Marginality Joachim von Braun • Franz W. Gatzweiler Editors Marginality Addressing the Nexus of Poverty, Exclusion and Ecology ISBN 978-94-007-7060-7 ISBN 978-94-007-7061-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7061-4 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg New York London Library of Congress Control Number: 2013946367 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and the Author(s) 2014. The book is published with open access at SpringerLink.com. Open Access This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. All commercial rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other way, and storage in data banks. 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The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Editors Joachim von Braun Center for Development Research University of Bonn Bonn , Germany Franz W. Gatzweiler Center for Development Research University of Bonn Bonn , Germany v Foreword on “Marginality and Development” Development is a process through which an individual, a community or a nation can progress economically, socially, culturally, psychologically and spiritually. The centre of any development is the human being, and human wellbeing is the ultimate goal of development. Major development concerns worldwide are eradication of poverty; improvement of health, nutrition and educational status of the people; removal of discrimination along gender, racial, and ethnic lines; and protection of environment for ensuring inter-generational equity. These are concerns that have figured prominently in setting the millennium development goals. Significant progress has been achieved in the reduction of income poverty in the developing world through economic progress, targeted safety nets and social protection programs. But economic growth and targeted transfers may not be sufficient to achieve development. We must address structural factors such as ecological vulnerability, discrimination and deprivation of rights caused by poor governance and other socio-political and cultural drivers, and forces of ecological diversity and climatic change that cause vulnerability and erode the resource base for livelihoods of the people, particularly for those who are at the margin of subsistence. All this calls for a broader perspective on development policies and programs through which the nexus of poverty, discrimination and environmental degradation can be addressed. It points to the need of understanding the increasingly complex drivers of persistent poverty at societal and ecological margins. This is where the marginality concept and framework as introduced by this book become extremely relevant to understand the complexities of under- development and poverty. Amartya Sen has influenced recent development thinking by introducing the concept of social exclusion, a subset of the concept of marginality, the theme of this book. Social exclusion widens the concept of poverty and points to the need of formulating development policies and programs beyond the narrow goals of eradicating income poverty that many nation states have been pursuing. The UNDP has taken the concept forward by articulating Human Development Index, a measure of multi-dimensional poverty that incorporates deprivations in the dimensions of health, education and living standards. vi The governments and the civil society organizations have already started designing and implementing programs to address the issues of marginality. Realizing that the pockets of extreme poverty remain in the ecologically marginal areas throughout the world, the international agricultural research centers under the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) system have recently diverted their attention to developing improved agricultural technologies for these areas. Notable progress has been made in developing innovations for marginal ecologies under climate stress, such as submergence-tolerant and salt-tolerant rice and heat-tolerant wheat varieties, and efforts are underway to incorporate drought-tolerance and cold-tolerance in many crops. Many NGOs, both international and national, have been addressing the issues of gender inequality and injustices, insecurity and poor governance, and education, health and water and sanitation in hardest to reach geographies and communities (such as indigenous and tribal people) that the governments have found difficult to reach or to address through mainstream development interventions. Some of them have extended their operations by establishing social enterprises or businesses to provide services to people at the bottom of the pyramid that the corporate sector has not been able to reach adequately, and to overcome problems of missing markets or market failure. This book uses the marginality lens to understand and explore the links between poverty, exclusion and ecology. It provides a conceptual framework of marginality and explains how it links with the concepts of poverty and underdevelopment. It looks at marginality from the ecological perspectives and revisits basic econo mics to understand social exclusion. It maps the physical locations and societal positions of marginalized people and communities, and traces formal and informal rules, regulations and institutions that govern access to land, water and biological resources fundamental to operations of the livelihoods of their choice. A section of the book addresses the environmental drivers of marginality, understanding the interface between land degradation and poverty, taking into account the role of nature in providing livelihoods opportunity to the extreme poor. The authors emphasize that resource endowments and land degradation are critical determinants of poverty, and identify agricultural development strategies in a framework of different opportunity costs of land and labor. They point to the need for accelerating investment in targeted R&D focusing on crops and traits that are important for the marginal ecologies to address the environmental limitations that the poor face in these regions. With recent advancement in biological sciences and invention of tools and techniques in the field of biotechnology, the probability of research success in these difficult domains of technological advancement has improved greatly in recent years. The book then reviews recent attempts to address marginality through development interventions in selected countries in Asia and Africa through a number of case studies. This part of the book throws light on the complexities of marginality and social exclusion, and difficulties to address them. The degree of pro-poor income growth is compared between various agricultural and non-agricultural livelihoods, rural and urban areas, and among ethnic caste and religious groups. The development actors of other countries can substantially gain from the experiences and lessons learnt from these cases of development interventions already undertaken to address marginality. Foreword on “Marginality and Development” vii Marginality is not a matter exclusive to public policy and rights, but also an issue that can be addressed by business and civil society organizations. The role of the corporate sector in combating marginality and addressing the demand for service of the bottom of the pyramid are reviewed and discussed in the last part of the book. This part also reviews the experience and effectiveness of social protection measures taken by the government and civil society organizations, particularly conditional cash transfer programs that are increasingly becoming part of the national poverty reduction and development strategies to address market failure for the poorest. This book provides new evidence and constructive insights in support of a vision of a world free from exploitation and discrimination where everyone has the opportu- nity to realize their potential, as we pursue it at BRAC, and to empower people and communities in situations of poverty, illiteracy, disease and social injustice. Our interventions at BRAC aim to achieve large scale, positive changes through economic and social programs that enable men and women to realize their potential. In short, the book breaks new grounds in holistic thinking and understanding of underdevelopment and persistent poverty. It extends the concept of social protection to include the impact of adverse ecological environments and climate on the wellbeing of poor people. Thereby it broadens the concept of poverty and shows the complexity of the issues in need to be addressed for designing development programs beyond the narrow objective of eradication of income poverty, and the complementary roles of government, corporate sector and civil society organizations for tackling the intractable problems in the last miles of our path to poverty reduction. The book defi nitely extends the horizon on existing knowledge of underdevelopment. It will be very useful to students, policy makers and development actors. Executive Director Mahabub Hossain BRAC Dhaka, Bangladesh Foreword on “Marginality and Development” ix Acknowledgements This volume was made possible through the cooperation among researchers and scientists from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, who kindly agreed to come together to contemplate the problem of “Marginality.” Ecologists, economists, and other social scientists have rather different ideas and concepts of what marginality is and of how the processes of marginalization take place. We express our sincere gratitude to all of the contributors to this volume, not just because they shared their insights from work on poverty and development—based on decades of work—but also because all of the contributors were kind enough to join in this effort in order to refl ect in new ways on the nexus of poverty, exclusion, and ecology that is at the foundation of marginality. Several sets of discussions lead us towards this volume, including: discussions at ZEF along with our colleague Paul Vlek who kept emphasizing the societal risks of land degradation, exchanges with a large network of researchers who work to address extreme poverty, and intensive exchanges on this topic with Prabhu Pingali and Monika Zurek at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. All of these were helpful in shedding light on and clarifying the multifaceted marginality issues, and for identifying windows of opportunity for actions to address marginalization. An exciting international conference on marginality held at the Center for Development Research (ZEF) at the University of Bonn in 2011 was made possible due to generous financial support provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation. Workshop participants—being researchers and practitioners—critically reviewed the presented papers at that stage and identified gaps, which we subsequently tried to fill in the preparation of this volume. Moreover, helpful critiques from three external anonymous reviewers on an earlier draft of this volume are gratefully acknowledged. We are grateful for the superb editing assistance of Erick H. Baur and acknowledge his important contributions to this volume. Joachim von Braun Franz W. Gatzweiler xi 1 Marginality—An Overview and Implications for Policy ..................... 1 Joachim von Braun and Franz W. Gatzweiler Part I Concepts and Theory 2 Marginality—A Framework for Analyzing Causal Complexities of Poverty .......................................................................... 27 Franz W. Gatzweiler and Heike Baumüller 3 Exclusion and Initiatives to ‘Include’: Revisiting Basic Economics to Guide Development Practice ................................ 41 Sajjad Zohir 4 Marginality from a Socio-ecological Perspective ................................. 57 Daniel Callo-Concha, Jan Henning Sommer, Janina Kleemann, Franz W. Gatzweiler, and Manfred Denich Part II Dimensions and Prevalence of Marginality 5 Mapping Marginality Hotspots ............................................................. 69 Valerie Graw and Christine Husmann 6 The Poorest: Who and Where They Are? ............................................. 85 Akhter U. Ahmed, Ruth Vargas Hill, and Farria Naeem 7 Targeting the Poorest and Most Vulnerable: Examples from Bangladesh ..................................................................................... 101 Nusha Yamina Choudhury and Christa Räder 8 Correlates of Extreme Poverty in Rural Ethiopia ................................ 117 Degnet Abebaw and Assefa Admassie Contents xii 9 Examining the Circle of Attachment Trauma, Shame, and Marginalization: The Unheard Voices of Young Kutchi Girls ............................................................................. 133 Manasi Kumar Part III Environmental Drivers of Marginality 10 Poverty, Agriculture and the Environment: The Case of Sub-Saharan Africa ............................................................................ 151 Prabhu Pingali, Kate Schneider, and Monika Zurek 11 The Marginal Poor and Their Dependence on Ecosystem Services: Evidence from South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa ......................................................................... 169 Pushpam Kumar and Makiko Yashiro 12 Land Degradation, Poverty and Marginality ....................................... 181 Nicolas Gerber, Ephraim Nkonya, and Joachim von Braun Part IV Experiencing Marginality in Africa and Asia 13 Tackling Social Exclusion and Marginality for Poverty Reduction: Indian Experiences .............................................................. 205 Sukhadeo Thorat 14 Consumption Behavior of the Poorest and Policy Implications in Indonesia ....................................................................... 221 Evita Hanie Pangaribowo 15 Addressing Extreme Poverty and Marginality: Experiences in Rural China ......................................................................................... 239 Ling Zhu 16 Experiences in Targeting the Poorest: A Case Study from Bangladesh ..................................................................................... 257 Syed Masud Ahmed 17 Rural Poverty and Marginalization in Ethiopia: A Review of Development Interventions ................................................................ 269 Assefa Admassie and Degnet Abebaw Part V Responses to Marginality at Different Levels: State, Business, and Community 18 Macro, Fiscal and Decentralization Options to Address Marginality and Reach the Extremely Poor ......................................... 303 S. Ehtisham Ahmad Contents xiii 19 Social Protection, Marginality, and Extreme Poverty: Just Give Money to the Poor? ................................................................ 315 David Hulme, Joseph Hanlon, and Armando Barrientos 20 Innovative Business Approaches for the Reduction of Extreme Poverty and Marginality? ................................................... 331 Heike Baumüller, Christine Husmann, and Joachim von Braun 21 Business Initiatives That Overcome Rural Poverty and Marginality Through Creating Shared Value ............................... 353 Niels Christiansen 22 The Marginalized and Poorest in Different Communities and Settings of Ethiopia .......................................................................... 365 Tadesse Woldemariam Gole, Fite Getaneh Ilfata, Motuma Tafa, and Aleka Aregachew Index ................................................................................................................. 383 Contents xv Contributors Degnet Abebaw Ethiopian Economic Policy Research Institute, Ethiopian Economics Association, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Assefa Admassie Ethiopian Economic Policy Research Institute, Ethiopian Economics Association, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia S. Ehtisham Ahmad Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany Asia Research Center, London School of Economics, London, UK Akhter U. Ahmed International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Dhaka, Bangladesh Syed Masud Ahmed BRAC Research and Evaluation Division, Dhaka, Bangladesh Aleka Aregachew Environment and Coffee Forest Forum (ECFF), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Armando Barrientos Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Heike Baumüller Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany Daniel Callo-Concha Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany Nusha Yamina Choudhury World Food Programme, Dhaka, Bangladesh Niels Christiansen Creating Shared Value Advisors, Lutry, Switzerland Manfred Denich Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany Franz W. Gatzweiler Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany xvi Nicolas Gerber Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany Tadesse Woldemariam Gole Environment and Coffee Forest Forum (ECFF), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Valerie Graw Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany Joseph Hanlon Visiting Senior Fellow, Department of International Development, London School of Economics, UK Honorary Research Fellow, School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester, UK Ruth Vargas Hill International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington, DC, USA Mahabub Hossain BRAC, Dhaka, Bangladesh David Hulme Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Christine Husmann Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany Fite Getaneh Ilfata Environment and Coffee Forest Forum (ECFF), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Janina Kleemann Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany Manasi Kumar Department of Psychiatry, College of Health Sciences, University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya Pushpam Kumar Ecosystem Services Economics Unit, Division of Environmental Policy Implementation, United Nations Environment Programme, Nairobi, Kenya Farria Naeem International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Dhaka, Bangladesh Ephraim Nkonya International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington, DC, USA Evita Hanie Pangaribowo Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany Department of Environmental Geography, Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia Prabhu Pingali Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, WA, USA Christa Räder World Food Programme, Dhaka, Bangladesh Kate Schneider Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, WA, USA Contributors xvii Jan Henning Sommer Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany Motuma Tafa Environment and Coffee Forest Forum (ECFF), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Sukhadeo Thorat Centre for the Study of Regional Development, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India Joachim von Braun Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany Makiko Yashiro Ecosystem Services Economics Unit, Division of Environmental Policy Implementation, United Nations Environment Programme, Nairobi, Kenya Ling Zhu Institute of Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China Sajjad Zohir Economic Research Group, Dhaka, Bangladesh Monika Zurek Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, WA, USA Contributors 1 J. von Braun and F.W. Gatzweiler (eds.), Marginality: Addressing the Nexus of Poverty, Exclusion and Ecology , DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7061-4_1, © The Author(s) 2014 Abstract The marginality concept calls for the integration of poverty concepts with those of social exclusion, geography, and ecology. The difficulties in reaching people at the margins of systems are explained by a set of distances, (i.e., physical distances such as being located in remote or harsh environments), social distances (being excluded, discriminated against, or not having rights or access to services or opportunities), but may also be related to technological and institutional infrastruc- ture defi ciencies. This chapter provides an overview of the concept of marginality and offers a synthesis of the findings of all the chapters in this volume. A review of policies intended to reduce marginality suggests that none of the marginality deter- minants need to be accepted as long term. Coherent policies and actions, however, need to match the systemic causality of marginality in order to be effective. Keywords Marginality • Poverty • Economic policy • Exclusion • Ecology • Environment 1.1 Why Focus on Marginality? There has been significant progress in the reduction of poverty in the developing world over the past few decades. The prevalence of income poverty defined at US$1.25/day per capita declined from 43 to 22 % from 1990 to 2008 according to information presented in Ahmed et al. (Chap. 6 this volume). This progress is the result of various factors, including economic growth reaching the poor and in many countries there has also been increased attention to social protection Chapter 1 Marginality—An Overview and Implications for Policy Joachim von Braun and Franz W. Gatzweiler J. von Braun ( * ) • F.W. Gatzweiler Center for Development Research (ZEF) , University of Bonn , Walter Flex Strasse 3 , 53113 Bonn , Germany e-mail: jvonbraun@uni-bonn.de; gatzweiler@uni-bonn.de 2 policies. Most of this progress was homegrown, but both factors—growth and social protection—were somewhat assisted by development aid (Sachs 2006). A simplistic extrapolation of the declining trend in overall poverty prevalence by about one percentage point per annum over the past 20 years would automatically misguide us with the expectation that absolute poverty could end within two decades. However, it would be more realistic to assume that any further reduction of the remaining poverty will be more protracted. The diversity of people far below that income poverty line (i.e., the extremely poor) is high. Economic growth alone may contribute less to poverty reduction at societal margins, both at the bottom end of the income distribution and in geographically remote areas. Examples of the latter are revealed already by the persistence of poverty in marginal areas of China and Indonesia (see Zhu Chap. 15 and Pangaribowo Chap. 14 this volume). More than half of the world’s poor now live in large, emerging economies that happen to be members of the economically leading G20 nations. The bottom billion has shifted and no longer only lives in the poorest and often fragile states (Collier 2007). On the other hand, the capacities to design and implement social protection policies have become more widespread over the past two decades and will assist with effective poverty reduction, even among the extremely poor (von Braun et al. 2009). Understanding the constraints and behavior of the marginalized poor is essential for effective program designs, and there has been research progress in that domain too, partly through randomized control trials of large and small development investments (Adato and Hoddinott 2010; Banerjee and Duflo 2011). Addressing extreme poverty effectively is, however, not just a mat- ter of growth and targeted transfer policies, but also a matter of addressing structural forces such as exclusion, discrimination, and the deprivation of rights; constrained access to services and technology; governance deficiencies and cor- ruption; and the forces of ecological change that are increasing the vulnerability and eroding the resilience of the poor, many of whom depend on natural resources at the margins in rural areas or live in high risk margins of urban areas. Some of these issues can be further illuminated by experimental research, but many are not open to that possibility due to the rigidities and scale of some of these structural forces. A broader perspective regarding poverty reduction and development policies and programs is called for, where the nexus of poverty, environmental change, and development is addressed. This entails understanding the increasingly context- specifi c determinants of the serious poverty problems at societal and environmental margins. This is where the marginality concept and framework come into play. The set of actors with the potential for engaging in overcoming marginality has become more diverse and promising in strength. Besides government (central and increas- ingly local) and civil society actors (which in addition to charities, are often more focused on developing capacity, skills, and rights), the private sector is much more deeply involved along all elements of value chains and in service delivery (not just with corporate social responsibility approaches, but also with inclusive business and shared value approaches). J. von Braun and F.W. Gatzweiler