CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
2.2 CONCEPTUALISING RURAL DEVELOPMENT
2.2.4 Historical background of rural development
31 (Wiggins and Proctor, 2001; Douglas, 2006; Grant, 2011). This indicates that most of the poor African rural dwellers are handicapped from accessing services and job markets by the lack of physical infrastructure. They also lack the necessary power to influence key decisions that affect their lives. The problem requires approaches that take into account various forms of deprivation and unfreedom that researchers such as Sen (1999), Friedmann (1992) and Chambers (1983), have identified and elucidated.
32 packages of higher hybrid seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, mechanisation and post- harvest technologies which came to known as the Green Revolution in Asia”.
The above articulation indicates that programmes of rural development in the 1960s focused on modernising agriculture by intensifying technology transfer and increasing inputs. The aim was to encourage rural farmers in poor countries to adopt new technologies and farming methods to achieve mass production. However, as Baah-Dwomoh (2016:8) points out, the approach
“largely ignored local and indegeous knowledge, farming systems and tenure arrangements and also targeted mostly men overlooking the fact that much agricultural work was done by women”. The fact that the role of rural women in agriculture and indigenous knowledge systems in the area of agriculture were not prioritised puts the sustainability of rural development in the 1960s into doubt. The evaluation of the extension programmes revealed that small scale farmers the majority of whom were women, contributed massively to the economic growth and that, they could easily drive economic development in poor countries. It is apparent that rural development programmes in the 1960s were still influenced by the modernisation theories which aimed at transforming traditional societies in poor countries from their primitive state (sic) to what was regarded as the progressive state (Reyes, 2001).
The 1970s saw a shift in the development discourse which also changed ideas informing rural development approaches. A study conducted by the World Bank in 1972 (quoted in Phuhlisani Solutions, 2009:11) concluded that, “It is now clear that more than a decade of rapid growth in underdeveloped countries has been of little or no benefit to perhaps a third of their population”.
The conclusion of the study indicates that economic growth does not necessarily lead to improvement of the quality of life of the poor. Put differently, economic growth without the transfer of resources and services to the poor in rural areas does not result in rural development.
A paradigm shift in rural development approaches occurred in the 1970s as a result of the World Bank governor’s speech which was delivered in Nairobi, Kenya in 1973. The governor acknowledged the imperative of poverty alleviation programmes and endorsed the adoption of new policy on rural development (Takeuchi, 2000). The proposed policy expanded the scope of rural development to include targeted investiment in agriculture, health and education, as well as the pvovision of physical infrastructure. In other words, the new policy took cognisence of the multi-dimensional nature of poverty, hence the adoption of a holistic approach to rural development. The new policy promoted the basic needs approach and the Integrated Rural Development (IRD) projects which focused on the provision of social services and financing
33 of agricultural programmes to increase income and food production in poor countries. The IRD projects in particular, aimed at creating a link between national policies and various government institutions to guide and regulate the planning and implementation of rural development programmes. According to Baah-Dwomoh (2016), the impact of the IRD projects of the 1970s was felt more in Asia and Africa. To this end, poor countries in Africa are said to have benefited more from the development of rural infrastructure, although in the main, “integrated rural development projects” performed poorly due to weak state institutions in most African countries (Baah-Dwomoh, 2016:9).
In the 1980s and 1990s rural development was affected by the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP), which were introduced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The SAPs forced poor countries, especially in Africa, to embark on economic and structural reforms which were intended to liberalise their economies and instil fiscal discipline, and promote good governance (Baah-Dwomoh, 2016). As a result, most African governments were forced to reduce their expenditure on social services and play a limited role in rural development. The non-state actors such as the international non-governmental organisations emerged to play animportant role of financing and implementing rural development programmes. The Word Bank and international donors also played a pivotal role of sponsoring rural development programmes in poor countries. However, the introduction of the SAPs adversely affected rural development and exacerbated poverty in Africa. It is difficult to ascertain the trickle-down effects that the SAPs were intended to achieve.
However, rural development approaches changed beginning of year 2000 with the approval and adoption of the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Livelihood (SL) strategies. The SL strategies take into account the various approaches that the poor employ to sustain themselves and focus on enhancing the livelihood sources of the poor in rural areas. The MDGs were adopted with the intention of reducing extreme poverty by half in all its facets by year 2015. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have since replaced the MDGs. The concept of sustainable development has become prominent in the development discourse because of the global challenges of climate change. This indicates that rural development policies in general have to incorporate the component of sustainability and contribute towards the mitigation of climate change. The concept of sustainability also promotes community-
34 driven rural development approaches and public participation in the making and implementation of rural development policies.
2.3. ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK FOR PUBLIC POLICY IMPLEMENTATION This section focuses on the concepts: policy and public policy by examining the literature on policy studies. The concept of public policy implementation is particularly considered because it is central to this study.