of rural
poor people in a relatively important development related process. A
process-oriented approach considers democratisation in general as an
actor-driven process involving conflicts and struggles between
contending groups and social classes in society. The collective
campaigns undertaken by excluded, marginalised and vulnerable groups to
open up access to development related decision making are an important
part of such struggles. The emphasis on political conflict allows one
to distinguish analytically between political process and outcomes.
Making an analytic distinction between process and outcomes is
necessary to be able to detect and explain any unexpected or unintended
outcomes of less-than-democratic political processes. Meanwhile, as
Piven and Cloward (1979: x) have pointed out, “[t]he main features of
contemporary popular struggles are both a reflection of an
institutionally determined logic and a challenge to that logic” and so
an institutional approach is also warranted. An institutional approach
emphasises the formal and informal institutions that structure
conflicts and shapes the different parties involved by defining their
power resources and influencing their choices of strategy. The
collective campaigns examined here do not spring out of thin air, but
rather have emerged and evolved in relation to an institutionally
determined logic. An institutional approach also stresses the role that
conflicts over effective participation play in reflecting back on and
altering the existing institutional parameters of politics. A
historical approach emphasises the analysis of conflicts and how they
evolve over time and in relation to certain critical historical turning
points, in order to better detect incremental changes in a collective
campaign’s substance or strategy, as well as its impact on the larger
institutional context, that may occur from one historical moment to
another. This combined process-oriented, historical-institutional
approach adopted here is an eclectic one that stresses the role of
political interactions and conflict, while giving due importance to the
role played by pre-existing structures and institutions that facilitate
or constrain poor people’s actions. It is informed largely by Thelen
and Steinmo’s (1992) “historical institutionalism, Byres’ (1995)
“comparative political economy, Long’s (1988) “actor-oriented”
approach, and Fox’s (1993) “interactive state-society” approach. In
addition, our methodology also attempts to be gender sensitive and is
inspired by the work of Bina Agarwal (1994), C.D. Deere (1996, 2003),
Naila Kabeer (1999), and Lynn Stephen (1997), among others.
Background
Chronic Rural Poverty
The recent conceptual focus on chronic rural poverty gives recognition
to how “different kinds of social relations produce [rural] poverty
effects which differ in intensity and duration”, thereby moving beyond
the conventional fixation (of the World Bank for example) on poverty as
a bracketed state, a problem of the poor who are ‘separate from the
rest of society’, which can be escaped only through increased household
incomes or targeted inclusion policies. (4)
More explicitly, pre-existing agrarian structures marked by skewed
distributions of wealth and power, among other conditions, are widely
understood as key determinants of chronic rural poverty. But for Green
and Hulme (2005: 872), the key question anymore is “not why are some
people poor in society, but why some societies tolerate poverty as an
outcome and for whom, and how this toleration becomes embedded within
institutional norms and systems”.
In a similar vein, the Chronic
Poverty Report (2004-05: 28) cites ‘weak institutions’ and ‘political
isolation’ combined, as one of the ‘multiple deprivations associated
with spatial poverty traps’, with political isolation in particular as
being ‘especially associated with weak political parties and networks,
weak claims on local and central goverrnment services’. That study goes
on to say that ‘[p]olitically, concentrations of very poor people are
often characterised by a less organised civil society, less responsive
government, and even a less visible NGO presence. Pockets of chronic
poverty therefore exist where socio-political exclusion – often on the
basis of language, identity, or gender – shapes the prospects of a
significant proportion of the population’.(5)
But like Green and Hulme, the Chronic Poverty Report argues that if
exclusion is the problem, simple inclusion (e.g., ‘add’ previously
excluded people and ‘stir’) is not the answer, since it is the terms of
inclusion that matter by determining actual breadth and depth. Some
analysts argue that the underlying issue is “adverse incorporation”,
rather than merely social exclusion, since “chronic poverty flows less
from exclusionary forces that hold certain groups at the margins of
society and economy and rather more from the relationships through
which these groups are intgerated into wider economic and social
networks”. (6)
The problem of widespread and persistent chronic rural poverty then has
important historically conditioned social-political causes. It is this
feature which has encouraged some poverty analysts to think, in turn,
more deeply about the potential political relevance and importance of
rural social movements and/or social movement actors in addressing the
problem. This renewed attention to social actors in general appears to
be more analytically nuanced and balanced than in the past:
“Few if any of these politically sensitive interventions suggest that
social movements are in and of themselves vehicles for adressing
chronic poverty. Instead they suggest such movements can be vehicles
for forms of political action that attack the social relationships
underlyng chronic poverty and that therefore increase the likelihood
that chronic poverty will be addressed, by … by whom? Almost always the
implication is ‘by the state’ or perhaps more exactly ‘by a state’, a
state that still does not exist. That is, social movements are the
progenitors of change in the form and culture of the state, and this is
their main contribution to chronic poverty reduction”.(7)
(1)
Social movements play an important role not only in pushing states to
address the problem of chronic poverty, but also in shaping how this
problem is addressed by states. In short, ‘development’ may still be
the answer to chronic rural poverty, but who defines what development
is, is now equally important. Clearly the term and concept mean
different things to different people, and must therefore always be
‘unpacked’ in discrete situations– what kind of development and for
whom? For instance, the World Bank and La Via Campesina hold very
different ideas about rural development, by whom and for whom. One of
the most important roles of social movements, according to Bebbington
(2006: 5), is to “make visible different ideas of development” and to
“challenge the meanings of core ideas that underlie policy debates,
challenge dominant notions about what counts as legitimate knowledge in
the process of forming policy and argue that alternative actors and
alternative sources of knowledge ought also have a seat in policy
making processes”. In the contemporary politicisation of development
debates, the underlying analytic issue is who decides? While this is a
key issue for many, it may be a particularly important issue for rural
populations, especially those in the global South. This is because,
historically, the rural poor in many developing countries have tended
to be viewed by urban-based policy elites and even many urban-based
social change activists as “passive receptors of change”, a phrase
borrowed from Ileto (1979: 9). Embracing a leftist politics does not
necessarily preclude such a perspective either, whether implicitly or
explicitly. For example, historically, “[t]he Left’s traditional
disdain for peasant autonomy is tied up in the belief that political
process is less important than economic outcome. In other words, the
question of who participates in decision-making is less important than
who benefits in the end”. (8)
Many civil society groups today question both the dominant and the
traditional left approaches, as partly reflected in the powerful
slogan: “Not about us without us”.
But it bears stressing that it is the question of who participates in
decision making that most directly links the issue of the nature and
direction of ‘development’ to the challenge of rural democratisation.
As the American political scientist Robert Dahl puts it:
“[I]f you are deprived of an equal voice in the government of a state,
the chances are quite high that your interests will not be given the
same attention as the interests of those who do have a voice. If you
have no voice, who will speak for you? Who will defend your interests
if you cannot? And not just your interests as an individual. If you
happen to be a member of an entire group excluded from participation,
how will the fundamental interests of that group be protected? The
answer is clear. The fundamental interests of adults who are denied
opportunities to participate in governing will not be adequately
protected and advanced by those who govern. The historical evidence on
this point is overwhelming”. (9)
Similarly, if we look to the world of development practice, Oxfam
International’s framing of the challenge as the “right to be heard”
also points to the link between democracy and development and refocuses
attention on the democratisation of development-related decision
making, considered here as a subset of the larger problem of how to
achieve full-blown political democratisation system-wide. To be sure,
the challenge of achieving full democratisation system-wide is one of
huge proportions. Limiting the analytic lens to dynamics in and around
the rural political dimension or arena might at first appear to make an
unnecessary division between urban and rural populations and political
environments. But certainly, agrarian structures and class formation –
and the chronic rural poverty that these have caused – are very
distinct, but not delinked, from their urban counterparts. The long and
rich tradition in agrarian political economy studies has taught us
this, from the seminal work of Barrington Moore Jr. (1967), to the more
recent works of Byres (1995), Kay (2002) and Bernstein (2006).
Moreover, it is important to recognise that the particular character of
contemporary rural political arenas, and the particular challenges of
democratising them that they imply, has deep roots in urban-rural
political divides that are inherited from the past.
Differentiated Political Arenas
To varying degrees across
global regions and countries, divisions between rural and urban
populations indeed exist. Such divisions may be understood as the
combined result of the historical legacies of colonialism and
post-colonial transactions and processes, national liberation and
post-liberation trajectories, dictatorship and post-dictatorship regime
transitions. In a comparative review of Mahmood Mamdani’s seminal 1996
study of politics in Africa, Fox (1998) points out that despite
differences between and within global-regions with regard to colonial
histories (including timing and duration), similar patterns of
‘internal colonialism’ in Latin America and Africa laid the foundations
for an urban-rural political divide that survives to varying extents
across different national settings today. In many countries in
different regions of the global South, “de facto bargains were struck
historically between [urban-based] national political elites and
[mainly rural-based] local political elites, where national elites
ceded territorial and political-economic power monopolies to local
bosses in exchange for political stability and loyalty to the national
regime”.(10)
For Africa, “Mamdani paints a picture of emerging political citizenship
limited to urban areas that had experienced direct colopnial rule,
while the rural hinterlands tend to remain dominate by despotic rule by
local ethno-political elites whose power was consolidated by indirect
colonial rule”.(11)
According to Fox (1998: 237), this is similar to what happened (albeit
earlier) in Latin America, where “[p]olitical and economic control of
largely rural indigenous and partly Afro-Latin American peoples tended
to be left in the hands of regional bosses, intermediate links in the
chain of domination known as internal colonialism”. Moreover, this
pattern reappears in more recent times in Latin America in the
transition to civilian rule as well. “Many of the transitions to
elected civilian rule in Latin America brought political freedoms to
urban areas but left large swaths of the countryside under
authoritarian or semi-authoritarian rule, at least until recent
breakthroughs by rural social and civic movements managed to broaden
and deepen. In short, in both Latin America and Africa, urban civilian
rule is necessary but far from sufficient for rural democratisation,
and this deep cleavage is historically inherited in both regions”. (12)
The received rural-urban divisions have often been replicated or
reinforced in the contemporary era, not only by state policies and
interventions, but also through the actions of non-state actors as
well, including social-economic elites and civil society actors --
including even alternative ‘new politics’ actors and agents of social
change, whether implicitly or explicitly (see for example Veltmeyer’s
(2004) useful discussion in the context of Latin America). Evidence
from Brazil and Mexico, South Africa and Mozambique, Indonesia, and the
Philippines – the six country cases taken up in this project – supports
this claim. Brazil’s post-dictatorship civilian regime gives
disproportionate representation to rural states in the federal
legislature; this combined with the lack of effective majority rule in
the Brazilian countryside has led to electoral outcomes that give rural
elites significant national as well as regional political clout. (13)
This is also the case in Mexico, where in the 1988 presidential
election rural districts gave Carlos Salinas his official majority. (14)
In the Philippines, the newly elected civilian executive in 1986, under
pressure from the rural social movement, promised to put land reform at
the top of the national political agenda, but then passed the key
policy decisions to the landlord-dominated national legislature,
leading to a compromise law that gave important concessions to
landlords.(15)
In many regions of Indonesia after the fall of Suharto, ‘old alliances
between business and state elites’ were soon reconstituted ‘through the
institutions of the new democratic order, such as parties and
parliaments’.(16)
South Africa’s post-1994 state ‘inherited a[n apartheid era] system of
administration that was based on the concentration of all power in
these rural areas in the hands of unaccountable traditional authorities
(chiefs and headmen)’.(17)
In post-liberation Mozambique, the Frelimo dominated national
legislature promulgated a law which introduced municipal elections in
urban municipalities and some rural centres, but effectively barred the
majority rural population from electing their local government
officials, who continue to be appointed by the central govenrment in
Maputo.(18)
As some of these examples suggest, once inside government (whether
executive or legislative branch), the actual performance of even
progressive political parties claiming to represent the interests of
rural poor populations, particularly on the pressing issue of land
reform – which if effectively and fully implemented would contribute a
lot to eroding the power of rural elites, has been decidedly mixed,
often leaving inherited rural-urban divides essentially intact. The
dynamics of land reform in Brazil under the Workers’ Party and Lula is
a case in point (Sauer 2006). In short, despite the coming to power of
progressive political parties in recent decades, “(i)n many countries
conservative rural political machines still have national clout,
keeping peasant problems off the agenda”.(19)
Such political actions and outcomes in turn form part of the very
political environment and context (historical, institutional, and
ideational or ideological) within which today’s social change activists
from both sides of the “divide” actually experience and interpret the
world, develop critical perspectives and alternatives, and then proceed
to act upon them. In sum, the received urban-rural divides in any given
country are better acknowledged and integrated into activist analyses,
rather than ignored. Likewise, the ways in which received rural-urban
divisions have been replicated and reinforced, or undermined and
eroded, by the political actions and interactions of both state and
non-state actors in the contemporary era must be identified and
understood, rather than dismissed. In focusing attention on struggles
for rural democratisation, the present project aspires to
‘problematise’ the received historical divisions and linkages between
rural and urban populations and their persistent social-economic and
political effects within rural society, as well as within urban society
and between the two, and then, while giving greater emphasis than usual
to the linkages (rather than divisions) between rural and urban
populations, spotlight the ways in which rural poor people struggle to
confront and reshape them ‘from below’.
Democratisation
Democratisation in general is a difficult
process involving struggles within society and the state to extend
effective access to democratic governance to the entire citzenry
system-wide. This definition includes changes of regime as well as
political processes within a regime. For a national regime to be
considered fully democratic, it must provide for universal adult
suffrage in free and fair electoral competition for governing offices
at all levels. But such competition must be based on the extension of
certain minimum political conditions throughout society, including
civilian control over the military and guaranteed respect for basic
political rights and freedoms.(20)
Dahl (1998) has identified five criteria that potentially offer a more
practical means to measure or evaluate the democratic-ness of political
systems, but can also be applied to specific development initiatives or
efforts. These are: (i) effective participation (ii) equality of voting
(iii) enlightened understanding (iv) final control over the agenda and
(v) inclusion of all adults. Each of these criterion in turn point to
or imply a set of interrelated basic political rights and freedoms,
including freedom of expression and freedom association, right to a
secret ballot, and the right to know (or right to information).
The Overall Challenge
Conventional views of democratisation in general often fail to take
seriously democracy’s minimum political conditions and how these are
constructed and extended fully throughout society. For example, those
who emphasise national elections as the main indicator that a country
is democratic, often take for granted the actual freeness and fairness
of given elections and ignore serious underlying obstacles to their
being truly free and fair system-wide. By contrast, for many critics of
such a view, the tendency is to instead stress particular socioeconomic
or participatory outcomes as the main indicator of democracy, while
taking for granted the actual opportunities and contentious political
processes that are often required to achieve such outcomes. Yet so much
empirical evidence from many parts of the world suggests that the
guaranteed respect for and access to basic rights and freedoms needed
for the poor, marginalised, and excluded to be effective agents of
their own destinies cannot be taken for granted. Nor can we expect
basic rights and freedoms to be given automatically or freely. Rather,
rights and freedoms must be claimed by those who are excluded, within
the very systems that have worked in the past to exclude them. Existing
limits and constraints on poor people’s political agency inherited from
the past do not disappear automatically or without struggle, while even
‘good’ laws do not implement themselves.(21)
The present discussion thus follows Fox (1994a, 1994b) in stressing the
dynamics of movement toward full political democracy and the role of
political action and conflict in producing them.
The precise character of the overall democratisation challenge may vary
over time and from one country to the next, shaped in part by the
underlying agrarian structure, as well as the prevailing “national
political architecture”.(22)
But in many developing countries, it often involves a three-way
struggle for control of the political process and its outcomes between:
(i) central state authorities, (ii) anti-reform subnational elites, and
(iii) democratic social and civic (opposition) movements.
The Challenge of Rural DemocratisationIn many rural areas, and
amidst neo-liberal globalisation pressures ‘from above’, the rise or
resurgence of what Fox calls ‘local authoritarian regimes’ (and what
Mamdani refers to as the problem of ‘decentralised despotism’), often
coexist with competitively elected civilian leaderships at the national
level.(23)
In recent decades much empirical evidence has emerged to indicate that
still incomplete democratisation processes and the continuing presence
of serious limits and constraints on rural poor people’s effective
access to basic rights and freedoms.(24)
This situation can be seen across a diverse array of national
historical-institutional settings: from more established ‘cacique
democracies’ such as Mexico, Brazil and the Philippines, to more recent
‘new democracies’ incorporating local ‘traditional’ authorities, such
as in post-apartheid South Africa, post-conflict Mozambique and
post-Suharto Indonesia. The failure of states to account to its rural
citizens has played a significant role in setting limits on the
consolidation of democratic regimes in numerous countries throughout
the developing world, even in those without rural majorities, such as
Brazil or South Africa. At the same time, the inherited rural-urban
divide in some countries has changed, become more porous, and even lost
relevance over time, especially in more recent decades, even as it has
persisted in others.(25)
For many social change activists, the compelling questions are becoming
less about the nature and effects of the inherited divisions
themselves, and more about the changing nature of rural-urban
crossings, linkages, connections, exchanges and ‘entanglements’. This
is clear perhaps most especially with respect to South Africa, which
has a majority urban/ peri-urban population and where much thought
consequently is being put into this issue. But even in South Africa, an
estimated 45 percent of the population remains to be purely rural
according to one source (Andrews, 2007). Such large minorities should
not be ignored or dismissed just because they are in the minority.
Three of the countries in this project can be said to be predominantly
urban – South Africa, Brazil and Mexico. Each still has significant
rural populations whose prospects in life and access to basic rights
and freedoms cannot be taken for granted, who are confronted by many
similar challenges and dilemmas, and, equally important, who similarly
seek out solutions that involve making alliances with urban and
peri-urban counterparts and activist networks.(26)
Regardless of the size of the rural poor population in a country, what
goes on in the rural political arena is important because it can affect
the lives and livelihoods of large numbers of people, including those
living in more urban areas. The ongoing failure of governments to enact
and/or fully implement redistributive social justice oriented agrarian
reforms for example, or the wanton imposition of ‘mega’ development
projects such as hydroelectric dams, or the unregulated promotion of
export-oriented corporate farming, have all contributed to
dispossession and impoverishment in the countryside, fuelling rapid and
unrestrained migration to the cities. Efforts to solve today’s most
pressing ‘urban’ problems, such as acute shortages of affordable
housing and rising unemployment, that do not recognize and address the
linkage between what happens in the cities and in the countryside, are
bound to fall short, as can be gleaned from Mike Davis’s recent book
Planet of Slums (2006). The prevailing problems in the production and
distribution of food, resulting in “more food – more hunger”, is very
much linked to these urban-rural dynamics as well.(27)
The recent currency of the “sustainable rural livelihoods” approach, a
highly differentiated genre of scholarship, is inherently founded on
the realisation of the more interlinked nature of livelihoods that span
the urban-rural and agricultural-industrial divides.(28)
As Bridget O’Laughlin explains in her powerful critical review of the
livelihoods approach, “… the term livelihoods signals recognition of
complexity, diversity and historical specificity, particularly in rural
life. Rurality is not coterminous with farming; to survive rural people
combine many different activities, one of which may be agriculture”
(2004: 385). O’Laughlin’s very useful review draws out some of this
literature’s key insights about the multiple livelihood strategies of
the poor, but also points out some of its key weaknesses. Perhaps most
importantly for our purposes, the existing research under the
livelihoods rubric, she notes, “… frames no questions. In particular
there is no theorisation of political space, a major problem for an
approach that seeks to improve the quality of policy advice in
development studies. There is concern with individual agency in
livelihoods research, but very little with the contingent politics of
collective agency” (2004: 387-388). This point is fundamental and helps
to inform the present project. Indeed, our emphasis on political
dynamics and political conflict, and particularly on rural-based
collective campaigns that target national policy making and
implementation, is a response to the continuing capacity of rural
elites to prevent and undermine progress towards more democratic
development. Much law and policy-making that affects the pace and
direction of rural development continues to be disproportionately
influenced by rural elites and their allies in national capitals.(29)
A great deal of existing state law and policy, including
anti-poverty-oriented policies and programmes targeting rural areas,
remain dependent on rural elite-controlled local governments and
line-agency offices for implementation. For example, national land
policy-making and implementation continues to be ‘twisted’ by rural
elites, often in alliance with urban-based national and international
elites, including transnational companies and their allies, in numerous
countries -- from Brazil to Indonesia, from South Africa to the
Philippines (Akram-Lodhi, Borras & Kay, 2007). Regional rural
elites, through exclusionary political practices, continue to influence
electoral outcomes at all levels. The rural elite ‘spoiler’ role thus
has the potential to undermine even urban-based ‘new politics’
initiatives. Although useful in their own right, one cannot assume that
‘best practice’ models in participatory democracy being developed in
(mainly urban areas) in the South and North can work in rural settings.(30)
The distinct demographic and geographic conditions of the countryside,
and their impact on the social-political landscape, will likely require
different kinds of initiatives than have been pioneered in the cities,
though some cross-pollination of ideas is certainly possible and
potentially fruitful. In the end, the challenge of achieving full
democratisation system-wide is formidable and there are many ways to
approach thinking about this problem. To be sure, limiting the analytic
lens to dynamics in and around the rural political dimension or arena
is just one approach, but one that is especially relevant in light of
persistent and widespread chronic rural poverty throughout the
developing world today and the persistence of rural-urban divides
inherited from the past. Yet no elected national civilian regime can be
considered fully democratic until all authoritarian enclaves have been
eliminated and the entire rural citizenry is effectively enfranchised.
Rural Social Movements: Amplifying Voices, Increasing Accountability
As discussed above, the underlying question (posed earlier by Green and
Hulme) of “why some societies tolerate” chronic rural poverty “as an
outcome and for whom” is essentially a political one. That is, it has
to do with the political dynamics of how the institutions in a society,
both formally or informally, aggregate and (re)distribute (decision
making) power over time. If we can agree on this, then the next crucial
question is how societies might reduce or eliminate such tolerance for
chronic poverty (and therefore make real strides in addressing it).
This next question is also essentially political. Take the issue of
land reform, for instance. As Lungisle Ntsebeza (2007: 13) asserts,
“What land reform is for, who should benefit and how it should be
pursued are often treated as technical economic questions, but at its
heart the land question is political – it is about identity and
citizenship as well as production and livelihoods – and can be resolved
only through political processes”. In the end, more generally, as John
Harriss (2002) argues, “depoliticising development” is unlikely to
result in any significantly pro-poor outcomes.(31)
By adopting a rural democratisation standpoint, we address this
overarching question by emphasising the role of political conflict
between pro-democratisation and anti-democratisation forces over time
in altering the inequitable status quo (or institutionalised patterns –
both formal and informal -- of power distribution) in a society. This
project contends that rural social movements have a key role to play in
pushing forward the democratisation process. The most urgent challenge
facing rural social change activists today is that of effectively
‘amplifying’ the voices of the rural poor, marginalised and excluded in
development-related decision-making that affects their lives, and
increasing state accountability to rural citizens. Amplifying rural
poor people’s voices and increasing state accountability to rural
citizens requires pushing back the existing limits and constraints,
both formal or informal, on rural poor people’s effective
participation, through collective political action. Rural collective
action that targets the development process necessarily involves
addressing and engaging ‘the institutions and social structures that
affect…people’s access to, control of, and security of assets
and…people’s ability to use, transform and reproduce those assets’.(32)
According to Bebbington (2006: 7-8), “Many phenomena can fall under
this category of institutions and structures, some more formal and
institutional, others more social and relational. The former might
include land tenure rules, subsoil ownership rights, environmental
regulation standards, rules governing access to and provision of health
care and education etc. The latter (which interact with the former) may
include relationships of race, ethnicity, gender, region and class that
also have significant implications for access, control, security, use
and reproduction of resources. Such relationships can influence: who
the judiciary, polity and police are more likely to defend when control
over assest becomes contested; the balance of power in marketing
relationships and price negotiations; the bargaining over and control
of assets within the household; the relative security of tenure of
different ethnic and gender groups; and so on”.
A basic assumption of this project is twofold: (i) that rural social
movements indeed have a key role to play in the long and difficult
process of eliminating established authoritarian practices that
restrict rural poor people’s effective participation in development
related decision making that affects their lives, thereby opening up
the development process and pushing it in more democratic directions;
(ii) but that this role is not automatic or always succesful. In making
this assumption, we take an initial cue from an earlier effort to study
specifically rural democratisation processes (see Fox, 1990: 3) in that
we “do not assume that peasant political behavior is inherently
qualitatively different from that of other social groups. The premise,
rather, is that the obstacles faced by the rural poor are such that
democratic collective action is often more difficult in rural than in
urban areas”.
This earlier study found that the obstacles to democratic collective
action in rural areas are of two types: those internal to rural social
and political movements, and those which lie in the interaction between
such movements and the state (both local and national). The internal
constraints were said to include the difficulty of mass assembly, the
relative dispersal of communities, the diversity of economic
activities, the ecological context, and the daily precariousness of
family survival. The external constraints were seen to flow from the
fact that it is often more difficult to establish respect for and
effective access to basic political rights and freedoms in rural than
in urban areas, precisely because of the relative strength of
authoritarian-clientelist practices and relative weakness of public
media and watchdog institutions. Just how rural social movement actors
actually endeavor to overcome these obstacles in their pursuit of more
democratic development outcomes, and which strategies offer the best
prospects for success, is a crucial part of the present inquiry.
Broadly speaking, empirical evidence suggests that progress toward more
democratic rural development requires rural social movements to work
along three broadly distinct but related lines of action, each
involving multiple levels of engagement. First, it requires the
building of social and political organisations capable of effectively
and democratically representing the plural identities and interests in
society vis-à-vis the state, and engendering more democratic
social-political practices in the process (organisation building).
Second, it requires developing innovative ways to wage the struggle to
democratise the state and make its development policies more
accountable to the poorest sectors of society (policy making). Third,
because laws and programs do not implement themselves, democratic
development requires that the poor, marginalised and excluded sectors
of society mobilise to claim and exercise their rights and freedoms in
order to “make them real” (claim making). Each of these lines of work,
and the ways in which they involve multiple levels of engagement, is
discussed in more depth below.
Organisation building First, progress toward more democratic
development requires the building of social and political organisations
capable of effectively and democratically representing the plural
identities and interests in society vis-à-vis the state, and
engendering more democratic social-political practices in the process).
In the first instance, building alternative rural social organisations
– that is, ones that are capable of representing the diverse interests
in rural society -- is not easy, since rural social organisations must
represent diverse economic, ethnic and gender interests. And these
diverse interests may themselves, in turn, be geographically-spatially
conditioned, as shown by Wolford (2003) in the case of Brazil.
For example, as Fox (1992: 39) has noted, “the gulf between those with
and without land looms large. Often the landless are left with at best
‘indirect’ representation by slightly better-off smallholders. This
process has led to the emergence of separate autonomous movements of
farmworkers and smallholders in Brazil, Nicaragua, Mexico and Chile”.
But access to land and other key natural resources is not the only
potential gulf. Most notably, apart from differences in terms of access
to key natural resources such as land, gender differences are also
important in both uniting and dividing the rural poor.(33) Finally, ethnic differences may also unite and/or divide excluded and marginalised rural populations.(34)
For movement organisers, the underlying issue may be “how to
incorporate autonomous spaces for ethnic and gender differences, and
guarantee democratic participation”.(35)
In the end, while “broad organisations can offer a national forum and
improved electoral possibilities”, they may be less useful for
addressing the diverse needs of the rural poor.(36)
There is an inherent tension between building organisations that have a
national reach and impact, and at the same time building organisations
that have local grounding and depth. Both are needed, however. As this
suggests, beyond the issue of diverse interests among the rural poor,
building alternative rural social organisations is further complicated
by the need to “scale-up” so as (i) to confront elite power where it is
most concentrated, which is often at the regional (rather than local)
level, and (ii) to effectively manage the elite avoidance strategy of
“passing the buck” of accountability from one level of the polity to
another. On the rural front, the problem of scale has two dimensions.
One involves extending the geographic spread of rural-based initiatives
‘horizontally’, through coalition building among the rural poor, both
within and between the villages and municipalities where they live, in
order to build effective counterweights to the usually regional-level
concentration of rural elite power. The other entails extending the
political reach of rural poor voices beyond the local level, by
constructing ‘vertical’ linkages and alliances that connect different
levels of the polity, from the local to the national level. Giving
attention to alternative organisation building on both planes (e.g.,
the horizontal and the vertical) is necessary to overcome the
geographic isolation and institutional exclusion – or the geopolitical
‘distance’ between individual rural poor households and governmental
officials in national capitals -- that tends to simultaneously
reinforce the power of regionally-based rural elites and weaken state
accountability to the rural poor.
Policy making
Second, because of the central role of the state in making the laws and
setting the policies that frame official development processes,
progress toward more democratic development requires developing
innovative ways to engage the state and make its development policies
more accountable to the poorest sectors of rural society. If the state
is frequently the source of problems for the rural poor, it is then
necessarily part of the solution as well. As Bebbington (2006: 17)
rightly observes, “While social movements are often directed at society
and culture, they generally cannot get away from the state. Whether the
goal is to change constitutions, land laws, mining regulations, free
trade deals … these are all changes that can only be achieved through
the state”. (37)
Indeed, according to Gillian Hart (1989: 48), understanding the state
is key to understanding “how power struggles at different levels of
society are connected with one another and related to access to and
control over resources and people”. Today, the problem of how to engage
the state on development policy and development related legal
frameworks indeed remains the central challenge for rural social
movement organisations.(38)
Policy making in general is a process that involves numerous steps or
stages, namely: (i) agenda setting, (ii) policy formulation, (iii)
decision making, (iv) policy implementation, and (v) policy evaluation.
Analytically, each of these steps or stages is institutionally distinct
and can be posited as discrete historical “turning points” in the
overall struggle to direct or redirect development in a more democratic
direction. Each step or stage in the policy making process thus raises
a distinct set of historically and institutionally specific
difficulties and challenges for those interested in influencing them.
To illustrate, as Walker has argued in the case of South Africa, the
women’s movement played a key role in getting gender equity on the
national political agenda and embedding the principle in the new
post-apartheid constitution, but the subsequent “movement of gender
activists into parliament and the public services after 1994 weakened
organisation among rural women” and also “the ability of rural women to
utilise the enabling spaces created by the national ‘gender machinery’”
since then (2002: iii). It is important to note, however, that although
each step in the policy making process is distinct and thus presents a
distinct set of problems for social change activists, the actual
dynamics of policy making in real life are not necessarily linear and
do not “in reality work through these stages logically”.(39)
There is a basic consensus among activists and academics alike that to
make development related policy making more accountable to the rural
poor requires bringing strong social pressure to bear in all phases of
the policy making process. But one question that immediately comes to
mind is “What kind of pressure is needed?” – e.g, should social
pressure from below be of the more reactive “expose and oppose”
variety, or should it be of the more proactive “propose” variety? In
the end, some combination of both is probably necessary. Many of
today’s most prominent militant rural social movement organisations,
such as the MST in Brazil and the transnational La Via Campesina,
clearly combine elements of both types of social pressure.(40)
In general, the mobilisation of strong social pressure is certainly a
fundamental starting point in any discussion about influencing public
policy. However, as social change activists increasingly discover, and
as a growing number of studies have found, the key challenge is no
longer simply a matter of mobilising strong social pressure from below,
as it was when centralised authoritarian regimes were in place in many
countries throughout the global South. With the national transition to
elected civilian regimes followed by programs of decentralisation “from
above” in many countries, the challenge necessarily has become more
nuanced and complex, to encompass the issues of exactly how, where and
when to mobilise such pressure.
Indeed, activist attention to and scholarly interest in the calibration
of social pressure “from below” has increased in recent years and
continues to grow. For instance, in the Philippines, the rise of the
“bibingka strategy” in land reform implementation in the 1990s (adopted
by one segment of the broad peasant movement) is chronicled by Borras
(1999), while Franco (forthcoming) highlights the ways in which rural
poor land-rights claimants deploy integrated social movement-legal
strategies. The 1990s shift from national-level policy advocacy to
local level land occupations in Indonesia, examined by Bachriadi &
Sardjono (2006), is perhaps another example of how social movement
actors calibrate and recalibrate their approaches to meet specific and
changing historical-institutional conditions. In South Africa, the last
five years has seen a resurgence of rural social organisation building
amidst a growing realisation that the most urgent problems of “poverty,
environmental degradation, landlessness, food insecurity, HIV/AIDS, and
a lack of basic services are not simple or separate problems that can
be solved by applying separate solutions. These are complex problems
that require multiple solutions and strategies”, according to Andrews
(2007). Some of these studies, moreover, seem to confirm Fox’s (2001)
findings on the importance of adopting strategies that are “vertically
integrated” in order to be able to monitor different elite actors at
different levels simultaneously. Meanwhile, Keck and Sikkink have shown
how transnational human rights and environmental advocacy networks
arose where “channels between domestic groups and their governments are
blocked or hampered or where such channels are ineffective for
resolving a conflict, setting into motion the ‘boomerang’ pattern of
influence” (1998: 12). But it is also important to remember that
transnational movements are not the new “magic bullet” – as Edelman
(1998) shows in his analysis of the case of the transnational peasant
movement ASOCODE in Central America, there are also risks involved for
local and national movements in linking up with transnational networks.
In short, moving beyond a purely “expose and oppose” orientation in
recent decades has been facilitated by social movement actors’ growing
recognition -- especially in an era of decentralisation and the
subsequent emergence of “a more polycentric state, with multiple
centers of decision making”, as Chalmers, Martin and Piester (1997:
545) put it -- of the value (and perhaps even necessity) of developing
more calibrated and nimble political strategies that make use of
multiple forms of action, multiple levels of intervention and multiple
centers of social movement power. Such a recognition, they say, in
turn, may well be encouraging the rise of the “associative network”,
ostensibly a new type of social movement network mirroring a more
polycentric state, as an alternative to the clientelist, populist,
corporatist or mass-mobilizationist types of structures that dominated
the social movement landscape in Latin America in the past. Claim making
Finally, it may be obvious that laws and programs do not implement
themselves. But this is perhaps especially true in rural political
arenas marked by inequitable distributions of wealth and power, for the
very reasons already mentioned above regarding the external obstacles
to rural democratisation. Instead, laws and policies are implemented
(and altered) through the actions and interactions of a wide range of
actors, including not only of state agencies and judges, but also
lawyers, law firms, professional associations, non-governmental law
reform organisations and civil society rights-advocacy groups and
social movement organisations. What kind of law or policy becomes
authoritative in a given space and time depends upon the ‘interactions
between actors in society and the state over the setting, interpreting,
and complying with authoritative rules’ (Houtzager & Franco, 2003).
This means that bringing about, or indeed consummating the struggle
for, more democratic development requires not only that state law and
policy become more responsive to the autonomously organised demands of
the rural poor, but also that the rural poor and other marginalised and
excluded sectors of rural society, must mobilise specifically to claim
their rights, in order to “make them real” over and above or against
the efforts of those, both in the state and in society, who would
deprive them of their rights. Given many frustrating experiences in the
past, in the United States and elsewhere, in trying to claim rights
through litigation (leading to the rise of the “myth of rights” school
of thought in sociology of law circles), it is important to note that
as far as this project is concerned, “mobilising to claim rights” may
involve litigation, or some form of direct action (such as land
occupation), or -- and perhaps more likely -- some combination of both.
In his critique of the “pervasive concern that rights strategies
necessarily lock social movements into the dangerous and paralyzing
embrace of litigation”, Alan Hunt makes a distinction between “rights”
and “litigation”, arguing that “[t]he espousal of a rights strategy
does not necessarily imply the espousal of a litigation strategy” and
that the “deployment of litigation is one possible – but certainly not
a privileged – feature of a counterhegemonic rights strategy” (1993:
237, emphasis in original). Indeed, for social change activists and
movements, litigation may best be viewed (as Hunt does) as “nothing
more than one of the tactics to be deployed within a much broader
conception of an essentially political, rather than legal, strategy”
(1993: 237). (41)
More generally, poor people’s struggles to claim their rights and “make
them real” are shaped by institutionalised understandings of rights,
but are not necessarily coterminous with or limited by them. A
perceived legal “rights gap” is today an important source of social
movement inspiration and political innovation, not only but perhaps
especially in the countryside, where state authority may be weak or
lacking altogether, in relation to established or aspiring
“traditional” or non-state authorities, who may or may not be concerned
about villagers’ ostensible human rights or their putative “right to
have rights”. (42)
This gap may be between what rights people think they ought to have, or
“people’s own understandings of what they are justly entitled to” as
Celestine Nyamu-Musembi (2005: 31) puts it, and what rights are
actually institutionalised under state law. Or, as Kevin O’Brien (1996)
points out, it may be the gap between what rights are promised by state
law and what rights are actually delivered by state authorities. In
this situation, one way to think about the act of mobilising to claim
rights is “rightful resistance”. According to O’Brien (1996: 33),
“[r]ightful resistance is a form of popular contention that (1)
operates near the boundary of an authorized channel, (2) employs the
rhetoric and commitments of the powerful to curb political or economic
power, and (3) hinges on locating and exploiting divisions among the
powerful”. The distinctive way in which rural populations in China in
recent years have experienced and used existing laws and policies is
illustrative. “In particular, rightful resistance entails the
innovative use of laws, policies, and other officially promoted values
to defy ‘disloyal’ political and economic elites; it is a kind of
partially sanctioned resistance that uses influential advocates and
recognized principles to apply pressure on those in power who have
failed to live up to some professed ideal or who have not implemented
some beneficial measure”.(43)
And according to O’Brien, “[s]o long as a gap exists between rights
promised and rights delivered, there is always room for rightful
resistance to emerge”. In short, for much of the world’s rural
population, “rights” remain unrecognised aspirations or unkept
promises. Either way, “specific social movement struggles.…have
[already] transformed the pre-defined normative parameters of human
rights, questioned established categories, expanded the range of claims
that could be characterised as rights, and in some cases altered
institutional structures”.(44)
And our assumption in this project is that, if they are to remain (or
become) politically relevant in the process of making development more
accountable to the rural poor, especially the landless and rural women,
rural social organisations must continue to do so.
Six Country Cases
As explained earlier, the collective campaigns examined in this project
are all attempting to engage state law and processes while at the same
time attempting to transform them into something more meaningful that
goes beyond “mere window dressing”. They are all geared toward prying
open access to and increasing real spaces for effective participation
of rural poor people in a relatively important development related
process. In each country, the analytic emphasis will be on the
political dynamics of challenging and breaking through the monopoly on
power held by rural elites and asserting the right of poor rural
citizens to a meaningful voice in priority-setting, resource allocation
and development planning. All of the country cases will examine
political processes emerging at the municipal/district level – this
being the most immediate level of engagement with government and state
- but will necessarily go beyond as well (e.g, provincial, national)
since rural elite power is often concentrated at higher levels of
government and local political dynamics are usually framed by national
policies. At which level or levels of analysis the emphasis will lay
depends on where the knots lie as well as where the organisational
partners have identified the opportunities.
Mozambique: the focus is on how UNAC and other rural organisations in
the province of Niassa are engaging with municipal governments around
the deployment of two sources of new funds for local government (20% of
proceeds from natural resource exploitation in a municipality are to be
ploughed back into the affected communities; national government is to
give block grants worth about $300,000 to local governments).
South Africa: the focus is on how ALARM affiliates are engaging at local
government level in the Eastern Cape province to put land reform on the
agenda of official local development planning through official
'Integrated Development Planning' processes; and on engagement with
provincial and national government regarding the government commitment
to redistribute 30% of land in the Western Cape. Mexico: the focus is
on how a new state-wide forum that includes 32 civil society
organisations is engaging with state/provincial government in the
poorest rural state of Guerrero around transparency in state government
through a 'right-to-know' campaign strategy.
Brazil: the focus is on state-society engagements in the states of
Pernambuco and Parana, sites of major land occupations, to reorient
rural development away from a neoliberal model and toward a more
sustainable people-oriented model.
Indonesia: the focus is on state-society engagements in West Java,
where rural social movements are mobilising to sustainably occupy
and launch large-scale pro-people rural development in state-owned (but
often private corporate-exploited) public forest land.
Philippines: the focus is on how UNORKA and its affiliate
organisations’ engagements with governement officials in the regions of
Southern Luzon and Central Visayas, where landlords use regular
municipal and regional trial courts to 'criminalise' land rights
claimants, through campaigns for 'rightful resistance' as part of
ongoing land reform struggles.
The country cases will examine the above initiatives among rural
communities to push the state into being more accountable to poor,
marginalised and excluded sectors. Exactly how they will do this,
however, will vary from case to case. To illustrate, take the case of
Mexico. As outlined above, the project will focus on rural people’s
efforts to promote greater state transparency through a ‘right to know’
campaign in the state of Guerrero. The Mexico study team will (i) work
with a local NGO in studying the campaign strategies, then (ii) bring
their analysis to the larger population of local activists in Guerrero
for validation and discussion, and then (iii) bring the processed study
of the case to the transnational table to share lessons and insights
with the other country teams during periodic international workshops
where all the country teams are present.
It is
then expected that the other country teams, which are likewise composed
of rural social change activists and activist researchers, will in turn
carry these ideas, lessons and insights home and integrate them back
into their own settings, situations and engagements where appropriate.
The country studies are expected to be used by rural coalitions for
internal reflections on organisational strategies, the opportunities
for taking forward rural democratisation and development agendas, and
political strategies towards achieving these.
Conclusion: Towards a Comparative Perspective
Building on the
country studies more broadly, we will then reflect comparatively on
three dimensions of the challenge of building and amplifying rural poor
voices that are considered to be especially important and relevant to
ongoing struggles: rural coalition building, rural-urban alliances, and
party-movement relations. The starting point for reflection in each of
these aspects is outlined below. For example, in reflecting on
rural-urban linkages, they will assess the potential for greater
co-ordination, using the outcomes as a basis for strategic discussions
with major urban organisations eg. trade unions, civic associations,
and sectoral associations with clear existing links to the countryside
– for example, small traders. Research findings on the obstacles to
rural democratisation and a people-centred rural development, and
alternative propositions emerging from rural movements would be the
basis for discussions with national progressive political parties, with
a view to challenging the urban bias of the major parties in all
countries concerned, breaking the historical pacts with rural elites
and influencing programmatic positions such that they reflect the
self-defined policy proposals of rural social movements.
|
Key dimension |
Description |
Points for collective reflection |
|
Rural Coalition Building |
The limits and opportunities of rural |
- Many factors have the potential to divide, as |
|
Rural-Urban Alliances |
The imperatives, obstacles, limits and |
- Many factors have the potential to divide, as |
|
Movement-Party Relations |
The complementary-competitive, |
- Traditional tensions between urban-based progressive political |
The global framework for the project has thus been designed to
facilitate international comparison, with each country study addressing
the same questions and reflecting on the same dimensions of the
challenge of rural democratisation (as explained above). Here, it is
important to note, the international consultants have a key role to
play, not only in helping the country teams to strengthen the
individual country studies, but especially in helping the whole project
team to identify, draw out, deepen and sharpen the collective analysis
of important similarities and differences between countries on the key
questions and key dimensions. Such analysis and insights will, it is
hoped, contribute to building and refreshing local activists’ existing
stocks of knowledge regarding the building of organisation, social
change opportunities and effective political strategies. There is
consensus among the partners of this project that there is huge
organisational and strategic value in systematising and exchanging
accumulated knowledge and experiences among activists, locally and
internationally. Alongside helping to share experiences and strategies
in overcoming obstacles to social change (such as, inequitable
structures, unrepresentative institutions, unaccountable leaders etc),
such exchanges may also help to address other potential obstacles in
the form of parochial perceptions, predetermined interpretations and
constrained imaginations among activists themselves of what is
possible. In undertaking this effort at relevant and grounded knoweldge
production, the project thus aspires to make a significant contribution
not only in the six countries, but beyond as well, to strengthening the
political impact of rural social movements on state policies,
reinforcing their demands for governments to be more transparent and
accountable to rural citizens and more responsive to demands to
reorient rural development models towards the needs of the rural poor.
This paper is only the first draft of the overall framework
paper for the three-year project on rural democratization, carried out
under the auspices of the TNI New Politics Programme. This paper is
intended to serve mainly as a resource and guide for the country teams
in the first phase of the field work. Comments are strongly encouraged!
I am extremely grateful to Fiona Dove and Saturnino Borras Jr. for
useful critical comments and crucial suggestions in earlier versions of
this draft. Any errors or omissions are my own.
Notes
(1) Borras, Kay & Akram Lodhi, 2007: 12.
(2) The Chronic Poverty Report 2004-05: 12.
(3) The Chronic Poverty Report 2004-05: 28.
(4) Green & Hulme, 2005: 873.
(5) CPR, 2004-055: 33.
(6) Bebbington, 2006: 8.
(7) Bebbington, 2006: 4.
(8) Fox, 1992: 39.
(9) Dahl, 1998: 76-77.
(10) Fox, 1998: 237.
(11) Fox 1998: 237. See also the recent study by Boone (2003).
(12) Fox 1998: 237.
(13) Fox, 1990: 7.
(14) Fox, 1992: 38.
(15) See Lara and Morales (1990), Franco (2001), and Putzel (1992).
(16) Aspinall, 2004: 88.
(17) Ntsebeza, 2005: 14.
(18) Serpa, 2003: 3.
(19)
Fox, 1992: 39. See for example Franco (2004) for the Philippines, and
Wainwright & Branford (2006) and Sauer (2006) for Brazil.
(20) This definition draws from Franco (2001).
(21) See Franco (forthcoming) and Houtzager & Franco (2003).
(22)
The term u201cnational political architecture" comes from MacIntyre,
who uses it as a metaphor u201cto capture the complex totality of a
countryu2019s basic political institutions u2013 the rules, usually
enshrined in a constitution and other key laws, that determine how the
leadership of a state is configured and how state authority is
exercised" (2003: 1). (23) See for example Franco (2001) for the Philippines and Ntsebeza (2006) for South Africa.
(24) For the concept of u2018local authoritarian regimeu2019 see Fox (1994a).
(25) See Tacoli (2006), Lynch (2005), McGregor, Simon & Thompson (2006), and Hart & Sitas (2004).
(26) See Veltmeyer (2004) for Latin America.
(27) See for example Rosset (2006) and McMichael (2006).
(28)
The development studies community was perhaps the first to put forward
a more coherent analytic framework for dealing with such diversity and
complexity, as gleaned from the work of Scoones (1998), Lahiff &
Scoones (2000), Bebbington (1999), and Ellis (2000).
(29) For discussion on the classic debates, see Moore (1967), Lehmann (1974) and Harriss (1982).
(30)
For important urban new politics initiatives in participatory
democracy, see Fung & Wright (2003) and Chavez & Goldfrank
(2004).
(31) Moore & Putzel (1999) also emphasized this link between politics and poverty.
(32) Bebbington, 2006: 7.
(33)
Bebbington, 2006: 7. See for example C.D. Deere (2003) on class and
gender in the landless womenu2019s movement in Brazil, and Lynn Stephen
(1997) on class, gender and ethnicity in rural social movements in
Mexico.
(34) Bebbington, 2006: 7. See Yashar (1999).
(35) Bebbington, 2006: 7. Fox, 1992: 41.
(36) Bebbington, 2006: 7. Fox, 1992: 39.
(37)
Bebbington, 2006: 7. Wainwright (2003) also emphasizes the continuing
importance of the central state in shaping popular struggles.
(38) Bebbington, 2006: 7. This point has been made by Pollard and Court (2005: 9), among others.
(39) Bebbington, 2006: 7. Pollard and Court, 2005: 2.
(40) Bebbington, 2006: 7. See for example the civil society paper presented at the ICARRD by Rosset et al. (2006).
(41)
Bebbington, 2006: 7. For a similar perspective and conclusions, see
Cousins (1997), who looks at the difficult challenges of u201cmaking
rights real" in the context of conflicting resource rights claims
around South Africau2019s land reform.
(42)
Bebbington, 2006: 7. For the notion of u201cthe right to have rights"
and how it inspired rural social organizations in Chiapas, Mexico in
the 1990s, see Neil Harvey (1998). (43) Bebbington, 2006: 7. Ou2019Brien (1996: 33). For an updated discussion, see Ou2019Brien & Li (2006).
(44) Bebbington, 2006: 7. Nyamu-Musembi (2005: 45).
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About the authors
Jennifer Franco
Jennifer Franco is a researcher working on land and rural politics issues. After receiving a PhD in politics in 1997 in the US, she began working with the Philippine solidarity group in the Netherlands, and with local peasant organizations, rural community organizing and human rights groups, and research outfits in the Philippines in two regions faced with extreme landlord resistance to redistributive agrarian reform. She began working with TNI in the mid-2000s, on several projects on various topics involving local peasant movement and rural reform activists, human rights activists, and activist researchers from various countries and regions. In 2010 she joined the College of Humanities and Development (COHD) at the China Agricultural University in Beijing as an adjunct faculty and travels there twice a year to give seminars and work with junior faculty and MA and PhD students. She has lived in the US, Philippines, Canada and the Netherlands.
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