Rural Women,Displacement and the Three Gorges Project

Based on empirical research, this article examines the status, situations and development issues of rural women displaced by the monumental Three Gorges Project (TGP) in China. The study reveals that TGP resettlement is leaving women worse off as family members, as well as worse off than male members. Woman resettlers are more likely to become impoverished than men, partly because women make up the main labour force in agricultural sectors. Most women are unable to achieve occupational mobility in the process of resettlement. Fewer employment opportunities, a gender‐segregated labour market, low level of human capital and social prejudice are principal causes. Land provision for resettlers is inadequate with a lower quality of productivity. Marriage is a means for some women to remain in or move to the reservoir area to improve their socio‐economic status, but bias against granting of ‘resettler’ status to married women and their generally low levels of education and lack of occupational skills work against them. It is imperative that the authorities integrate a gender perspective into policy‐making and design of resettlement schemes.     

Unsettling Experiences: Internal Resettlement and International Aid Agencies in Laos

A number of programmes and policies in Laos are promoting the internal resettlement of mostly indigenous ethnic minorities from remote highlands to lowland areas and along roads. Various justifications are given for this internal resettlement: eradication of opium cultivation, security concerns, access and service delivery, cultural integration and nation building, and the reduction of swidden agriculture. There is compelling evidence that it is having a devastating impact on local livelihoods and cultures, and that international aid agencies are playing important but varied and sometimes conflicting roles with regard to internal resettlement in Laos. While some international aid agencies claim that they are willing to support internal resettlement if it is ‘voluntary’, it is not easy to separate voluntary from involuntary resettlement in the Lao context. Both state and non‐state players often find it convenient to discursively frame non‐villager initiated resettlement as ‘voluntary’.     

Resettlement Programmes and Environmental Capacity in the Three Gorges Dam Project

This contribution looks at the Three Gorges dam project, and specifically at the resettlement programme, focusing on two major aspects. It examines the resettlement programme in relation to the environmental capacity in the reservoir area; and it assesses the existence of a risk consciousness and a reconstruction strategy, seen in terms of the ‘impoverishment risks and reconstruction’(IRR) model. The author argues that issues related to the environment and natural resources are highly significant and have led to changes in the resettlement programme, including a change in policy towards moving rural people out of the reservoir area, as well as the issuing of new resettlement regulations. The IRR model is a useful tool to identify risks and can serve as a guide to the reconstruction of livelihoods for the resettled people. The limitations of using the model in the Three Gorges project concern specific Chinese environmental, social, economic and political conditions that influence efficient resettlement implementation. The Chinese authorities’ emphasis in resettlement has been on rebuilding relocatees’ livelihoods: it focuses less — if at all — on the social aspects and the social trauma of broken networks. The IRR model could therefore be useful in the context of focusing more on the social costs of resettlement.     

Witchcraft,Social Cohesion and Participation in a South African Village

The past thirty years have seen development agencies, non‐governmental organizations and their funders embrace ‘participatory’ development strategies. These strategies require the poor to take part in decision‐making about, and the implementation of, development projects and programmes. Underlying enthusiasm for participation is the recognition that centralized, top‐down systems and methods have not delivered development, and the assumption that the poor are eager and able to ‘participate’. Using ethnographic research on witch beliefs and their impact on social relations in a South African village, this article argues that such assumptions are not always justified. It shows that witch beliefs and related conflicts have long‐term negative consequences for intra‐community relations and examines what this implies for development policy and practice.     

Engendering the New Enclosures: Development,Involuntary Resettlement and the Struggles for Social Reproduction in Coastal Tanzania

This article engages with the feminist concept of ‘social reproduction’ to arrive at a richer understanding of the gendered processes and outcomes of contemporary large‐scale land acquisitions, or the ‘new enclosures’. It focuses on the case of a recent land deal for industrial sugarcane production in the Coast Region of Tanzania and the resultant process of involuntary resettlement. It critically analyses people's struggles for land in the face of imminent displacement, and the gendered ways they experience the erosion of their pre‐existing modes of social reproduction. It argues that enclosure of rural landscapes does more than immediately strip peasants and pastoralists of their means of production and turn them into wage labourers. It gradually uproots them from their socio‐ecological knowledges, cultural practices and historical memories, which are rooted on the land and articulated through gender. The highly uncertain processes of enclosure and displacement also force rural women and men to renegotiate their livelihood strategies and intra‐household gender relations.     

Resettlement,Opium and Labour Dependence: Akha–Tai Relations in Northern Laos

Forestry is a major source of revenue for the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Government’s view is that shifting cultivation in the highlands is the primary cause of deforestation and erosion; this has led it to establish a policy of eliminating shifting cultivation by the resettlement of highland people in or near the lowlands. Here, it is assumed, the highlanders will be able to lead a more sedentary existence, cultivate wet rice, and benefit from various forms of development assistance. In the district of Muang Sing in northern Laos this policy has been partly responsible for the movement of large numbers of Akha people downhill to settle on the lower slopes of the highlands, at the periphery of the lowlands. This movement has been further encouraged by the low productivity of the Akha swidden economy. This article argues that Akha expectations of a more secure livelihood have not been fulfilled due to the ravages of disease, high rates of opium addiction, and the lack of government assistance. Instead, the Akha of the lower slopes have become an impoverished labour force, exploited for the benefit of the politically and economically dominant Tai lowlanders.     

Debt‐Bonded Brick Kiln Workers and Their Intent to Return: Towards a Labour Geography of Smallholder Farming Persistence in Cambodia

Despite the increasing preponderance of non‐farm work in Cambodia, labour migrants across a range of working conditions remain linked to their rural homesteads through durable financial and social arrangements. This article explores this phenomenon through the case of debt‐bonded brick kiln workers in Phnom Penh, formerly smallholder farmers in villages. Drawing on the field of labour geography, the article first examines the process by which labourers became debt‐bonded, thus situating them within the country’s broader agrarian transition and recasting peasants as rural labour. It then explores workers’ perceptions of rural life, suggesting that the unfreedom of kiln work, contrasted with the fixedness and potential for mobility in rural life, makes workers aspire to return to their land. The article ultimately highlights how the persistence of smallholder farmers can be understood as an issue of poor work under neoliberalism in Cambodia, and draws light on the agency of labour in understanding this.     

Demographic Change,Differential Ageing,and Public Policy in Rural and Regional Australia: A Three‐State Case Study

This paper takes a differential demographic change in six rural settlement categories within rural and regional Australia as the starting point for the measurement of differential ageing using a Relative Ageing Index which compares ageing in sub‐populations with the national norm. The spatial units employed are 412 rural communities, approximated by social catchments each consisting of a country town and its surrounding dispersed population. The study covers the period from 1981 to 2006 and includes the rural areas of New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia, excluding major cities, peri‐urban areas, and the remote rangelands. It examines demographic change and differential ageing in a selection of the rural settlement categories recommended for further analysis in the report of the ‘Demographic Change and Liveability Panel’, one of three advisory panels established in 2010 by the then Commonwealth Government seeking to develop a sustainable population strategy for Australia. Ageing profiles are produced for the whole study area, for the individual rural settlement categories, and for the urban and rural components within each category separately. Results show that differential ageing is least advanced in the ‘regional cities’, most advanced in the ‘sea change’, but of most concern in the agriculture‐based rural settlement categories where it exacerbates the effects of overall population decline. In all categories, ageing in the dispersed rural population element exceeded that of the urban component. Results emphasise the vital role of the ‘regional cities’ category in future public policy development supported by ameliorative and collaborative measures for their surrounding agriculture‐based communities.     

从传统农庄到现代城市社区转型的曲折历程——“无保调查”中保定市薛刘营村城市化进程考察

河北省保定市薛刘营村是中国农村经济史上持续80余年著名的"无保调查"中具有特殊意义的研究对象。这个紧邻城市的传统农庄,在新中国成立初期被纳入城市郊区,20世纪90年代末纳入市区,而今即将转变为一个新型城市社区。该村城市化经历了从顺畅起步而后受阻,到快速发展后遭遇产业结构、就业结构和居民身份转换与市民待遇转换长期不同步的"非均衡"发展状况,再到突破旧村拆迁瓶颈,实现建立现代城市社区的曲折历程。这一过程提供了以村为单位研究中国北方城郊传统农庄城市化的完整标本,也为推进北方城郊农村城市化发展提供了宝贵经验。     

DAMS AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN MALAYSIA: DEVELOPMENT,DISPLACEMENT AND RESETTLEMENT

Large dams have proliferated in Malaysia in recent decades. Constructed mainly to meet mounting domestic demand for water and energy, they have destroyed large tracts of species‐rich tropical rain forest and displaced many already poor and marginalized indigenous groups from their homes and ancestral lands without their consent. Evicted indigenes were promised a better life in resettlement villages, but for the most part this has not occurred. Invariably traumatized by resettlement and widely forced into cash‐based economies for which they were ill prepared, many resettled indigenes suffered from frayed social relationships, high rates of unemployment and enduring poverty, in large part because the authorities failed to internalize project costs. The consequences for indigenous groups of dam‐induced environmental change and development‐forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR) are explored through a critical reading of the literature on four large dams: Sungai Selangor, Babagon, Batang Ai and Bakun. More large dams are under construction and many others have been proposed, resulting in threats to the future well‐being of many indigenous communities. Generally speaking, the experiences of Malaysia's dam‐affected indigenes mirror those of other indigenous minorities in the greater Southeast Asian region.     

NGOs as Social Movements: Policy Narratives,Networks and the Performance of Dalit Rights in South India

Donor‐funded development NGOs are sometimes portrayed as co‐opting, privatizing or depoliticizing citizen action or social movements. This much is implied by the term ‘NGOization’. Alternatively, NGOs can be seen as bearers of rights‐based work increasingly threatened by tighter regulation or substitution by corporate social responsibility models of development. This article engages critically with both perspectives. It traces the role of NGOs and their funders in agenda setting, specifically in bringing the previously excluded issue of caste discrimination into development policy discourse in the form of a Dalit‐rights approach in Tamil Nadu, south India. The authors explore the institutional processes of policy making and NGO networking involved, the alliances, entanglements of NGOs and social movements, and the performativity of NGO Dalit rights. But at the same time, the article illustrates how NGO institutional systems have constrained or failed to sustain such identity‐based claims to entitlement. In Nancy Fraser's terms, the article explores success and failure in addressing ‘first‐order’ issues of justice, that is rights to resources (in this case, land), and in tackling ‘second‐order’ injustices concerning the framing of who counts (who can make a claim as a rights holder) and how (by what procedures are claims and contests staged and resolved). This draws attention to the important but fragile achievements of NGOs’ discursive framings that give Dalits the ‘right to have rights’.     

Refusal,circulation, refuge: young (im) mobilities in rural Israel

Recent years have seen the Israeli state investing considerable efforts in the alleviation of unprecedentedly high inter-regional inequalities. Improved transportation networks intended to better connect peripheral residents to centrally located opportunities have been at the heart of this policy known as ‘periphery cancellation’. In this article, we study strategies deployed by young peripherals as they engage with the statist call for enhanced mobility between regions. Drawing on qualitative research conducted at ‘A Center for the Young’ in a small town in the predominantly rural Upper Galilee, we examine the extent to which young adults negotiate the recent state-led mobility turn. Taking a critical nobilities approach, we argue that statist aspirations of mobilizing peripherals to central hubs collide with socio-spatial constraints faced by many young residents. The official call for mobility is frequently met by a sense of spatial (im)mobility articulated by young agents who deploy instead alternative strategies to achieve socio-spatial mobility. Termed refusal, circulation, and refuge, these strategies draw on notions of peripheral stagnation, attributed to both state policies that have long marginalized the area as well as rooted conventions about the social and cultural inertia of peripheral residents. These strategies, we contend, widen existing inequalities between central haves and peripheral have nots while solidifying a sense of socio-spatial disenfranchisement among many of its young inhabitants.     

Decentralization and Democracy in Indonesia: A Critique of Neo‐Institutionalist Perspectives

This article assesses some of the major premises of neo‐institutionalist explanations of decentralization policy and practices, but focuses especially on the relationship between decentralization and democracy, in the context of the recent and ongoing Indonesian experience with decentralization. In the last two decades ‘decentralization’ has become, along with ‘civil society’, ‘social capital’ and ‘good governance’, an integral part of the contemporary neo‐institutionalist lexicon, especially that part which is intended to draw greater attention to ‘social’ development. The concern of this article is to demystify how, as a policy objective, decentralization has come to embody a barely acknowledged political, not just theoretical, agenda. It also suggests alternative ways of understanding why decentralization has often failed to achieve its stated aims in terms of promoting democracy, ‘good governance’, and the like. What is offered is an understanding of decentralization processes that more fully incorporates the factors of power, struggle and interests, which tend to be overlooked by neo‐institutionalist perspectives. The current Indonesian experience clearly illustrates the way in which institutions can be hijacked by a wide range of interests that may sideline those that champion the worldview of ‘technocratic rationality’.     

Experimental Consensus: Negotiating with the Irrigating State in the South of Laos

Abstract

It is common to view Laos as a political culture prone to “consensus”, yet it is also true that policy is constantly changing there, often radically. If everyone is always “in consensus”, what can explain this change? I suggest that the answer is found in the particular kind of consensus at play: it is informed by a wider “experimentarian” ethic evident in rural Laos, where ideas (including the latest policies) are put to the test through practical implementation. The results of these experiments are used to validate policy change and reversal. This allows rural residents a degree of manoeuvrability in their engagements with the state that is striking given the “authoritarian” status of the current regime. It can explain and is used to justify, for instance, the oft-observed gap between policy and actual practice. This room for manoeuvre comes at the price of “playing the game”, at least for a while, of the latest policy fad, sometimes with disastrous consequences for rural livelihoods. I use the example of an irrigation project that was implemented in the south of Laos from 1999–2002 to examine “experimental consensus” at work as policy was received, engaged and eventually relinquished.     

Policy Merchandising and Social Assistance in Africa: Don't Call Dog Monkey for Me

The title of this article draws on a Yorùbá aphorism that roughly translates into ‘don't sell me a dummy’. The dark side of social policy, the theme of this Debate, has a distinct character in the African context. The transformation of the African public policy landscape, shaped by the ‘counter-revolution’ in development thinking, has taken a new form with the donor ‘policy merchandising’ of cash transfer schemes. The stratified and segregated social policy on offer contrasts with the historical experience of ‘donor’ countries themselves. The policy instrument advanced is cast as ‘a silent revolution in development’, embodying the idea of development shifting from structural transformation to poverty alleviation. What is promoted is an impoverished version of development. Within the discourse of ‘working with the grain of African politics’, the politics of social assistance policy merchandising starts with a notion of politics as clientelist. It then deploys the instrumentality of clientelism — within an imperial deployment of power — in the manufacture of civil society and policy coalition, to ensure the local adoption of a policy instrument that the extra-territorial donor actors offer. This modality of public policy formulation contrasts sharply with the historical experience of public policy making in the ‘donor’ countries themselves. The result is the subversion of the consolidation of democracy in the African client states.     

Villages that Never Were: The Museum Village as a Heritage Genre

Villages of relocated buildings now constitute a phenomenon of the world’s repertoire of heritage. They go by a multitude of names depending on particular inflection: open air museum, folk museum, living history museum, heritage village, museum village and so forth. ¹ [1] On the range of villages, see Thompson, ‘The Social Significance of Folk Museums’; Marshall, ‘Folklife and the Rise of American Folk Museums’; Leon and Piatt, ‘Living History Museums’; Shafernich, ‘On‐site Museums, Open‐air Museums, Museum Villages and Living History Museums’; Moolman, ‘Site Museums’; de Jong, ‘Approaches and Concepts’; Chappell, ‘Open‐air Museums’; Corbin, ‘Representations of an Imagined Past’. This paper reviews the context of the form of the genre’s manifestation in Australia, where it is often known as the ‘pioneer village’. They are the fruit of a populist vision of national history which celebrates white rural settlement as its central theme. In practice, the villages manifest a deep commitment to collecting and saving old buildings as the meaningful construction of a favourite historical identity. But the generation that established Australia’s villages has been overtaken. Today, the intersection of museum villages with the managerialist pressures of local economy enhancement and modern professional standards of heritage management challenge most villages’ survival.     

Property Rights and the Environment in Pastoral China: Evidence from the Field

It is widely perceived that the degradation of China’s rangelands has accelerated since the introduction of rural reforms in the late 1970s. The popular explanation for this phenomenon has been that a ‘tragedy of the commons’ exists, as privately‐owned livestock are being grazed on ‘common’ land. Since the passing of the Rangeland Law in 1985, Chinese pastoral tenure policy has emphasized the establishment of individual household tenure as a necessary condition for improving incentives for sustainable rangeland management. Yet household tenure has yet to be effectively established in many pastoral regions. The first objective of this article is to describe pastoral tenure arrangements in northern Xinjiang‐Uygur Autonomous Region. Its second objective is to explain pastoral tenure arrangements, particularly the observed persistence of collective action. It is argued that there is no ‘tragedy of the commons’ and that it is characteristics of rangeland resources and the social environment that give rise to the particular types of institutional arrangements found.     

Respacing for Peace? Resistance to Integration and the Ontopolitics of Rural Planning in Post‐War Burundi

This article investigates the politics and social impact of post‐war ‘respacing for peace’ strategies in Burundi from within a set of contested spatial arrangements — or rather, post‐war socio‐spatial experiments — including peace villages, IDP site clearances and land sharing. The author takes a critical look at these reconfigurations, and the resistances and manipulations that result when people (or their remains) are moved or placed in the name of coexistence, integration and sharing after the war. In this way, the article contributes to a post‐conflict planning literature that is mostly concerned with overcoming segregation and cleansing through integration, by exploring some of the complexities and problems that can arise with unquestioned embrace of the latter. It shows that a very particular and problematic logic of ethnic coexistence and physical integration drives post‐war respacing in Burundi and that people resist it with strategies in both physical and reflexive space. Proceeding through a set of paradoxes — such as the refusal to return and staying put, or re‐emigration as a response to settling — the article explores how and why respacing‐for‐peace might produce, or fail to prevent, the opposite outcome: community conflict, social tension and segregation.     

From ‘neo-vernacular’ to ‘semi-vernacular’: a case study of vernacular architecture representation and adaptation in rural Chinese village revitalization

ABSTRACT

Vernacular architecture can be regarded as heritage places. Recently, the need to protect vernacular heritage in China has been reflected through government policy changes, for example the ‘beautiful countryside’ program which aims to develop rural villages since 2005. However, a conflict between conserving the tangible fabric and the intangible heritage of the vernacular place can become pronounced, as villagers have desires for a modern lifestyle, and maintaining the physical building fabric. Vernacular villages require sustainable development alongside conservation of both tangible and intangible heritage significance. A key factor in keeping a village alive is continuing its utilization by a local community. This paper introduces the terms ‘neo-vernacular’ (buildings with a vernacular appearance with contemporary methods and materials) and ‘semi-vernacular’ (reusing or renovating vernacular buildings in combination with modern and traditional building techniques) to distinguish two approaches to vernacular villages conservation. We analyse the distinctions between the works of Amateur Architecture Studio (AAS) and Atelier Zhang Lei (AZL) to demonstrate the neo-vernacular and semi-vernacular approaches respectively through photo-comparison diagrams, and reviewing comments from local villagers, architectural students, and scholars. In the discussion, we propose that the semi-vernacular adaptation offers a new approach worth pursuing in China’s rapidly changing rural landscapes.     

Empowering Pyromaniacs in Madagascar: Ideology and Legitimacy in Community‐Based Natural Resource Management

Development practitioners frequently rely on community‐based natural resource management (CBNRM) as an approach to encourage equitable and sustainable environmental resource use. Based on an analysis of the case of grassland and woodland burning in highland Madagascar, this article argues that the success of CBNRM depends upon the real empowerment of local resource users and attention to legitimacy in local institutions. Two key factors — obstructive environmental ideologies (‘received wisdoms’) and the complex political and social arena of ‘community’ governance — challenge empowerment and legitimacy and can transform outcomes. In Madagascar, persistent hesitancy among leaders over the legitimate role of fire has sidetracked a new CBNRM policy called GELOSE away from one of its original purposes — community fire management — towards other applications, such as community management of forest exploitation. In addition, complications with local governance frustrate implementation efforts. As a result, a century‐long political stalemate over fire continues.