Elsevier

World Development

Volume 36, Issue 12, December 2008, Pages 2874-2887
World Development

Social Movements and the Dynamics of Rural Territorial Development in Latin America

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2007.11.017Get rights and content

Summary

This special section brings together 4 of the 12 studies conducted within a research program analyzing the relationships among social mobilization, governance, and rural development in contemporary Latin America. The introduction gives an overview of the contemporary significance of social movements for rural development dynamics in the region, and of the principal insights of the section papers and the broader research program of which they were a part. This significance varies as an effect of two distinct and uneven geographies: the geography of social movements themselves and the geography of the rural political economy. The effects that movements have on the political economy of rural development also depend significantly on internal characteristics of these movements. The paper identifies several such characteristics. The general pattern is that movements have had far more effect on widening the political inclusiveness of rural development than they have on improving its economic inclusiveness and dynamism.

Section snippets

Social movement and new “rural questions” in Latin America

The last two decades have witnessed significant changes in the patterns and processes of territorially based rural development in Latin America. Beyond local differences, certain generic trends seem apparent. First, there has been a noticeable return to large-scale public and private investment in programs of infrastructural and economic development. This is most evidently so in investments in hydrocarbons, minerals, roads, and water management and the massive South American Initiative for

Social movements, governance, and RTD: the papers in brief

Much writing on social movements is inflected with a normative commitment that, even in critical research, is ultimately sympathetic to and hopeful about the potential of social movements in fostering processes of social change that lead toward societies that are more participatory, just and able to deliver human development effectively.3 At their

Movement dynamics and territorial dynamics: contradictions in search of a synthesis

These papers, and the research program of which they are a part (Bengoa, 2007), share two principal conclusions. First, social movements have sought change and innovation in governance arrangements far more than they have in economic processes. They have struggled for increased levels of inclusion and participation in decision making, local planning, and policy formation, and have more generally sought greater transparency and accountability in the governance of territorially based development

Geographies of territory

Schejtman and Berdegué (2007, pp. 72–74) propose a two-by-two matrix for thinking about contemporary territorial dynamics in Latin America. They suggest that—a groso modo—four types of territory can be identified in the region.

Type 1 territories are those that have enjoyed productive transformation (read modernization and market integration) coupled with institutional changes, which allow “reasonable” levels of participatory governance

Implications for RTD

The IADB, World Bank, IFAD, and many other agencies now use the language of RTD as they speak of and conceptualize their rural interventions (Sumpsi, 2007, World Bank, 2007).

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Rimisp-Latin American Center for Rural Development for support in preparing this supplement, and especially to Julio Berdegué. The supplement reports on research supported, via Rimisp, by Canada’s International Development Research Center. Anthony Bebbington also acknowledges with thanks a UK Economic and Social Science Research Council Professorial Research Fellowship (RES-051-27-0191) that supported much of his time in the joint preparation of this chapter and

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