Geoffrey D. Wood

Reproducing Unequal Security: Peru as a Wellbeing Regime

The main purpose of this chapter is to present an analysis of the wider institutional landscape within which poor and marginalized people in Peru have to negotiate their livelihoods and forge some sense of wellbeing. The chapter thereby aims to provide a country-level counterpoint to the richer but more microanalysis presented in the other chapters.2 In so doing, we also explore the extent to which lower level welfare arrangements can be regarded as autonomous from national institutions of market and state. Starting with those who rely primarily on rural livelihoods, then three livelihood strengthening options can be distinguished, corresponding to Hirschman’s (1970) distinction between “exit, voice and loyalty.” Migration is often a problematic escape into equally harsh and contested terrain for negotiating an alternative livelihood. Voice includes engaging in localized collective action and protest with an uncertain payoff. And loyalty often amounts to unreliable dependency on the patronage of monopoly employers, landlords, political brokers, richer relatives, NGO, and government. Many families combine all three options, with outcomes made more uncertain and unequal by Peru’s insertion into the global economy through mining, export crops, tourism, and international migration.

Provision of irrigation services by the landless—An approach to agrarian reform in Bangladesh

Abstract The rural areas of Bangladesh are dominated by landless labourers whose numbers are tending to increase and whose level of living is desperately low. One way of alleviating their poverty is to place in their hands the control of productive assets not already controlled by landowners. A large-scale experiment is under way to assist some of them to deploy irrigation water by shallow tubewells and low-lift pumps. Early results suggest that this can be successfully done and that it may be one way of increasing agricultural production and improving the distribution of income simultaneously.