Anthony Bebbington

Capitals and capabilities: A framework for analyzing peasant viability, rural livelihoods and poverty

Abstract On the basis of themes emerging in current debates on rural development in Latin America, this paper develops an analytical framework for analyzing rural livelihoods in terms of their sustainability and their implications for rural poverty. The framework argues that our analyses of rural livelihoods need to understand them in terms of: (a) people’s access to five types of capital asset; (b) the ways in which they combine and transform those assets in the building of livelihoods that as far as possible meet their material and their experiential needs; (c) the ways in which people are able to expand their asset bases through engaging with other actors through relationships governed by the logics of the state, market and civil society; and (d) the ways in which they are able to deploy and enhance their capabilities both to make living more meaningful and to change the dominant rules and relationships governing the ways in which resources are controlled, distributed and transformed in society. Particular attention is paid to the importance of social capital as an asset through which people are able to widen their access to resources and other actors.

Reencountering Development: Livelihood Transitions and Place Transformations in the Andes

Neither poststructural nor neoliberal interpretations of development capture the full extent and complexity of rural transformations in the Andes. Poststructural critiques tend to view development as a process of cultural destruction and homogenization, while neoliberal interpretations identify a different development ‘failure’ that inheres in ‘inefficient’ patterns of resource use, and the ‘nonviability’ of large parts of the Andean peasantry. In each case, the state is seen as a problem: as an agent of dominating modernization, or as a brake on market-led transformation. The paper reviews these positions in the light of the transformations in governance, livelihoods, and landscape that have occurred in the regions of Colta, Guamote, and Otavalo, all centers of indigenous Quichua populations in the Ecuadorian Andes. These transformations question the accuracy of arguments about cultural destruction or nonviability. Instead they suggest that people have built economically viable livelihood strategies that, while neither agricultural nor necessarily rural, allow people to sustain a link with rural places, and in turn allow the continued reproduction of these places as distinctively Quichua. The cases also point to the increased indigenous control of political, civil, and economic institutions and the important roles that development interventions, including those of the state, have played in fostering this control. In sum, this suggests the need for more nuanced interpretations of development that emphasize human agency and the room to maneuver that can exist within otherwise constraining institutions and structures. It also suggests the value of placing livelihood and the coproduction of place at the center of any interpretation of the processes and effects of rural development.

Exploring Social Capital Debates at the World Bank

This article explores the ways in which discussions of social capital have emerged within the World Bank, and how they interacted both with project practices and with larger debates in the institution. These debates are understood as a ‘battlefield of knowledge’, whose form and outcomes are structured but not determined by the political economy of the Bank. Understanding the debates this way has implications for research on the ways in which development discourses are produced and enacted, as well as for more specific discussions of the place of social capital in development studies. The article concludes with a reflection on implications of these debates for future research, policy, and practice.

NGOs and uneven development: geographies of development intervention

Much research on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) involved in international development has been case-study-based, with questions about the broader geographies of NGO intervention rarely asked. This paper explores the factors that drive such NGO geographies and considers how they relate to the uneven geographies of poverty and livelihood produced under contemporary processes of capitalist expansion and contraction. Explanations of NGO presence and absence must of necessity be historicized and contextualized, and particular attention should be paid to the influences of the politics and political economy of aid and development, the geographies of religious, political and other social institutions, the transnational networks in which these institutions are often embedded, and the social networks and life histories of NGO professionals and allies. The resulting geographies of intervention pattern the uneven ways in which NGOs become involved in reworking places and livelihoods, though this reworking is also structured by the dynamics of political economy. The paper closes by drawing out implications for geographical research on NGOs, as well as for efforts to theorize the relationships between intentional development interventions and immanent processes of political economic change, and their effects on inequality and unevenness.

Institutional challenges for mining and sustainability in Peru

Global consumption continues to generate growth in mining. In lesser developed economies, this growth offers the potential to generate new resources for development, but also creates challenges to sustainability in the regions in which extraction occurs. This context leads to debate on the institutional arrangements most likely to build synergies between mining, livelihoods, and development, and on the socio-political conditions under which such institutions can emerge. Building from a multiyear, three-country program of research projects, Peru, a global center of mining expansion, serves as an exemplar for analyzing the effects of extractive industry on livelihoods and the conditions under which arrangements favoring local sustainability might emerge. This program is guided by three emergent hypotheses in human-environmental sciences regarding the relationships among institutions, knowledge, learning, and sustainability. The research combines in-depth and comparative case study analysis, and uses mapping and spatial analysis, surveys, in-depth interviews, participant observation, and our own direct participation in public debates on the regulation of mining for development. The findings demonstrate the pressures that mining expansion has placed on water resources, livelihood assets, and social relationships. These pressures are a result of institutional conditions that separate the governance of mineral expansion, water resources, and local development, and of relationships of power that prioritize large scale investment over livelihood and environment. A further problem is the poor communication between mining sector knowledge systems and those of local populations. These results are consistent with themes recently elaborated in sustainability science.

Transnational Livelihoods and Landscapes: Political Ecologies of Globalization

This paper introduces a collection of articles on ‘Transnational livelihoods and landscapes’. We outline the analytical value of grounding political ecologies of globalization in notions of livelihood, scale, place and network. This requires an understanding of the linkages between rural people to global processes. We argue that the exploitation of these linkages can, under certain circumstances, result in new options and markets for rural people in marginal regions, even though many rural societies also confront serious political, environmental and economic challenges that likewise derive from globalization.

Environmental histories, access to resources and landscape change: an introduction

This paper forms the introduction to a special issue of this journal entitled ‘Environmental Histories, Access to Resources and Landscape Change’, that poses challenges to the ways in which the multiple dimensions of resource degradation are understood, analyzed and acted upon in developing countries. The paper outlines a framework for understanding the complexity of land degradation processes, their impacts, and offers insights into their remediation. The framework builds on the work of regional political ecologists. It involves a widened conception of resource degradation; an explicit awareness of layered scales of analysis in both time and space; an emphasis on the mechanisms structuring and determining patterns of access to a range of resources that influence the use of the natural environment; an engagement with environmental history; and a sensitivity to the relevance and application of research effort. Copyright

The New Extraction: Rewriting the Political Ecology of the Andes?

O n june 5, two months of gathering indigenous protest across the Peruvian Amazon culminated in one of the country’s most tragic moments in many a year. Several thousand indigenous and non-indigenous people had assembled in the Amazonas town of Bagua, blocking the highway and demanding the derogation of executive decrees on which they had not been consulted and that they felt threatened their future access to land, and therefore their livelihoods, in the territories they have long occupied. Also gathered were police forces, sent in by the central government to reopen the highway. In a still unclear sequence of events, shooting began. By the end of the day, and though numbers are still disputed, five Awajún-Wampís indigenous people and five mestizo townspeople were confirmed dead, along with 23 police men, 11 of whom were killed in retaliation by indigenous people as they were guarding a pumping station of the North Peruvian Oil Pipeline. One hundred and sixty-nine indigenous and mestizo civilians and 31 police were confirmed injured. A report issued in July by the national Ombudsman’s office found that all the indigenous people involved in the conflict had been accounted for in the villages its representatives had visited and that no formal complaints of missing persons had been received. Indigenous leaders, however, said that many more remote villages had not been visited and that reliable figures on the missing or killed would not be available unless an independent commission were created to investigate the events. While the roots of this confrontation run deep, the ticker on the time bomb was set more recently. On October 28, 2007, Peru’s president, Alan García, published “El síndrome del perro del hortelano” (The Dog in the Manger Syndrome), the first in a series of newspaper articles in which he laid out his interpretation of Peru’s ills and his vision of how to cure them. The problem, he argued, was that Peru’s immense natural resource endowments are not legally titled, and therefore cannot be traded, do not attract investment, and do not generate employment. The result: continuing poverty. This situation persists, he maintained, because of the “law of the dog in the manger, which says if I can’t do it, nobody can do it”—a position argued by “the old anti-capitalist Communists of the 19th century, who disguised themselves as the protectionists of the 20th century and then changed T-shirts again in the 21st century to be environmentalists.” García bemoaned that “there are millions of hectares for timber extraction that lie idle, millions more that communities and associations have not, and will never, cultivate, in addition to hundreds of mineral deposits that cannot be worked.” Oil development was being hampered because those who questioned the expansion of extractive industry had “created the image of the ‘non-contact’ jungle native.” The solution, according to García, is to formalize property rights, offer up large swaths of land for sale, and attract large-scale investment and modern technology. By June 2008, García had passed 99 decrees to act on this manifesto, easing processes that would effectively break up community land and territory. The people in Bagua were protesting some of these very decrees. As various commentators have argued, what lies behind García’s decrees (as well as parallel initiatives in the coastal valleys) is, in the words of anthropologist Richard Chase Smith, “a clear project of state reform oriented towards the concentration of land and natural resources in private 12 The New Extraction: Rewriting the Political Ecology of the Andes?

New states, new NGOs? crises and transitions among rural development NGOs in the Andean region

Abstract This paper discusses the challenges faced by rural development nongovernmental organization (NGOs) in the Andes and Chile within current contexts of public sector reform and economic liberalization. These changes, and the recognition that previous NGO initiatives have had limited impacts on rural poverty, have helped trigger crises of institutional identity, legitimacy and sustainability among NGOs. Among some NGOs, these crises have begun to elicit institutional responses that address the underlying weaknesses of the NGO sector, and identify more appropriate future roles and identities for NGOs. The paper discusses several such responses, and argues that these changes begin to remove long-standing distortions in the relationships between NGOs and their societies and economies, and thus offer the possibility of longer term institutional sustainability.

Conflict translates environmental and social risk into business costs

Significance In this report we investigate company–community conflict and its role in the regulation of sustainability performance in the extractive industries. We estimate the cost of conflict to companies and identify conflict as an important means through which environmental and social risks are translated into business costs and decision-making. The paper clarifies the relationship between the environmental and social risk experienced—and interpreted—by local communities, and the business risks experienced—and interpreted—by corporations. Findings reveal that, at least for the case of the extractive industries, these two types of risk can co-constitute each other. The central importance of corporate strategy and behavior for sustainability science is highlighted. Sustainability science has grown as a field of inquiry, but has said little about the role of large-scale private sector actors in socio-ecological systems change. However, the shaping of global trends and transitions depends greatly on the private sector and its development impact. Market-based and command-and-control policy instruments have, along with corporate citizenship, been the predominant means for bringing sustainable development priorities into private sector decision-making. This research identifies conflict as a further means through which environmental and social risks are translated into business costs and decision making. Through in-depth interviews with finance, legal, and sustainability professionals in the extractive industries, and empirical case analysis of 50 projects worldwide, this research reports on the financial value at stake when conflict erupts with local communities. Over the past decade, high commodity prices have fueled the expansion of mining and hydrocarbon extraction. These developments profoundly transform environments, communities, and economies, and frequently generate social conflict. Our analysis shows that mining and hydrocarbon companies fail to factor in the full scale of the costs of conflict. For example, as a result of conflict, a major, world-class mining project with capital expenditure of between US