Development Patterns, Mobility and Livelihood Diversification

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors make a number of important propositions with respect to spatial dimensions of the quest for poverty reduction in low-income countries, including how we interpret notions of rural and urban, and the importance of mobility in contributing to positive processes of economic and social change.

Abstract: -i-Executive Summary1. This paper makes a number of important propositions with respect to spatial dimensions of the quest for poverty reduction in low income countries. Some of these are to do with how we interpret notions of rural and urban, and the importance of mobility in contributing to positive processes of economic and social change. Others are to do with the limitations of sector-centred approaches to poverty reduction. Still others are to do with policy environments that inhibit and stifle mobility and exchange due either to wrong notions about their negative effects on the development process, or to generalised blocking behaviours that often seem to occur at the interface between public authority and private action.2. An overarching proposition is that mobility has overwhelming positive impacts on processes of change. This is equally true historically as it is today. It is mobility that ensures that labour supply meets labour demand at the junctions of economic systems in which dynamic forward momentum is occurring. It is also mobility that results in the interchange of new ideas across different locations, the acquisition of new knowledge and skills by those who move, the transfer of financial resources back from more dynamic to less dynamic areas, the potential to diversify livelihoods and thereby reduce livelihood risks and vulnerability in both urban and rural areas.3. In the context of mobility, it is useful to recognise that the descriptions urban and rural pertain to administrative boundaries that do not reflect patterns and flows of economic activity across space within national economies. Much modern industrial activity occurs in rural spaces: on green field sites, along transport corridors, at ports that may or may not be adjacent to large cities. Likewise, cities can contain significant agricultural activities, and service sub-sectors occur in both urban and rural settings.4. There are good reasons for caution regarding the resurgence in interest in agricultural technology as a contributor to poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa. We have been here before: agronomists working in Africa were no less enthusiastic than their Asia counterparts about the potential for high yielding varieties to act as a vehicle for poverty reduction in the 1970s. Rural families in Africa are heavily engaged in rural-urban interchanges, reflecting an array of disadvantages associated with undue reliance on farming: declining real output prices, limited markets, price instability, high climatic and market risk, absence of rural financial markets, declining farm sizes and so on. Better to build upon and facilitate workable rural-urban mobility than fall back on false expectations about the poverty reducing capabilities of farming on its own.5. Mobility is blocked and discouraged by numerous devices and behaviours in low income countries including permits, fees, fines,