RIMISP: Core Support for Rural Development Research Phase 2
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Summary
Territorial inequalities persist in many parts of Latin America. For example, the mountainous Andean territories are often much poorer than coastal territories.Read more
Territorial inequalities persist in many parts of Latin America. For example, the mountainous Andean territories are often much poorer than coastal territories. Despite progress in some Latin American countries, about half of the region's territories show no signs of economic growth and they have not reduced poverty. Many policymakers in Latin America now recognize the need to better balance national and territorial objectives to ensure more equitable and widespread development. This project aims to contribute to policy and institutional change that reduces territorial inequalities, and encourages greater development of non-urban regions. The project will be led by the Latin American Centre for Rural Development (RIMISP), building on an existing research and policy-influencing program in Latin America. Project results will translate into recommendations at the national and sub-national levels to encourage strategies and investments that improve the lives of people in under-developed territories. Along with informing national and regional policies, the project encourages the private sector to adapt their practices to support territorial cohesion. As well, this project will support RIMISP's objectives of becoming an internationally recognized centre for place-based policies and territorial equality, and extending its research into other developing regions in Africa and Asia.
Research outputs
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That territories in the same country show diverse responses to the same or similar policy
interventions suggests there are factors, both socially constructed and natural, that are not randomly distributed across space, which have territorially specific effects on development outcomes. This article introduces a special issue that reports findings from the Rural Territories Dynamics program where research was to identify such conditions of territory, and to understand how, through interactions with “extraterritorial” processes, these conditions drive patterns of rural change across Latin America. Collectives and community action can mean access to the kind of power that can shape more inclusive development.
Natural resources constitute an important axis around which rural territorial dynamics revolve. Based on empirical
registration of how applications for and denouncements of natural resource use are dealt with in two Nicaraguan rural territories, this
paper examines the importance of inequality for the institutional practices through which district-level governance of natural resource
use takes place. Notable differences are identified. The paper concludes that institutional practices which promote rule-based natural
resource governance and gradually curb the veto possibilities of powerful actors are more likely to emerge in territories where political
voice is not restricted to the economic elite.
Interaction over time will result in different political regimes. This paper analyzes the extent to which transformative territorial coalitions can deliberately change the exclusive structures that afflict rural territories in Latin America. A historical comparison of three rural territorial dynamics in Ecuador demonstrates that deliberate planning is not necessary to promote an inclusive and equitable economic dynamic if a long historical process has created favorable territorial social structures. When territories do not have such social structures, they are more likely to require a strong exogenous shock to create a new and inclusive economic organization.
Ideally, poverty indicators improve because poor people’s livelihoods are improved. They can, however, also improve
because poor people are expelled from the territory. This article explores the case of the cattle region of Chontales, Nicaragua, which
during 1998–2005 experienced economic growth and declining poverty rates, spurred by investments and organizational development.
The article argues that in the absence of pro-poor coalitions, these investments facilitated the return and strengthening of the local elite
and that the observed decline in poverty rates emerges as the result of dispossession and subsequent exodus of the poor rather than of
inclusive economic growth.
This paper summarizes a study of changes in per-capita income, monetary poverty, and income distribution in 9,045 subnational
administrative units of nine Latin American countries between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s. The results largely support spatial
convergence of mean household incomes, although the estimates indicate it has been slow. Territorial inequality is found to be persistent
and reduces the pro-poor effect of local income growth. Although national-context specific, the estimates also indicate that territorial
development dynamics are influenced by the structural features of the territories. In view of the evidence, territorial development policies
in Latin America seem well warranted.
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