1

Political Conditions for Agrarian Reform and Poverty Alleviation

Ronald J. Herring1

Summary

The purpose of this piece is to explore how we might go about understanding the politicalconditions for poverty alleviation via agrarian reform. It argues that the traditional conceptualizationof agrarian reform and its politics -- which presents a near impossibility in typical politicalconfigurations -- is too limiting. The traditional economic focus on intersection of landed rights,agriculture and poverty needs broadening to incorporate technological change enabled by thebiological revolution and the importance of ecological systems that support both agriculture andsurvival strategies of the poor. The traditional political focus on agrarian classes needs broadening toincorporate new social forces interested in the correlates of agrarian inequality and the socialcorrelates of land-based inequality -- “new social movements” and their domestic and internationalallies. The argument nevertheless reaffirms the importance of classic agrarian reform in its dualcontributions to direct relief of poverty and democratizing effects which enable other pro-poorreforms to work more efficiently. The surest way to poverty reduction in most rural societies isreformation of the property system. Though there are other roads to government action to alleviatepoverty, all are subject to distortions induced by inequality, a major component of which is skeweddistribution of property. Asset redistribution also enables social democracy, and even populistdistributive programs work better with social democracy than without. Social democracy is,however, not a direct policy choice; there is much historical contingency at work. A conundrum ofland reform policy generally is that it is a statist project -- as all policy is -- and as such has oftenincreased state power and patronage in ways that are inconsistent with reform objectives. Withoutreform of the state, its alleged beneficiaries are seldom the driving force and may become its victims.Yet it is agrarian reform, particularly in its expanded conceptualization, which enables more broadlybased rural power vis-a-vis the state by changing the incentive structure of state operatives throughaltering the rural distribution of power. Thus, a policy agenda for pro-poor reform must retainelements of the venerable core of the agrarian project and yet recognize the potential of largercoalitions for the poor. These elements include environmental integrity and regeneration, women’srights, human rights, cultural survival and democratization. This analysis is not meant to replace classwith postmodernist identity politics, but rather to emphasize the reality of new coalitional possibilities.

1John S. Knight Professor of International Relations, Professor of Government and Director, The Mario

Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA l4853 USA (internet:rjh5@cornell.edu). Prepared for the DFID Conference on 2001 World Development Report on Poverty,Birmingham, England, August 16-17, l999. I am indebted to Dia Mohan and Malinda Seneviratne for invaluableresearch assistance and discussions. This draft also benefits from comments of Manoj Srivastava.

2

Reconceptualizing Agrarian Reform

The traditional study of agrarian reform presents an apparent political impossibility. Landconfers power in agrarian systems; reform policy must then work through a system of power tooverthrow its base (Herring l983: Ch 8). Not only would one predict little policy, but as importantlylittle implementation: power is expressed at various levels of the political economy, from agendasetting to administration. This model is certainly accurate for most of the history of agrarian reform.Exceptions have occurred through communist revolution (China), external intervention (Japan) orsocial democratic mobilization of the poor majority (Kerala in India). In the classic landlord-tenantsystem, in which land is held by a small minority of the population and the landless are economicallydependent and politically powerless, the model holds remarkably, but not surprisingly, well.Moreover, with commercialization of agriculture, dominance of agrarian systems by what theRudolphs (l987) call “bullock capitalists” -- substantial family farmers who actively participate inagriculture -- renders a political coalition against a minority land-owning class even more difficult toconjure.

For these and other reasons, poverty discourse within powerful institutions has moved toexpanding the pie rather than redistributing it. William Thiesenhusen (l995) notes the impact of debtcrises and restructuring as reasons for dropping agrarian reform from the development agenda.Market solutions to poverty in general replaced concerns with redistributive policy in the l980s.Certainly the waning, then end, of the Cold War -- reducing the urgency of efforts to remove theagrarian base of communist movements -- had much to do with the shift. The architect of manyagrarian reforms in poor countries, the United States, has moved in its external agenda from fightinglocal communisms to conditionalities of market promotion, human rights, gender equity anddemocratization (McHugh, Forthcoming).

But political conditions are not so hopeless as the landlord-dominance model suggests. Thisis true for a number of reasons. First, there is the declining importance of agriculture. Particularly inLatin America, but throughout the poor world, urbanization and the growth of service sectors hasreduced the political salience of agricultural land ownership. Marketization has meant that leaseagreements more common to urban economic relations have become more common in agriculture.Part of this move is motivated by the political controversies surrounding land reform in many parts ofthe world; it is prudent for agrarian elites to diversify, even divest. In Jeffrey Paige’s model ofagrarian conflict (l975), the necessity of political control of land was rooted in the absence ofalternatives for landed elites, resulting in conflictual structures.

Secondly, land as anchor of natural systems forces reconsideration of property distributions.A great deal of nominally state property in nature is ripe for distribution to the poor, who may proveto be better managers than the state in terms of both preventing environmental degradation andpreservation of biodiversity (A. Kothari l997; Kothari et al. l996). A coalition of movements andinternational actors interested in both “deep” ecology and social ecology is structurally enabled byenvironmental crisis and new recognition of both services of ecological systems and the public goodsentailed in biodiversity. On the latter, advances in biotechnology enable new forms of ownership toarise; a global system of property rights in biota is in formation. For this system of rights to support

3

the poor requires a property reform similar to that of traditional agrarian reform.

Third, recognition of gender-differentiated deprivations opens a new policy space forconsidering control of rural assets (Agarwal l992, l997). Increased mobilization of womenpotentially adds a political force for redistribution (Deere l997). International and domestic NGOscommitted to this cause could and should recognize the roots of gender disability and powerlessnessin property distributions.

Fourth, democratic transitions, though often fragile, open new possibilities; in cases such asSouth Africa, post-Marcos Philippines or Zimbabwe, agrarian reform emerges as a pressing politicalagenda.2 New nations, such as Eritrea (Joireman l996), consider alterations in rural property fromthe perspective of nation building and economic growth.

Fifth, technological change in agriculture should in principle continually lower the subsistencethreshold size of holding while expanding options for small farmers (Conway l997); one result is thatthe scale of necessary redistribution may be smaller and therefore more politically feasible.

An enabling sixth factor affecting all of the above is the proliferation of NGOs, includinginternational NGOs, and their legitimation by the international development assistance community asplayers. These actors represent a force for exposing the abuses of human rights and politicalfreedom which have often repressed agrarian movements.3 It is so numbingly consistent how oftenhuman rights abuses involve those without standing or economic autonomy in the agrarian underclassthat the phenomenon is almost naturalized.

This list of factors altering the potential balance of power in the politics of reform is by nomeans exhaustive. To take one example: the New York Times of December l8, l996 printed anarticle “Turning Colombia's Drug Plots Over to Peasant Plowshares,” by Diana Jean Schemo. AlbaOrtilla Duenas, the Colombian Minister of Agrarian Reform, was reported to be sanguine that a lawpassed by Congress the week of December 9, 1996, authorizing the seizure of drug dealers' assets,will ease the plight of landless peasants. The article noted as well that about 250 people who hadbeen forced off their plots of land “at the behest of a nearby landowner and drug dealer arecamping at government agencies in Bogota Colombia, seeking protection, after several of theirnumber were killed and others threatened.” Seizure of assets of criminals engaged in any land-basedillegal activity offer an untapped pool of resources; international pressure on such

2 The Philippines presents an important caveat: weak political parties organized for

patronage with few local organizational roots proved ineffectual in carrying out the land reforms afterthe fall of Marcos (Riedinger l995). Nevertheless, the politics of the transition put land reform backon the national agenda.

3 Steven Hendrix (l996/97) argues that the causes of many domestic conflicts and humanrights abuses which land in the lap of international agencies seeking reconstruction and reconciliationreside in land tenure conflicts, but there are typically ignored by international agencies.

4

activities as drug trading adds to the political weight of redistribution. It is not that drug growers arealways rich and powerful, nor that the power of those who are is easily broken; it is theaccumulation of similar pressures that suggests a need to reconceptualize the political possibility ofagrarian reform.

To argue that new coalitions are possible and new conceptualizations useful is not to burythe honored tradition of land reform as an intellectual and political project. So long as there areregionally concentrated incidences of increasing landlessness, land concentration, under-utilized landand underemployed rural people, the traditional model will ring true.4 Indeed, the forces whichhistorically have moved agrarian reform persist, with their familiar regional and temporal spottiness,intermittent character, uneven results; likewise, land reforms of the past remain foci of contemporarypolitics. Despite slippage in the development policy world, land reform is not dead.

Reports of the Demise of Agrarian Reform are Premature :

In a short space it would be impossible to survey the contemporary spread of agrarianpolitics surrounding land reform. But the issue is by no means unimportant in the politics of rural --and urban -- people demanding redistributions of property.

First, even dead land reforms are not dead. Promises unkept keep the movements alive;past misdeeds are not forgotten. Both become nodes around which politics precipitate. NancyAbelmann (l996) examines the social and political activism of the 1980s in South Korea through thelens of the Koch'ang Tenant Farmers' Movement. In the turbulent "summer of protest" of 1987,North Cholla province farmers organized to protest against the Samyang Corporation's ownershipof tenant plots never distributed in the 1949 land reform. Deborah Potts and Chris Mutambirwa(l997) document the continuing conflicts in moral economy caused by promised land redistributionand pressures for commercialization of redistributed plots in Zimbabwe. Nicaragua’s tumultuousland reforms under the Sandinistas redistributed more than one million hectares to about 200,000families -- about a third of the nation’s arable land -- setting in train controversies over permanenttitles resolved only in December l997 with conferment of rights to beneficiaries.5 Vietnam’s landreforms were the core of controversy in the civil war6; reconstruction continues to rearrange landed

4 M. Riad El-Ghonemy (l990) makes the general case that rising land concentrations andrural poverty, growing landlessness, and the rise of sub-subsistence farms -- agrarian degeneration ingeneral -- still necessitate land reform. Moreover, he argues that land-reformed countries do betteron a range of development indicators than unreformed countries (Chapters 6-7). James Putzel’swork on the Philippines (l992: Chapters 1, ll) makes an archetypal case for one society.

5 For an excellent analysis of process, and the collapse of the rural economy following landreform, see Enriquez l991.The Economist of December 28, l997 (31-32) reports that titles will beconferred on urban dwellers who received 100 square meters or less, rural people who received 35hectares or less. Larger properties are subject to review before title is granted.

6 See Bethell’s quirky “Land Reform Lost Vietnam” (l995) for a view of antagonists in theUnited States policy world.

5

rights in the direction of longer-term security of holdings for individuals and groups (Haque andMontesi l996).

State socialism’s global collapse has introduced a “third wave” of land reforms. Here theissue is restructuring land rights long held by non-democratic states (Swinnen et al l997). DonaldWilliams (l996) argues that land reforms in Africa have likewise often increased state power andpatronage in ways that are inconsistent with traditional reform objectives. Powelson and Stock(1990) make the claim globally (and too harshly, with insufficient attention to positive effects ofreforms). Probably the most difficult dilemma in land reform policy generally is that it is a statistproject; without reform of the state, its alleged beneficiaries are seldom the driving force or priority.Writing on South Africa, Henry Bernstein (l998:28) warns against “the seductions of voluntarism,whether of statist (substitutionist) or populist (‘communitarian’) varieties.” Bernstein here capturesthe central dilemma of advocacy of agrarian reform: popular forces are seldom sufficiently formed,or powerful, enough to drive political change and yet substitution of the state may result in eitherdespotism, complicity with local elites or irrelevance for lack of local roots. My brief explication ofthe case of former slaves in the United States below both confirms and modifies Bernstein’s caution:without the substitutionist power of the state, beginnings of agrarian reform may subject dependentpopulations to continued or enhanced oppression. It is wrong to write off the central state, whateverits class composition.7 Agrarian reform opens one more dimension of the urgent reform of the state,and offers one mechanism.

South Africa offers a case of cumulative political pressures for agrarian reform driven bothby traditional agrarianism based on dispossession and reverberations of political pledges duringmobilization. Land control issues overlap significantly with gender inequalities (Meer l997). As inZimbabwe, promises of land reform in past mobilization present current political and economicdilemmas for newly democratic governments. The difficulties are familiar: using market criteria andmechanisms halts the pace and limits the effects of reform, uncertainty for current holders depressesinvestment, communal arrangements and chiefly prerogatives present political contradictions8 and itis not clear where the money to finance compensation will be found.

But not all contemporary politics of agrarian reform are based on residues of past failuresand mobilizational promises. New peasant movements are born; James Petras (l997) writes of “theresurgence of the left” generally in Latin America, particularly in the countryside. New peasantmovements use different idioms, and have more ambiguous ties with established political parties, but

7 Bernstein is very much concerned with “decentralized despotism,” in consonance withMamdani’s (l996) work on “citizen and subject.” The pernicious effect of celebrating the local willbe discussed below.

8 The Economist of June 24, l995 quoted Nelson Mandela -- who had received some landin his own village -- as saying: “You have to be on good terms with your chief, and fortunately thechief in my home is my nephew." Not everyone is so well connected. The ANC has beenunderstandably reluctant to tackle the issue of “traditional” forms of authority and theirconcentrations of political and economic power locally.

6

exhibit continuities of analysis and personnel with previous struggles, even while representing creativepolitical practice under new circumstances. Henry Veltmeyer (l997:139) in his survey of resistanceto neoliberal policy in Latin America concludes that “new peasant movements” constitute the “mostdynamic forces.”

“In Ecuador, Colombia, El Salvador, and other countries in the region, peasants havelikewise constituted themselves as the principle subject of the class struggle. In manycontexts peasants are of indigenous origin, giving their struggle a national and ethniccharacter, but the cause of the struggle can be found in their relationship to the means ofproduction and to the State (Veltmeyer l997:154).”

Armed struggle in Chiapas illustrates Veltmeyer’s point; putting agrarian reform back on thepolicy agenda was a predictable response by the Mexican state (Johnson l995). Less dramatic butpowerfully organized is the Movimento dos Trabalhodores Rurais Sem Terra (movement of rurallandless workers) in Brazil. The MST “has generated a nation-wide political discussion about theissue of land ...[and] is the most dynamic social movement in the country, the best organized, and themost effective, with a record of concrete achievements and considerable support (Veltmeyer l997:154). James Petras (l998) argues that the initial concentration of the MST regionally was explainedby proximity to urban areas with sympathetic political networks and the availability of large tracts ofuncultivated land to serve as targets for mobilization. The movement was thus able to transform itselffrom a sectoral agrarian reform movement of the classic sort to a national movement with broader,national, political objectives (“Project Brazil”).9 Decentralization of political authority -- very much ofthe development agenda of the aid community -- thus offers, as illustrated in this case, more potentialfor agrarian reform movements and their success. Likewise important for the dynamism of the MST-- and for understanding the new coalitional possibilities for agrarian reform -- is the “eruption of anew generation of young women militants (Petras l998:132).”

Both Veltmeyer and Petras analyze the impact of neoliberal policy as a backgroundcondition for new political movements in Latin America. Alison Brysk is even more explicit. Sheillustrates the new opportunities of identity politics in the face of deprivations of structural adjustmentin Ecuador, with mixed results in terms of success, in her tellingly titled “Indian Market(forthcoming).” As mandated cuts in the social wage threaten progress and security in rural areas,specifically agrarian issues are joined to and expanded by concern with national developmentstrategy writ large, built on a mobilizational base of “Indian” ethnicity.

Since the growth discourse has silenced the redistributive discourse in many parts of theworld, including the development assistance institutions, it is useful to consider the arguments forletting the market do more of the heavy lifting in alleviating poverty. Neo-liberal policies produce(unevenly) new grounds for mobilization at the same time that growth seems to offer a plausiblesubstitute for direct poverty-alleviation policy.

9 See also Petras l997, pp 23-25.

7

Why Redistribution? Social Democracy, Growth and Poverty

Traditional agrarian reform has then not exited the political agenda; this section argues that itshould not disappear from the policy agenda. The surest way to poverty elimination in rural societiesis redistribution, though there are other roads to government action to alleviate poverty. Socialdemocracy provides both the political space and the political energy to effect changes in propertysystems. There is a serious chicken-and-egg problem embedded in this assertion: asset redistributionalso enables social democracy. Social democracy is, however, not a direct policy choice; there is alot of historical contingency at work (e.g. Herring l987).

It is always best to begin where one’s knowledge is surest; in my case that is the Indiansubcontinent. The recent pre-eminence of neo-liberal views of development casts doubt on previousgenres of poverty literature. If a rising tide raises all ships, the legitimacy of politically difficult, fiscallyburdensome and administratively complex schemes for the poor is called into question. Thischallenge for students of the South Asian subcontinent — which contains a large share of theworld’s absolute poor — was recently posed by the World Bank study: India: Achievements andChallenges in Reducing Poverty (l997). That study concludes that economic growth has been themajor factor reducing poverty, despite a complicated array of schemes to “uplift weaker sectors.”Secondly, liberalization is held to be the major reason for growth. Growth will provide the neededresources for public safety nets and investment in human capital which round out the desirablepoverty-reduction scenario. The clear prescription is growth encouragement as the major anti-poverty mechanism; the rest (safety nets, human capital) is desirable if affordable.

Though India is often considered a failed development state, there is enormous regionalvariation, and variation is important in searches for effective poverty policy. Inter-state comparisonswithin India indicate that Kerala has been especially successful in reducing poverty. Though thepercentage of poor in India's population has declined by various measures since Independence, inabsolute numbers, the long trajectory has been an increase in poverty, with strong regional variation.Consistent with contemporary celebration of the "Kerala model"10, the Bank notes (p v): "The rangein poverty reduction among states is so wide that Kerala's progress in lowering the headcount indexof poverty (2.4 percent per year, on average, between l957-58 and l993-94) is more than 120times that of Bihar and more than four times that of Rajasthan." One implication is that we shouldunderstand Kerala better: what, for example, separates it from Bihar and Rajasthan? One curiositygiven the Bank’s overall emphasis on growth is that Kerala does so well given that its growth ratehas been quite anemic (Kannan and Pushpangadan l988; Tharamangalam l998). Its agrarianorganizations have historically been well developed, in contrast to most of the sub-continent and

10 The literature is large; for a representative range of positive and critical commentary, see,

for example, Dreze and Sen, l989, pp 221ff et passim; Parayil l996; Heller l994 Chapter 1;Mencher l980; Herring l980; Tharamangalam l998; Jeffrey l993. The "model" has become soubiquitous that Vice President Al Gore of the United States called Kerala a "stunning success story."On disaggregating states in terms of their growth performance, see Aseema Sinha’s dissertation,Divided Leviathan, in progress.

8

much of the poor world. Kerala produced what was arguably the first elected communistgovernment in the world in l957, and remains -- contrary to the global pattern -- an electoralstronghold of communism in a nation of decidedly centrist political tendencies. Its agrarian reformshave been radical, abolishing an especially oppressive rentier landlordism integrated with agresticserfdom, in a period of Indian history dominated by inaction on the agrarian question. Agrarian laborlegislation establishes entitlements anomalous for the poor world and radical by the standards of richnations. The clear implication is that social democracy works well in poverty alleviation. Theconditions include mobilization of the weakest sectors of society, a political party with roots in thosemovements and sufficiently adaptive strategy to ride the whirlwinds of political conflict successfullyand the integrity to stay the course. Atul Kohli (l987) finds similar conditions in his comparativestudy of Indian states.

Though the Bank is ambivalent about agrarian reform in India, and gives it only passingreference, about 80% of India's poverty is rural poverty (World Bank l997: xiii). By class,agricultural workers are especially likely to be poor; landlessness remains the major cause ofpoverty. Kerala's comparatively good performance in poverty reduction certainly could not havehappened without land reform and the correlates of land reform (rural worker organization, rightsand policy protections) -- which collectively make up agrarian reform.

The absolute numbers of poor continue to increase in India as a whole: by World Bankestimates, from l64 million in l951 to 312 million (about 35% of the population) in l993-94.Indonesia is taken as a contrasting model: an annual decline of 10% between l970 and l993, from58% to 8% of the population. The Executive Summary of the Bank report begins with a commoncomparison: India has fared badly in growth and poverty reduction in comparison with South EastAsia (p xiii). Yet the Asian collapse beginning in July l997 -- that struck particularly hard inIndonesia, but ramified throughout the region -- clearly had a more dramatic impact on nationsfollowing the neoliberal path than on India, where there has been significant backsliding and haltingcompliance on reform (Herring in press). Poverty is created very quickly in general economiccollapse. What we still do not know is the tectonics of macro-economic change: the extent to whichunfettered liberalization of financial markets in particular is responsible for both rapid growth andvulnerability to dramatic collapse -- much as rapidly moving plates in the earth's crust create greaterpotential for catastrophic earthquakes. Whereas transnational actors are largely bailed out by globaldamage control through the Fund and bilateral transfers, the collapse of household economies is noone's responsibility. Much information is lost in the aggregate view. What is not clear is how long thenewly poor in Indonesia will remain so, nor how far back along the historical line of povertyreduction the current situation has moved because of economic collapse.

Such comparative arguments are often made, but the causality remains murky. In cross-national macro comparisons that dominate the development literature, it is difficult to know when thepseudo-precision of our measures outruns their validity and reliability for finely tuned conclusionsabout poverty. In the United States, where data collection is an obsession, the Census stillundercounts minorities in cities but admits to being incapable of solving the problem; much of ourdata is quite bad, particularly on matters of low commercial importance -- the number of homeless,for example. Michael Lipton notes (l997: 1004) that "disparities between successive PPP

9

[purchasing-power parity] measures, and between all such measures and national-accounts data, aresometimes huge and unexplained."11Errors of the magnitude Lipton discusses -- exceeding threetimes the poverty rate by adopting alternative PPP deflators -- seriously undermine the confidencewe can place in the macro-comparative literature on relationships between development strategywrit large and poverty. The ethical implication is that policy which produces direct and knowableresults in poverty reduction -- agrarian reform, for example -- should have precedence overmethods whose effects are indirect, uncertain, difficult to assess12 (Herring l983:Ch 9,10).

The "new consensus" on growth and poverty is not without dissent.13 To the extent theconsensus concentrates on labor-intensive growth from relatively equal asset distributions, it is notinconsistent with agrarian reform but works better with it. To the extent it assumes safety-nets andpro-poor programs from the surplus of aggressive capitalism, it is naive political economy (cf. Drezeand Sen l989).

Though there are many technical and conceptual problems with the new consensus, the mostimportant for this section is inattention to political economy. Growth which alleviates poverty worksbetter in relatively egalitarian settings, which are themselves more amenable to growth (Lipton l997).Growth alters the distribution of political power; advocates for the poor are probably ill-advised tolean on the reed of altruism of the new rich. Secondly, whatever the effects of growth, there will be arole for public intervention to alleviate particular forms of poverty and to address concentrations ofpeople passed over or harmed14 by growth processes; public intervention by states catering to

11For example, Lipton notes:"An extreme case is China: the move from Penn 5.1 to Penn5.6 conversions drastically cut the estimate of China's purchasing-power, so that the estimate ofpoverty incidence ... in the early l990s tripled overnight, from about 9% of the population to 29%.China's estimated poverty reduction record, too, is made to look worse: economic growth sincel980 on PPP 5.6 is about half that recorded in the national accounts."

12 See Herring l983: Ch 9,10 for the logic. Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess (l998)present the evidence that land reforms explain some differences in poverty reduction across states inIndia, but their data and method are not convincing, though they get what seems to be the obviousright answer.

13See Michael Lipton's "Editorial: Poverty -- Are There Holes in the Consensus?" WorldDevelopment 25:7 pp 1003-1007. On India specifically, and the Bank's l997 report, Gaiha andKulkarni, l998.

14Though the World Bank study of India (l997) concludes that their results "clearly refuteany presumption of 'immiserizing growth,'" Gaiha and Kulkarni's panel data from Maharashtra (l998:Table 1) indicate significant fractions of village population who either were poor and became pooreror were non-poor and became poor despite aggregate growth. It seems unlikely that the Bankposition has sufficiently disaggregated and reliable data to make the sweeping claim above. Ofcourse the Bank’s position cannot be literally true; there are always victims of economic change,whatever the net vector sum: cf John Sidel on violence against the poor who stood in the way ofexpansion by agents of capitalism in growth sectors of the Philippines (l998).

10

unreconstructed elite dominance are less likely to play those roles well compared to states reactingto a field of power in which there is more voice among the weakest sectors. The notion that growthcreates the financial conditions for "safety nets" presupposes a political morphology sympathetic tothose needing nets; rapid growth may produce a political economy with other priorities and vestedinterests opposed to redistribution via transfers. Given these uncertainties, direct and knowableresults should have precedence over speculation and hope; agrarian reform has a strong trackrecord in terms of the trajectories of states which have grown rapidly and with some equality (SouthKorea, Japan, Taiwan, for example).

Within the South Asian region, exceptional progress on providing basic human needs hashistorically been made both in Kerala and in the nation of Sri Lanka. Both are strikingly above thelevel of physical quality of life that would be predicted on the basis of per capita income. Kerala issufficiently anomalous for its very high levels of life expectancy and literacy and very low infantmortality rates despite aggregate poverty that it is widely considered a development model. SriLanka occupied a similar position before civil war in the l980s produced social catastrophe(Herring, forthcoming).

A major difference between Kerala and Sri Lanka is that agrarian mobilization wasextensive in Kerala but lagged in Sri Lanka (see Moore l985; Herring l988, l994). A highlymobilized democracy in Sri Lanka extended the welfare state on residues of colonial rule, driven bytightly competitive left-populist and conservative political blocs; even liberalization and adjustmentfrom l977 onwards protected public entitlements to a significant degree. But in both cases the drivingengine was a highly politicized public which demanded protection of the weakest sectors within acompetitive democracy that made votes count. In both cases the historical process of mobilizationwas long. Colonial rule aided both early democracy and welfarism in Sri Lanka, premised on a richplantation export economy. In Kerala, it was mobilization against an especially oppressive localmanifestation of the colonial state that created both institutions of grass-roots democracy and thewelfare state. In both cases, poverty as measured by income alone is inadequate without taking intoaccount the social wage which separates destitution from a minimal basic needs provision.

Given the historical antecedents of basic human needs development in these cases, it is clearthat social democracy is not a policy choice in the ordinary sense. Contemporary Kerala hasprecisely the type of political institutions that are often desiderata but seemingly impossible choicesfor other societies. The electorate is informed, extraordinarily participatory, alert and assertive;political parties are representative and competitive; political behavior matters. As a consequence,political institutions work (Heller, In Press). Yet these parameters of the political system are theproduct of long evolution, of struggle, and of reforms -- social and economic. They were born notentirely of policy choice but through popular reaction to repression and exclusion: landlordism,casteism, degradation of women, slavery and untouchability. One has only to look to Haiti orSomalia to note how unrealistic it is either to assume that outsiders can engineer effective politicalinstitutions or that democracy created internally without significant shifts in political power. Thepolicy choice field is therefore limited.

Yet policy choices do matter. One of the means through which these institutions were

11

developed in Kerala was popular responses to state initiatives and state failures on the ground inagrarian reform (Herring l987). A reach exceeding the state's grasp encouraged mobilization ofnewly benefitted groups seeking to obtain their de jure rights; creating coalitions of the poornecessitated reaching across traditional social barriers and extending the scope of reform. In Kerala,this process was began by a colonial state traumatized by insurgency -- the Mappila rebellionleading to the Malabar Tenancy Act of l929 -- and continued through abolition of tenancy altogetherin the l970s (Herring l983; l988). More generally, one can conceptualize a range of anti-poverty andother policies from the least enabling to those which strengthen the political capacity for furtherreform (Echeverri-Gent l993). Clientelism does create constituencies, as the Sri Lankan caseillustrates concretely. But welfarism without a class base is inherently fragile. Some policies empowerclasses more than others. It is in this set of desiderata that the optimal policy mix is to be located. Itis difficult to imagine an optimal set that did not include agrarian reform.

Path Dependency, Poverty and Democracy: A Comparative Illustration

That there is a reciprocal relationship between agrarian reform and democratic developmentseems almost self-evident. Barrington Moore, Jr. (l966), in his Social Origins of Dictatorship andDemocracy — a book significantly subtitled “Lord and Peasant in the Making of the ModernWorld” — made sweeping claims about the political importance of breaking landed aristocracies fordemocratic development — in opposition to dictatorships. In Capitalist Development andDemocracy by Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens (1992),Moore’s early findings are confirmed across a broad range of cases (though with little attention toAsia). Prosterman and Riedinger (l987) make a sustained argument on the relation between landreform, citizenship and democratic development. This literature depends on an essential tenet ofpolitical economy: concentrations of economic power enable, sometimes necessitate (Page l975),concentrations of political power. Landlessness as a reciprocal dynamic enables dependency,therefore subjugation and unfreedom. John Stuart Mill suggested that tenants for this reason shouldnot have the vote, as they were unlikely to be free political agents.

These dynamics are illustrated by the divergent paths of agrarian underclasses in the UnitedStates -- a successful pluralist democracy -- and Kerala State in Southern India, a successful socialdemocracy. Comparing Kerala to less effective states within India -- Bihar15, for example -- is oneway to highlight the potential effects of agrarian reform on governance and poverty, but it seemsmore telling to compare the historic failures in the United States. Promised land reforms in the UnitedStates after the War of Secession (l860-65) did not become a part of the process known as"Reconstruction." The comparison to contemporary India, or other parts of the poor world may

15 On failure, Jannuzi l974. As I was considering this issue, Manoj Srivastava, an IAS officer

from Bihar (then at Cornell) recounted a cause of failure of the Total Literacy Campaign in Bhojpurdistrict of Bihar. The most powerful landlord of one block simply rejected the idea and decreed thatnothing happened in the block, no one entered the block, without his approval. This outcome isinconceivable in Kerala.

12

seem strained, but is not16; our propensity to think in static categories (e.g. "third world") missessome interesting longitudinal comparisons. Emergence of the United States from its underdevelopedagrarian origins is historically recent. The fallout from failures in Reconstruction suggests reasons forthe positive effects in Kerala.

The period after the Civil War in the United States (1865-1877) is called "Reconstruction,"reflecting (in retrospect) more the pious hope of reformers than capacity. The greatest challenge wasto reconstruct social structure. Though some political leaders wanted to punish the southern land-holding aristocracy for instigating war, others saw land reform as the only realistic means of creatingcitizens from slaves. The rumored/promised land reform came under the slogan "forty acres and amule." That amount of agricultural capital would in many parts of the South have affordedsubsistence. But no bill survived politics in the Congress. To the contrary, experiments in landredistribution in the South under martial law were dismantled after military occupation by federaltroops ended. Land reform under martial law -- which worked fairly well in Japan after World WarII -- was abandoned as an option. Not only did redistribution not become law, but even preferentialdistribution of public lands in favor of freedmen (as opposed to railroad companies) failed as well(Foner l989:451). With the departure of federal troops, Southern elites re-established rule withterror, fraud, intimidation and economic power. In the aftermath of failed reconstruction, backslidingin land policy -- then entirely in the hands of the state governments -- reduced the limited gains ofreform and produced for blacks in particular an agrarian system rivaling that of the more extremecases of landlord rule in the South Asian subcontinent.17

Because the (white) landed elite retained economic power, and eventually returned to rule,efforts to resurrect a subject class had no base. The failure of "reconstruction" left in place anagrarian political economy of bimodal subjugation and dominance, largely coterminous with race, butaffecting the white agrarian poor as well. W.E.B. Du Bois remarked that "the slave went free; stooda brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery" (in Foner l989:602). Whenradical agrarian populism of the l890s subsequently swept through the South, blacks were notpolitically available for a biracial coalition that might have altered the national distribution of power

16 For a reasoned comparison of the agrarian structure of rural India to that of the AmericanSouth, see John Echeverri-Gent l993; on agrarian structure in the South more generally, seeGoodwyn l976. Echeverri-Gent notes that Southern United States, particularly in the l930s,exhibited social-structural similarities with rural India: a caste-like system political-economicoppression and marginalization, high rates of dependency of laborers, share-tenants and marginalfarmers, severe primary commodity price cycles, small-scale labor intensive agriculture, extortionatesharecropping, credit exploitation and extensive poverty. Likewise, politics was characterized by"elite domination, intraparty factionalism, agrarian populism" (p 76).

17 For example, North Carolina's Landlord and Tenant Act of l877 gave the landlords somuch unilateral power that one former slave complained that the landlord had been made "the court,sheriff and jury." Likewise, policy toward the commons restricted access by the landless, a policyfirst invoked in areas of greatest black concentration of population (Foner l989:594-595). SeeEcheverri-Gent (l993) on the general analogues between India and the South.

13

(on which, Goodwyn 1976). There are macro-implications for the politics of dealing with poverty.Eric Foner (l989:604) argues that the failure of reconstruction led directly to one-party (and white)dominance in the "Solid South" which "helped define the contours of American politics and weakenthe prospects not simply of change in racial matters but of progressive legislation in many otherrealms."

The failure in political terms meant that the Thermidor period following Reconstruction sawsteady erosion of black rights: restrictions on the rights of former slaves to vote, be admitted to equalpublic schools or fully participate in dominant institutions of public or civil society.18 Prosterman andRiedinger's comparative study of land reform concludes more generally that reforms "provide avillage-level underpinning that reinforces the national-level freedoms rather than contradicts them(l987:232)." Of special importance for the long trajectory of poverty, human capital developmentwas restricted; social safety nets and educational facilities remained comparatively underdevelopedin the South generally, and especially for blacks, into the contemporary period. Land policy fromWashington failed as a lever in reconstructing the South but left behind antipathy to intervention bythe federal government so severe that military force was required in the l950s to enforce courtorders to enroll blacks in public schools.

To the extent that racism (or caste19) explains some share of poverty's persistence, theimplications of Reconstruction's failure are profound. Eric Foner (l989:604) writes that"Reconstruction's demise and the emergence of blacks as a disenfranchised class of dependentlaborers greatly facilitated racism's further spread, until by the early twentieth century it had becomemore deeply embedded in the nations's culture and politics than at any time since the beginning of theantislavery crusade and perhaps in our entire history."

Land reform by itself would not have solved the economic, much less social and politicalproblems of former slaves, but there is evidence that it would have made a difference. Foner(l989:l09) notes that "well into the twentieth century, black who did acquire land were more likely toregister, vote, and run for office than other members of the rural community." But "as things turnedout, blacks lacked even the partial shield against economic exploitation afforded by ownership ofland (p l10)." Subsequent evidence from the differential trajectory of different classes of blackfarmers likewise indicates that the counter-factual argument is strong. Lester Salaman’s (l979:129)

18 For a sustained argument on the relation between land reform, citizenship and democraticdevelopment, see Prosterman and Riedinger (l987). On the political consequences of this period inthe United States, see Richard Bensel's Yankee Leviathan; on the failure of reconstruction, EricFoner's magisterial Reconstruction (l989).For an argument linking land ownership to independentsocial activism among Southern blacks in the l960s, Salamon l979.

19 Gaiha and Kulkarni found in their empirical work (l998) in India, that caste was (notsurprisingly) important: "a significant effect on movement out of poverty" (p 17). They attribute thisresult to discrimination in specific markets or weak motivation (internalized identification); it mayalso, I would think, reflect the variable distribution of connections; it is easier to get a job, a loan, anadvantage if one has caste fellows in positions to help.

14

work on the effects of “New Deal” experiments in land distribution indicates the consequences ofmissing this historical moment in the South. Landless black tenants who benefitted from very limitedand truncated land distribution in the l930s created “a permanent middle class that ultimatelyemerged in the l960s as the backbone of the civil-rights movement in the rural South.”

The failure to break local landed power in the South had the further pernicious consequenceof creating suspicion in voting publics policy from Washington and a blind allegiance to local rule.The irony of contemporary development thinking is that a premature celebration of the local [theproduct of what Pranab Bardhan (l995) calls the “anarcho-communalists” -- displacing responsibilityfrom bad states to good communities -- reinvents precisely the scale structure that kept racialdominance alive in the Southern United States (Herring l998). The effects were not merelyeconomic, but linked to systematic oppression. Education was systematically denied blacks andeducational qualifications were used as tests for eligibility to vote. The World Bank's WorldDevelopment Report of l990 rightly stressed the importance of education as one means ofpromoting opportunity for the landless to escape poverty. More generally, Eric Foner notes (p 110)that "fulfillment of blacks’ non-economic aspirations, from family autonomy to the creation of schoolsand churches, all depended ... on success in winning control of their working lives and gaining accessto the economic resources of the South."

Kerala's long historical struggles for agrarian reforms likewise confronted extraordinarysubjugation in the form of agrestic slavery and serfdom, persisting into the l960s in local perceptions.Agrarian reform had a significant impact on citizenship -- the transformation of subjects to citizens.This transformation puts pressure on political systems for redistributive public policy -- not all ofwhich is unambiguous in terms of long-term poverty-reduction.20 Kerala is a social democracy on asub-national scale, with all the warts and messy politics of any democracy, but without the control ofpolicy that nation-states have. That democracy owes its form in large part to decades of pursuit andfinal implementation of fairly radical agrarian reforms.

The core of the Kerala’s agrarian reforms -- legislated in l959, then defeated bymachinations in Delhi, and finally implemented in the l970's -- was the abolition of landlordism as asystem of social control and exploitation (Herring, forthcoming). The long process in many waysbegan with ratcheted episodes of reaction to agrarian reforms beginning with the Malabar TenancyAct of l929. It is this long process -- not simply the effective date of land to the tiller in l970 -- towhich the argument of this paper refers.

The experiences of Kerala State have been celebrated as a purposive, direct, policy-drivenpoverty-reduction success story, in contrast to much of the subcontinent. The outcome of the longprocess of mobilization that produced both land reform and labor reform in the 1970s is by

20 Subsidies are the most obvious problem. The World Bank's report on poverty in India

(l997:xvi) notes the crowding out of social welfare spending by subsidies. Reforms after l991 slowedthe rate of growth in subsidies, but the political structure of federalism allowed constituent states tosubstitute their own subsidies.

15

objective measures of human welfare -- mortality, longevity, literacy, male-female population ratio --anomalous for the level of per capita income (below the mean for India) and for the rate of growth inagricultural production (below the mean for India).21 Poverty reduction has been achieved via landreforms, labor reforms and transfer payments. All three presupposed an effective political andadministrative system and popular pressure on the state.

For reasons now quite familiar22, redistribution of land rights (not necessarily patches ofsoil) should have positive effects on growth and justice. Food security via public means -- e.g. rationshops, WICs, etc. -- complements agrarian reform as anti-poverty policy in Kerala. A relativelyextensive welfare profile by sub-continental standards complements food security more narrowlyconceived. Such programs presuppose a political system with both capacity and will. Anti-povertyvalues are embedded in real institutions and guarded and refreshed by participation. Otherwisepublic programs turn into boondoggles for the middle class, rent subsidies for the bureaucracy andpatronage for politicians (cf Bardhan l995). We have long understood how the redistributivepolicies required extraordinary public support. The operation of ration shops and feeding programsin Kerala reinforces the conclusion that popular participation and consciousness are necessaryconditions for a effective pro-poor distributive public policy.

What the Kerala experience underscores, and does not really resolve, is the problem of themost awkward class -- the agricultural laborers.23 Income gains from more rapid growth areuncertain, lagged and unevenly distributed among households and over time. Problems of thelaborers in Kerala were addressed through distribution of homestead plots for many, which areintensively used and quite important both nutritionally and commercially, through limited distributionof surplus lands from the land reform, and from limited distribution of public lands (a pervasivephenomenon -- the erosion of the public commons via populist patronage). Where there is a greatdeal of low-productivity, or degraded, land in either public or private hands, this strategy is a goodone; but, where the sheer numbers of landless are overwhelming, it may not prove feasible.

If it is politically impossible to redistribute land, it is still possible to formalize the obligationsthat traditionally legitimated landownership (the obligation to take care of the landless) and

21 This claim is not meant to ignore the points about history raised in the debate between

Amartya Sen and Surjit Bhalla (Srinivasan and Bardhan l988); certain improvements in socialwelfare predate land reform. It is more useful to see land reform as the culmination of a process thatspawned caste reform, educational reform, altered priorities in social welfare spending and laborreform.

22 See, e.g. Michael Lipton, "Land Reform as Commenced Business: The Evidence AgainstStopping," World Development vol 21 no 4 l993 pp 641-658. My own arguments are developed inChapters 9 and 10 of Land to the Tiller (Yale/Oxford l983.)

23 On Kerala, e.g. Mencher l980, Herring l980; l989. McReynolds l998 findsunambiguously that beneficiaries of land reform in El Salvador hired in more labor, improving ruraljob prospects in the aggregate, as the economic theory of land reform expects.

16

redistribute the product of the land via higher wages and pensions. In Kerala, old-age pensions fromfarmer surplus were mandated by the Agricultural Workers Act of l974. When this proved politicallyand administratively impossible, the state took up the fiscal burden.24 Security of employment("permanency") was the second method, and tough minimum wage legislation the third. Together,these rules of agriculture, and the accompanying conflict over their enforcement, convinced manyfarmers (at least in the short run) that they should exit food production and/or move to less labor-intensive crops than paddy. At least some of the subsequent stagnation in Kerala's agriculture can beattributed to these dynamics (Herring l989).

Models and Specifics:

As in much policy talk, models and analogies become important parts of the persuasiveapparatus in discussions of agrarian reform. For years, reforms in Taiwan, Japan and South Koreaheld the high ground and contributed to the impossibility theorem discussed in the next section. Thatis, all three reforms took place under extraordinary circumstances difficult to replicate. Theirrelevance to the poor world was thus suspect. To some extent every case is sui generis. Becausethere is now much talk of the “Kerala model,” it is useful to examine where the land reformspecifically fell short. In terms of democracy, reforms were both a response to and a deepening ofdemocratic process and institutions. But there were economic costs as well, and some lessonslearned in that process might provide food for thought in those cases where political coalitions forreform are feasible. The variability of both agronomic, legal and political conditions surrounding landcontrol render any simple transfer of either lessons or policies unwise. Nevertheless, there arelessons of some general applicability.

The Kerala reforms can be criticized on a number of grounds. First, absentee rentiers withtenants were dispossessed (on about 42% of the non-plantation arable), but de facto functionlessowners who hire and supervise labor indifferently (holding land for security or speculative value)were not. Many of these owners have other jobs or income sources (Herring l989). If land is to berationed, their claim is weak. Taxation policy should be able to move land into more intensive use; afurther formal redistribution may not be so necessary as adjustments in tax rules. Secondly, the landceiling was both too high and too restrictive (excluding plantation crops, for example) to yield muchland for distribution (though the threat of a ceiling induced some market redistribution). Thirdly, toomuch of the redistributed land was of poor quality and recipients had too little credit to improve it.Special efforts are necessary to provide economies of scale in provision of inputs and marketing ofoutputs for tiny holders. Rather than worrying about whether this is a public or private responsibility,much more effort should be invested in ensuring that existing public sector institutions work as theyshould; there are strong political compulsions for working through the state. Also, as Bina Agarwal(l992) stresses more generally, land reforms in Kerala were not sensitive to the effects of patriarchyon land control, which reforms must address.

24 Herring, l989; Gulati, l990. Old age pensions also improved intra-household income

distribution for the most vulnerable sections of the most vulnerable class, as families recognized thatnon-working members were an economic asset, even if a small one.

17

Productivity consequences of actual land reforms inevitably diverge from theory; in Kerala,there is cause for concern. The process through which redistributive reforms in particular areachieved accounts for much of their impact on growth. Radical land reforms in a democracy requirean extraordinary political mobilization. In Kerala, that mobilization took decades and assumed theform of a class coalition of tenants and landless laborers. Tenants got the land when absenteerentiers were dispossessed; the payoff to the more numerous landless laborers was limiteddistribution of tiny household plots (about 0.1 acres) and labor reforms granting security ofemployment, ratcheted wages, a pension fund and other benefits anomalous for the landless poor.Such mobilization may well produce conflicts over distribution of the spoils of reform. In Kerala,these tensions produced a stale-mated class conflict in the late l970s and early l980s which reducedboth production and on-farm investment.25 Newly landed farmers were reluctant to pay double thewage rate of surrounding states and resented having a permanent labor force working atadministered wages.

Despite long-standing economic theory validating reform (Herring l983: Ch 9), land reformmays have serious disruptive effects on production for some time, depending on the social processof reform and how it is handled politically. There are other grounds for concern. The Kerala reformsabolished landlordism as a social system. Economists in particular worry that criminalizingsharecropping has negative effects in terms of insurance and risk-sharing. Again, a staging argumentabout historical change is necessary: abolition of landlordism breaks social structures that perpetuatepoverty and disenable the state. States respond to fields of power; an unreconstructed agrariansystem of dominance reduces the degrees of freedom for the state in pursuing less controversial pro-poor policies such as transfer payments, education, labor reform. Re-introduction of leasearrangements among equals after a transition period should redress any negative consequences of arestricted land market. But without the abolition of landlordism, agrarian systems in whichoppression is a major part of social dynamics perpetuate poverty. Land reform policy mustdistinguish between socially oppressive and exploitative landlordism and frictional tenancyarrangements among near-equals, the latter being conducive to efficient agriculture.

Kerala's remarkable record in terms of social indicators has largely been viewed as a humanwelfare success story, as publicized by Amartya Sen and others, and a disaster in terms ofagricultural production and productivity (e.g. Tharamangalam l998; Kannan and Pushpangadanl988). If the World Bank's (l997) view of poverty in India is correct, sacrificing growth reduces therate of poverty decline and depletes the resources for safety nets. I know of no convincing way toparse the trade-offs if they exist. It is possible to stress the effects of a stale-mated class conflict inagriculture (Herring l989) as a source of disinvestment or to see institution building as the source of

25 See Ronald Herring, "Contesting the 'Great Transformation:' The 'Factory Acts' in South

India," Program in Agrarian Studies Paper Series, Yale University February l993 and Herring(forthcoming). On the longer history of reform and provisions of the Act, Herring l983 Chapters 6,7.Patrick Heller (l993, and In Press) argues that new social energies generated by this process haveworked class compromises which augur well for future growth.

18

new forms of investment (Heller l994). The World Bank's l997 report on India argues that there isno trade-off; retargeting programs can simultaneously create growth and human capital/safety netdevelopment. In ethical terms, the Kerala model is quite defensible; assuming growth will trickledown, and elimination of popular-sector entitlements will accelerate growth, together put the burdenof risk on the poor, and this generation over the next. It is hard to mount an ethical defense of sorisky a strategy.

The Impossibility Theorem

The most common response to calls for agrarian reform is that, however desirable in theory, it is politically impossible. The first response is that no policy offers a full menu of desirableoutcomes. Indeed, different sources of poverty, each with competing normative justifications, requiredifferent and flexible state responses as fickle politics redefine the line between the deserving andundeserving poor: the idle are contrasted with the unfortunate, unwed mothers with widows andorphans, the physically handicapped with the mentally disturbed. Some poverty is episodic -- whatAgarwal (l992: l87) calls “troughs and calamities.” Some poverty is perpetual, some frictional. Publicmoral economies differ across time and space on constructing the relative deserts of different classesof poverty and the poor. Neither growth nor agrarian reform offers any panacea.

And yet opposition to agrarian reform, or radical redistribution in general, makes thedebatable assumption that pro-poor policy in general is somehow less politically fraught thanproperty redistribution. Non-redistributive solutions make strong assumptions about either effectiveand autonomous states or, increasingly, “communities (Bardhan l995).” Since virtually no oneadvocates complete laissez-faire treatment of all classes of poverty, most anti-poverty positions --including the battered "Washington consensus" -- imply an effective state. The World Bank's WorldDevelopment Report for l997 makes the case for centering governance issues in development, butoffers not much in the way of feasible mechanisms. The overtly political problem is disagreement onthe extent of market failure and what to do about it. If growth itself is dependent on the capablestate, so much more so is poverty alleviation which is efficient and effective.

Getting to an effective and representative political structure has a lot to do with historicaljunctures and the development of political morphologies over time. Path-dependency thenintroduces one set of analytical problems for understanding either governance or poverty. A secondset is introduced by the Archimedes problem of public policy: what assumptions do we make aboutthe scope and limits of public authority and the malleability of political morphology.26

Think of three classes of strategies for poverty alleviation: transfer payments, public worksand asset redistribution. For poverty resulting from individual infirmities -- debilitating illness, mental

26 For an ethical argument, see Herring l983: Chapter 9; on the enabling effect of public

policy toward political potential for alleviating poverty, Echeverri-Gent l993. In the l960s, the left inthe United States used to answer arguments for compromise with the electoral system with: "if youalways choose the lesser of two evils, you will never have anything but evil to choose from."

19

incompetence, age, physical disabilities -- public works or asset distribution would be inappropriatebut transfer payments certainly work. The only question is their fiscal implications, which drivesstraight to the first consideration: a political economy of the state and the moral economy of masspublics.

It is easy, and common, to say that welfare programs are unsustainable in poor societies.So, too, is a nuclear arms race, but political coalitions are clearly capable of sustaining alternativepriority regimes. Welfare confronts the political problem of justice: the perception in mass publicsthat open entitlements encourage cheating, dampen incentives, reward unacceptable behavior. Thefallback position in the subcontinent since colonial times has been need-tested assistance in the formof public works (Herring and Edwards l983). Yet one of the more effective of these -- theEmployment Guarantee Scheme in Maharashtra State -- was an open-ended entitlement which hadto be rationed after its costs escalated beyond 15% of the state budget. Moreover, as the programbecame more attractive, there was significant replacement of the very poor by the not-so-poor in theranks of beneficiaries (Gaiha et al l998).

What is the scope for supplemental public intervention assuming that the first publicresponsibility is to ensure the World Bank's preferred "broad-based, employment-intensive growth"in rural areas? Rural public works have taken up a lot of the entitlement slack in India atconsiderable cost and indifferent results.

Rural public works are politically easy: they promise something for everyone, so that eliteshave no reason to dismantle or obstruct the program. For this reason, Maharashtra's EmploymentGuarantee Scheme is an archetype: developmental public works provide wages for the poor,means-tested by the difficulty of the work and distance from the village, and capital-assets andinfrastructural improvement for those who own rural Maharashtra, financed by the convenient cash-cow of Bombay in a reversal of "urban-bias" dynamics (Herring and Edwards l983). Thoughsubstantial landowners reap the lion's share of benefits, and there is significant corruption, benefits tothe poor are considerable: not only a guarantee of employment, but such rarities as on-site childcare, as well as maternity leave and allowance.

John Echeverri-Gent's (l993) critique of the Employment Guarantee Scheme is that from apolitical developmental point of view it fails to mobilize and involve the rural poor to the sameextent as the public works programs of West Bengal (under the National Rural EmploymentProgramme), where local governmental institutions rather than line departments formulate andexecute projects under a leftist government.

The Employment Guarantee Scheme in Maharashtra was a model founded in the crisis ofdrought relief and political agitation; it was subsequently extended as national policy in India. Uselessprojects and extensive corruption were bought at a high cost (Herring and Edwards l983). The poorwere to some extent "crowded out" by those with higher incomes and better connections (Gaiha andKulkarni l998:28; Gaiha et al l998). It is crucial to realize that some of this fiscal burden could bealleviated through agrarian reforms and that the political results of reform are often important forsustaining and energizing complementary social policies.

20

Universalistic entitlements generally have the problem of sustainability as costs escalate, asthe backlash against welfare expenditures in the United States in the last two decades illustrates. Thepolitical problem is sustaining a public belief that the deserving are benefitting, the undeserving arenot, and a public norm of capitalist society is not too far undermined: if you don't work, you don'teat (absent inheritance). For a univeralist welfare scheme to work, the moral economy must besolidly supportive (the blind are deserving) or encompass a general interest in the form ofwidespread benefits across classes (public works) or empathetic possibility: it could happen toanyone (disaster relief, unemployment insurance). Agrarian reform decisively fails this politicalfeasibility test unless one can argue, as Nehru did in India, that the agrarian structure is a drag onmodernization of the whole economy, or, as seems more feasible for the future, that peasants arebetter environmental stewards than transnational timber firms.

The interventionist alternatives to asset redistribution seem to fall into two broad categories:market rigging and political rigging. Market rigging (price supports, minimum wage legislation,"handicraft" subsidies, etc.) has its place, and has been so extensive in the currently rich nations thatit is naive or simply ideological to argue that growth cannot be built on a political economy. Yetthere are observable problems with market rigging, from enforcement costs and consequent rent-seeking to distortion of incentives with unintended consequences. Political rigging assumes that thepoor will not fully benefit even from targeted programs, nor get their share of general entitlementsand development projects absent reconfiguration of local power. Political rigging in India takes theform of quotas for the traditionally disadvantaged; India's revision of its rules for local governance(panchayati raj) in l993 (the 72nd amendment to the Constitution) represent one end of thepolitical rigging continuum: mandated special representation for traditionally outcaste groups andtribals and a quota for women.27

As for market rigging, there are good historical examples of positive effects from purposefulintervention, but we also know that in power structures of marked inequality, the ability of the poorto function autonomously is limited. Reconstruction in the southern United States attempted politicalrigging without redistributing economic power and largely failed. In India, panchayats (villagecouncils) still often represent the interests of the locally affluent, who use poor retainers as pawnsthrough the formal institutions (Gaiha and Kulkarni l998: 34, 43). That is, capture of local institutionsis a common outcome of devolution and decentralization, now almost totems of development praxis(Herring l998; Uphoff l998).

Accountability, transparency, and alert activism among the citizenry all presuppose the socialbases for independent action, something a serious agrarian reform facilitates in a way few other

27 Disaggregation of poverty too often fails to disaggregate along gender lines. The

experience of the United States is that feminization of poverty produces among the most intractablepoverty problems: if women work, their children are of necessity looked after in some institutionalsetting, which eats a high percentage of low-income wages, but if they nurture their children, they areseverely restricted in employment opportunities for spatial and other reasons.

21

policies can. Representation of "communities" in quotas ignores the significant vertical elongation ofcommunities economically; Gaiha and Kulkarni (1998:40) seem surprised to note that "a ScheduledCaste [former “untouchable”] Chairman did not transfer land to a single poor person during histenure" under a program in Uttar Pradesh inaugurated by Chief Minister Mayawati, designedexclusively for Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe families. The program was explicitly aimed ataiding weaker groups though the leasing of panchayat land. Rigging on the basis of primordialloyalty, discounting elongation of ascriptive groups by market dynamics and interest differentiation,inevitably faces this prospect.

Unlike universalistic entitlements, land reforms can be targeted to those with the strongestnormative claims -- typically share-croppers or permanent field laborers. Rapid growth may be asolution for the poor with some assets, contacts, mobility, energy and low risk aversion -- whosenumbers should increase with reform, but do nothing for the most intractable poverty absentredistribution.

The more macro issue is Atul Kohli's important point in The State and Poverty in India:cohesive parties of the left are the guardians of policies that protect the poor (notwithstandingMallick's l993 dissent on West Bengal). Such parties form around and sustain themselves onredistributive policies. Agrarian reform can over generations form a flexible goal for mobilization ofthe poor, as has been the case in Kerala.

Because it is the consequences of poverty -- not simply some numerical measure of income-- that should be of concern, the social wage may be more important than the market wage -- andeasier to manipulate. For these reasons, agrarian reform which ratchets up the demand for povertyalleviation at the macro level is important. It is at the macro level that social wage policy isformulated. At this level, performance is more important perhaps than mere existence of legislation.Policies providing a social wage are indifferently implemented in the absence of social energy; thestate needs goading, monitoring, oversight.

Transfer payments, public works and anti-poverty programs in India frequently engendercorruption and miss their targets, or approach them inefficiently (World Bank l997:xix, passim). Alarge part of this problem is lack of accountability of state to citizenry. This suggests that policieswhich directly reduce poverty -- such as land reform -- are superior to policies which requiresignificant continuous intervention and indirect effect or potential for diversion. Alternatives to landreform for alleviating the plight of the rural poor are then neither certain in success nor costless.

In any of the scenarios above, coping with poverty presupposes governance. One way ofthinking about governance is to consider the preconditions for mass citizenship. Kerala state is oftenconsidered a model for its success in human welfare, but as importantly is a political system thatworks. Education and ration shops are two examples often cited. Dreze and Sen, for example, notethat in India generally "... it is quite possible for a village school to be non-functional for as long asten years (due to teacher absenteeism and shirking without any action being taken and any collectiveprotest being organized." In Kerala, however, "... a comparable state of affairs would not bepassively tolerated (in Gaiha and Kulkarni l998: 24)." Ration shops are far more successful in Kerala

22

than in most other states precisely because both politicians and bureaucrats know they faceretribution from an anomalously alert and active citizenry rather than abject dependency of a largefraction of the population. In general, a state which must respond to a landed population of somerough equality in rights is less able to perpetrate or ignore malfeasance and irresponsibility in itsoperations. Citizens with such rights are more likely to demand results.

Alternative Sources of Pro-Poor Policy

There are many political motivations other than concern for the poor or dependence on apolitical base of poor people which may be consistent with poverty reduction. This is fortunate, sinceregimes dedicated to the poor are rare and the poor lack the resources and political space to maketheir agenda policy. Reform may come from other sources. Conservative elites fear mass unrest;modernizing elites consider “feudal” agrarian relations a drag on the economy (Herring l983: Ch 8).Concern with poverty has resurfaced at the World Bank; though there are remnants of theconservative view that growth alone will generate a tide which raises all ships, the “Washingtonconsensus” seems in special disarray after the Asian collapse which began in July of l997.

Domestic motivations for pro-poor political initiatives may include legitimation of governingelites, shifts in public moral economy -- often driven by international forces -- and productdifferentiation by political parties or leaders seeking to establish new political space for themselves.On the latter, consider Indira Gandhi’s l971 campaign of garibi hatao (abolish poverty). Thisinitiative, which despite its largely symbolic nature did have some effects on the ground, was aneffort to differentiate her break-away Congress party from traditional bosses. It redefined thedimensions of political space in ways favorable to the new political formation. The effectiveEmployment Guarantee Scheme in Maharashtra built on residues of colonial distress relief worksand fear of the crime and disorder of desperate landless people, but performed new politicalfunctions. It allowed party bosses of the Congress to utilize state revenues collected from Mumbai(Bombay) city to legitimate rural rule and create assets for the rural elite with public works ondemand. Both poverty reduction and legitimation of rule were accomplished, though inefficiently, bya regime with no definable base among the mobilized poor (Herring and Edwards l983).

In more general comparative terms, Kimberly Niles (l998) has argued for an understandingof poverty alleviation as a “political survival strategy,” based on cases from Southeast Asia. In heranalysis, elected authoritarian regimes (Indonesia and Malaysia) do more in terms of targeted socialspending on the poor than do democracies with “fluid and fragmented” party systems such as thePhilippines. This outcome reflects the short time horizons of fluid and fragmented parties, theirnarrow constituency bases and the absence of much prospect that the party will be identified withprogress on the poverty front over time -- i.e., there is not much reason for investment for the longhaul.

This phenomenon -- the dilution of anti-poverty programs in favor of patronage andparticularism among multiplying parties -- is represented broadly in the South Asian subcontinent,even in post land-reform Kerala, though not in strong form. As the major leftist redistributive projectin Kerala came to an end, politics of particularism strengthened, but the dominant blocs of left and

23

right remained largely dominant. Nevertheless, abolition of landlordism as a social system created acrisis for politics on the left. In the absence of a clear class project with plausible objectives,individual’s objectives of dignity and material progress may be better served through the mobilizationof alternative identities. Aggregate ethnic/communal politics began to fill some of the vacuum left bythe withering of a coherent class political project in Kerala. There were no longer issues of classconflict, imperialism or sub-nationalism which have politically or economically plausible solutionscomparable to the abolition of landlordism and colonial rule. Moreover, the shift in public moraleconomy from class redistribution to general distributive politics undoubtedly contributed to theresurgence of alternative identifications for political action. The number of political parties contestingin Kerala expanded in the decade after land reform; many were self-evidently political organizationsaimed only at the re-assertion of primordial loyalties -- caste and community -- as unifying factors.But the pendulum does not stop its swing. As a consequence of the cul-de-sac of redistribution aspolitical project, the communists’ new project became one of balancing class redistribution and ashadow of revolution with strategies for economic growth: a productivist class compromise. PatrickHeller (In Press) argues strongly that the strength of highly mobilized civil society and the institutionsof class compromise in Kerala augur well for the economic future of the state. The ruling CPI-M,currently in power, has staked a great deal on utilizing the strengths of social democracy to institute abold project for decentralized planning and resource mobilization, building up from local bodies tostate managers rather than the other way around (Tornquist and Tharakan l996).

Whether or not these efforts to add dynamism to a welfare state succeed is of course ofgreat importance in assessing the Kerala model. But it should be stressed that even the possibility forthese bold democratizing developmental initiatives was laid by the redistributive politics of socialdemocracy. Celebrating decentralization and devolution in the absence of redistribution of politicalpower runs the risk of further empowering local elites.

If the public-choice account represented by Niles (l998) is accurate, or more generallyapplicable, the implication is that premature conditionality by international developmental institutionsfor democracy may be counter-productive. Party system matters more than regime type, but partysystems are least amenable to policy influence. Secondly, elections matter more than parties; if thereis choice, accountability of even authoritarian regimes through elections may prove superior for thepoverty agenda in comparison with insistence on multi-party democracy. Fragmented parties of theephemeral type are not necessarily conducive to poverty alleviation and may indeed represent littlemore than organized primordial conflict over scarce resources (Esman and Herring, forthcoming, Ch1). The least conducive regime type in Niles’ analysis is closed authoritarian, particularly of themilitary variety. Even there, conditionalities of transparency, accountability and human rights mayprove more important for the poor than demands for multi-party democracy.

Policy analysis that seeks to be normative inevitably confronts the Archimedes problem:given a long enough lever and a place to stand, a single person could move the mass of the earth.But what levers do we assume, and what place to stand? To assume that any existing politicalsystem is in some sort of equilibrium, from which budging is impossible, is to assume a conservativestance that prescribes doing nothing -- or tinkering at the margins. To assume that political systems,institutions and patterns of behavior are infinitely malleable certainly yields a wide range of policy

24

options, but has little relevance on the ground. Political pessimists concerned with poverty mayconclude that growth is enough because responsive states and coalitions for the poor are rare. Thereis a better frame of reference: instead of seeing public policy as captive to existing structures andpolitical dynamics, and thus constrained severely, analysts need to see that pro-poor policy has astrategic element in which much that is assumed constant in most analyses is subject to policy choiceand thus change.

Universalistic and expanding sum programs are more politically feasible than redistributivepolicies. They are also wasteful and inefficient. Political sustainability in the absence of bottom-upmobilization is suspect. External policy advice has made some impact in moving universalisticentitlements -- which are politically popular -- in the direction of targeted programs (Bardhan l995).Land reforms are especially appropriate for this purpose, as they can be targeted to those with thestrongest normative claims -- typically share-croppers or permanent field laborers in traditionalagrarian reform, the poor generally in expanded notions of reform. The enabling effects of propertyreform augur better for subsequent targeting of expenditure programs for those most in need.

In sum, the search for feasible and sustainable political coalitions for poverty alleviationrequires attention to coalitions in situations which includes condition which are not immediate policychoices. It raises important questions of sequence and coalition formation. The following twosections illustrate unconventional possibilities for creating pro-poor coalitions.

The Distribution of Property Rights in Nature:

The traditional agrarian reform narrative rightly expands beyond land per se to consider afull range of relations and transactions which affect poverty and growth: access to markets, extensionservices, credit, infrastructure and so on. This discourse is, like land reform narrowly conceived,redistributionist; power-driven distortions require correction if conditions of the poor are to beaddressed. It is now a cliche of agricultural policy that land reform without reforms in broadersupport services will result in little improvement in efficiency or justice. Yet the focus is on agricultureis too limiting. As we think of conditions for agrarian reform in the contemporary world, we return toland, not as agricultural capital, but as landscape, as a component of ecological systems. Thisrefocus is necessary because environmental degradation produces and is fed by poverty (Blaikie andBrookfield l987) and because a number of public goods beyond production and justice are at stake.

Nature policy is fundamentally about property. Since Polanyi’s (l957) “greattransformation,” ownership of nature in a macro sense has seemed normatively bizarre to wholepopulations (Cronon l983) and politically contested. Public objections to private ownership ofnature are often deeply ethical, rooted in a variety of religious and cultural traditions. Privatization oflandscapes has historically spawned significant conflict between states pursuing developmentalobjectives and marginal peoples whose livelihoods are premised on access to nature and itsproducts (e.g. Peluso l992; Guha l989).

Property is inherently complex: a “bundle of rights” embedded in public law, continuallyrenegotiated through court cases and legislation, disentangled and rebundled in fluid ways. Access

25

and control only begin to describe the dimensions. Property rights in nature inevitably raise questionsof nested sovereignties, particularly given the simultaneous pressures to globalize intellectual propertysystems through the World Trade Organization, the political pressure to decentralize and devolveauthority below the nation-state level and the Convention on Biodiversity’s vesting of rights innations.

Karl Polanyi concluded presciently in the pre-ecological age of l944 (l957:184): "Theeconomic argument could be easily expanded so as to include the conditions of safety and securityattached to the integrity of the soil and its resources -- such as the vigor and stamina of thepopulation, the abundance of food supplies, the amount and character of defense materials, even theclimate of the country which might suffer from the denudation of forests, from erosions and dustbowls, all of which, ultimately, depend upon the factor land, yet none of which respond to thesupply-and-demand mechanism of the market. Given a system entirely dependent upon marketfunctions for the safeguarding of its existential needs, confidence will naturally turn to such forcesoutside the market system which are capable of ensuring common interests jeopardized by thesystem."

“Such forces outside the market system” typically means the state. Just as theembeddedness of local commons logically necessitated a larger scale of authority in the “tragedy ofthe commons” model (Herring l991), only cooperation at the international level would address thepotentially global tragedy of the commons. A species-level learning process has dramaticallyexpanded not only the scale over which control of environmental processes must be exercized, butthe breadth of implications for economic life. The institutional problem is not only that authority on ascale equal to the scale of ecological processes is difficult to manage -- there is no global state -- butalso that governance within such structures as exist -- essentially international soft law regimes -- isundermined by its unfairness. This point is clear with regard to international environmental protection,where the North-South divisions etch the justice arguments sharply, but applies equally to intra-national disparities between centers and peripheries. Emergence of a global nature regime with state-like properties is a genuinely new manifestation of Polanyi's "double movement." It co-exists uneasilywith a global neo-liberal economic regime. There is a contradictory dialectic in the global demandthat the international system become more a market, absent state meddling, and the simultaneousglobal demand that market failures and externalities (of which ecological integrity is perhaps the mostegregious) be considered in global terms (Herring and Bharucha l999).

Part of the justice discourse in the South constructs environmental protection as a “luxury”which poor nations and people cannot afford; in a hierarchy of needs, human welfare comes first.This construction is counterproductive. More often than not, environmental protection is crucial tothe poor, who are more primary-product and natural-resource dependent than the rich. Fishermen,loggers, peasants, hunters and gatherers -- all are less able to escape environmental degradationthan are the well off; moreover, all are better able to take advantage of labor-intensive nature-basedopportunities than are the rich. The stake of the poor in environmental protection is fundamental.Kishore Saint (l987:57) notes:

“The wildlife-loving environmentalists have found that there are people in and around the

26

sanctuaries and wildlife habitats they wish to protect. The ‘people-wallahs’ or ‘povertyalleviators’ have discovered that environment is nothing other than the primary, productiveresource base of the poor and that poverty is aggravated by the degradation of thisresource. It is also being realized that this deterioration is often the consequence ofdevelopment activities such as mining, industrialization and dam construction.”

Here the question of property rights goes to the heart of the developmental state, whichclaims by eminent domain extraordinarily broad proprietary scope. Likewise, much degradationfollows from a concentration of property rights in destructive private hands. Nevertheless, it isprecisely an uneven distribution of resource control and opportunities that makes global or evennational solutions problematic in terms of justice. If the consumption of the center -- globally andnationally -- creates crises which force sacrifices from the periphery, constituting public authority tomandate and enforce those sacrifices will be impeded, often defeated. Thus justice is not simply thefirst principle of social systems, as a Rawlsian perspective would have it, but also a necessarycondition for efficacious policy.

Forest policy in India illustrates these dilemmas. Unfairness undermines conservation of theresource base (Kothari and Parajuli l993). Despite official gestures toward participatory or jointforest management, policy to ensure "sustainable use" remains controversial. Politically, thecontradiction is between centralized bureaucratic control and devolution to States and communities.Normatively, there is conflict over conceptualization of forest dwellers' daily practices as"concessions and privileges" (granted by the state) as opposed to rights inherently vested in localpeople. Environmentally, the conflict is between preservationist "deep ecology" and the socialecology of development favored by most activist NGOs (Herring l99l). Empirically, in terms offorest conservation, there are no easy conclusions and deep disagreements. Conflicting claims toresource stewardship, conservation values, employment and social justice are no easier to resolve inpoor countries than in the old growth forests of the United States; the normative and political issuesare homologous. Reform means redistributing state monopolies of land control without enablingdegradation.

This macro controversy over landscapes is now joined by a growing conflict over thedistribution of property rights in biota (e.g. Dawkins l997). Biotechnology enables ownership of thebuilding blocks of life itself, and the power to create organisms not found in nature. Increasingly,self-interested fear of consequences of genetically modified organisms joins strands of oppositionlong premised on indigenous rights in landscapes. Because of the scientific dominance of the North,ethical and safety issues have largely been dominated by Northern practice, to which there isgrowing resistance in the South.

A great global public good is at stake in development of biotechnology. The list ofremarkable medical and agricultural advances is large and growing rapidly. Natural systems havehistorically provided living laboratories, counter-intuitive insights and raw materials for innovations(Weiss and Eisner 1998). Yet just as advances in biotechnology increase the payoffs of discoveriesfrom wild biota, declining biodiversity threatens depletion. There is then a pressing question of theappropriate balance of public interest and distributed rights in these resources.

27

Any list of serious obstacles to sustainable development will include a number of intractableproblems which can -- in principle -- be engineered around, provided adequate safeguards andmeans of technology transfer at reasonable cost (Reid l996). Moreover, biotechnology offerssignificant prospects for conserving biodiversity by limiting destructive practices while obtaininghigher and more stable yields on less land (Horsch and Fraley l998). In contrast to traditionalbreeding technologies, genetic engineering now allows transfers of characteristics across speciesboundaries; the consequences entail both opportunity and risk (e.g. Pimentel et al l989).

Genes conferring drought resistance, for example, might promise alleviation of the politicallyconflictual and developmentally crippling issues of water control and access which drive both smalland large-scale conflict in many parts of the world. Improvements in non-commercial or subsistencecrops (often termed “inferior grains” despite their nutritional characteristics) do not attract corporateresearch efforts but offer great potential for food security (Lipton, l989). Pest-resistant strains canreduce damaging application of toxins that leak to ground water and affect agricultural workers.Engineering for nutrition could provide enhanced health to poor people. Gordon Conway (l997)refers to this potential as a “doubly green revolution.” With appropriate targeting of research andsolution to property rights questions, the developmental consequences for the poor are profound.

Realizing these developmental gains presupposes both evolution of appropriate propertysystems28 and the continued operation of global science, as well as retargeting research andapplications to problems of the poor. Yet precisely because this process has been global, conflictsof interpretive systems in the “North-South” frame abound. Fundamental differences between aconceptualization of science in the public interest and political interpretations centering on "bio-piracy" (Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997) increasingly restrict basic research in poor countries. Thereare demands as well for repatriation of museum collections and herbaria located in parts of theworld other than their origins. The root of these conflicts is the belief that globalization forces arefundamentally unfair in their distribution of benefits and potentially harmful to ecological systems andhuman health.

28 At least three conceptual systems are in contest globally around ownership of nature. At a

recent conference at Cornell [April l999], Henry Shands, who manages the United StatesDepartment of Agriculture’s germplasm bank, argued for a trusteeship notion of property: biota arethe “common heritage of mankind.” USDA maintains the bank and releases new varieties in thehundreds annually at no cost to anyone in the world who wants them; “we even pay the postage.”Bernard LeBuanec, who directs an international consortium of seed companies, argued that such acommon-property system was inconsistent with progress. No rational firm will invest in innovationand development without secure property rights to insure a return on investment. T.P. Sreenivasan, adiplomat who put together India’s team for Rio, saw such repositories as artifacts of colonialappropriation of the earth’s biota. His preferred model was that established at Rio: nation states ownbiota. Subsidiary rights in biota are then dependent on national policy; there is no “common heritageof mankind” in any meaningful property sense.

28

Though concern for biodiversity is often termed an elitist enterprise,29 the first victims ofenvironmental degradation are the poor. Disappearing forests cost not only species but livelihoodsand cultural identities. Environmental integrity must then be a central developmental concern,neither a separate desideratum nor a luxury. New organisms create risks. Genetically modifiedorganisms are tested in temperate conditions, but deployed in a wide variety of ecological settings.The environmental consequences are simply not known, but may entail harmful consequences,including the generation or strengthening of new weeds, new viruses, alteration of ecologicaldynamics, increased resistance of pests to pesticides and harmful effects on organisms not targetedby the technology. The long-term effects on whole systems are simply not known, nor easilyknowable under current test regimes. Moreover, given the distribution of scientific expertise andtechnical capacities globally, biotechnology has the potential to become yet another sphere in whichchoices in people in poor places lack autonomy (Burgiel and Wagner l999).

There are complicated ethical dimensions to trade-offs involved in genetic innovations thatenable crops to grow in more adverse environments but with a reduction in biodiversity or withunknown risks. What level of risk is acceptable given the advantages in terms of production oravoidance of toxic alternatives? What are the ethical considerations in delegating such decisions tonational-level bodies as opposed to local communities? By what ethical calculus does policy valuefuture generations’ interests in biodiversity above current needs for livelihoods? These questionsneed to join the traditional agrarian questions of justice in distribution of the agricultural means ofproduction.

There is no space in this brief intervention to cover adequately the intense debates aroundpoverty, property and environmental protection. There are some areas which deserve more policyattention for poverty alleviation: 1) resurrection of the commons: experiments in creatinggovernance through restructuring of command-and-control systems to include joint-property andstate-society linkages at a very local level may overcome some of the political inequality thatcorrodes governance of nature; eco-restoration projects with direct benefits to the poor promisejustice with greening, but are administratively difficult. 2) establishing and distributing intellectualproperty rights in biota: as biotechnology enhances the prospects of commercializing biofunctionsand genetic materials, those who have foregone the opportunities of exploiting through destruction oftheir environments need intellectual property rights and the benefits that flow therefrom (Gupta l996;l998). The alternative of vesting these rights in nation states, as the biodiversity treaty does, raisesdifficult questions when the state is neither representative nor pro-poor. 3) ecologically-sensitiveland reform30: Pressures for cultivating ever more marginal land can be alleviated by rationing

29 Kishore Saint in Agarwal et al eds l987:57 states in fairly typical terms: “Despite our loftysentiments about Chief Seattle and Mahatma Gandhi, contemporary environmental concern is elitistin its origins. It has arisen out of reduced opportunities for enjoying nature and an increase indiscomfort and danger due to pollution and the depletion of natural resources.”

30 Adger (l997) argues the feasibility of this approach with empirical evidence from SouthAfrica, but it must be noted that the usually sanguine view of sustainable developmentalists ofmultiple-use lands comes into conflict with the views of many ecologists.

29

productive land and redistributing away from rentiers and speculators toward farmers; justice in landsystems coincides with environmental protection. When these issues are taken into account, thecoalition for considering redistribution of property rights in land expands considerably, and with it thepotential for reform.

Gendered Property:

Traditional land reform literature, as well as policy discussions, have been typically blind tothe gendered nature of property and its consequences. Bina Agarwal has brought the attention of thepolicy world and academia to the inadequately gendered view of property in the traditional literature(e.g. l992, l994, l997). In her l992 piece she argues that not just land reform, but poverty programsgenerally assume that money or benefits going to the male “head of household” reach the household.She analyzes the family as a bargaining arena: what resources do individuals bring to the table? Tothe extent that women have resources outside the family -- in civil society and economy -- theirposition inside the family in terms of security is improved.31 Agrarian reform that is gender sensitivecould thus improve intra-family outcomes and improve the inter-temporal variations in both intra-family and external power vis-a-vis the market. “Empowerment”is therefore more important than“entitlement,”(p 202); entitlements are subjects to shifts in the public moral economy. Propertyownership in increasingly marketized societies is a more solid foundation for reaping both privateand public benefits.

Agarwal also reflects a growing recognition (e.g. 1992:186; l997) of the intersection ofcommon property institutions, nature and poverty: she also concludes that the commons provides asource of income, and thus bargaining strength, independent of men for women and children. [Ingeneral the typical commons -- providing low value, labor intensive products -- is a resource foreveryone who has a low opportunity cost of labor]. Therefore, the privatization of commons, whichis a global phenomenon, reduces the supports -- and bargaining power and reservation wage -- ofthe most vulnerable.

Privatization of the commons means that contemporary agrarian reform cannot be limited toreversing distortions in existing property systems, but must address prevention of privatization ordegradation of common lands -- or , more proactively, resurrecting the commons as a property form(Herring l990) and regenerating the commons as a natural resource base. The world is full of“wasteland”: we as a species waste a lot. Regeneration of wastes is both labor intensive andrestorative of security and opportunity for weaker sectors, within households and across classes.

Mere recognition of gendered property is not enough, however. Ambreena Manji’s (l998)treatment of the Commission of Inquiry into Land Matters in Tanzania beginning in l991 confirms

31 She takes this analysis further by looking at four factors that affect female bargaining

power and finds that Sri Lanka and Kerala do better on these measures and also have the highestratio of females to males. This ratio discrepancy is especially marked in comparison to NorthwestIndia where the females are notoriously missing from the demographic data (pp 201-202).

30

concretely Agarwal’s generalizations about deeply embedded gender bias even among reformers.Carmen Diana Deere’s (l997) study of 14 Latin America countries indicates significant progress ingaining access to land through agrarian reform legislation influenced by activism of women’s groups.Whereas it would seem that women’s groups would be allies in the struggle for land reform, Manji’streatment illustrates the political obstacles that preclude assuming that effect -- including “urban bias”and class divisions in activist groups (l998:664-5). Manji’s analysis also demonstrates that there isno necessary connection between progressive stances on women’s issues internationally and withinthe domestic state. Nevertheless, it seems clear from everything we know about oppression,exclusion and opportunity that redressing gendered inequalities in much of the world must includereform of property relations. Reciprocally, allies of women’s rights domestically and internationallyought to be in the land reform coalition.

Ethics and Empirics

The most difficult problem for normatively justifiable prescriptive policy analysis is parsingthe effects of any discrete change on the consequences of poverty amid the myriad of factorsaffecting household well-being. If we could be confident that a rising tide would raise all ships,promotion of growth alone would be among the most effective anti-poverty policies. There are twoproblems. First, it seems that no one really knows how exactly to promote rapid and sustainablegrowth with significant security. Second, it is difficult to know under what conditions growthproduces not just a vector sum of poverty reduction but inflicts little economic harm to the leastadaptable and least secure. The usual answer is cross-national and time-series studies.

Poverty comparisons cross-nationally or even inter-temporally are inherently difficult(Ravallion l992). Governments often prefer self-serving methodologies with deep ecological fallacies:ie, if region x is mostly poor, and resources move into region x, poverty is being alleviated. Or,worse, the alleviation of poverty is measured by the number of poor people in region x, assumingthat everyone benefits and there is no elite co-optation of resources, leakage into corruption orwaste, patronage politics or any of the other dynamics that we know to undermine the effectivenessof the state (Gaiha and Kulkarni l998). Alternatively, expenditures by agencies and programs withpro-poor mandates are measured as an admittedly problematic proxy for progress in povertyalleviation. Though serious attempts are made (e.g. Sahn et al l997), students of the same regionsoften differ fundamentally on the methodological and empirical problems of assessing the effects ofchanges in macro-policy on discrete alterations in the poverty ratio.

These methodological problems are especially important because of the ethical implicationsof uncertain knowledge. The prime directive is to do no harm. As a consequence, direct andknowable results should have ethical precedence over indirect and hypothetical. The effects ofgrowth at the macro and aggregate level are too uncertain to sustain an ethical argument for povertyalleviation if significant sacrifices are entailed in the process. For these reasons, the contributions ofagrarian reform to both poverty alleviation and democratic development make it a preferred policychoice under conditions where it is feasible.

Social democracy came under pressure because of the presumed difficulty of marrying

31

growth and justice without incurring trade-offs. That debate seemed won with the triumph ofneoliberal economic theory in the late l980s, early l990s. There are second thoughts among povertyanalysts, however; market distortions may indeed harm the poor with particular force, but obsessiveand exclusive attention to fixing markets is no help for the poor (Lipton l995). This debate isimportant, but too often assumes that the democratic part of social democracy is less problematicthat the issues of growth and social justice.

At least in agrarian societies, the answers seem clear: the land question is fundamental forenabling social democracy in both its political and economic sense. Though no longer fashionable, inpart because its Cold War roots shriveled with the declining need to defeat communism, agrarianreform still offers significant poverty-reduction advantages in comparison with alternatives. Thoughof immediate and direct benefit to the rural poor, more importantly it is capable of altering the pathof societal development, and therefore sturdier and more enduring than many alternatives; it takes alonger view. This argument is buttressed by the comparative consideration of the historicalexperience of the United States above. Aggregate wealth multiplied in abundance but persistentpoverty is glaring; growth has not been enough. Promised land reforms to rehabilitate former slavesas citizens after civil war in the nineteenth century ("forty acres and a mule") were abandoned topolitical opposition; the result was an agrarian structure, and attendant political economy, whichperpetuated abject dependency. Poverty not only persisted in the population of former slaves overgenerations, but remains disproportionate. In contrast, Kerala abolished an agrarian system basedon agrestic serfdom and slavery in a compressed time period and has been notably successful inreducing the incidence of poverty despite income and growth rates well below the Indian mean.Whether policy promotes more or less state intervention, agrarian reform remains a means ofrestructuring the field of power to which state functionaries respond, and therefore enables morepossibilities for building an effective and responsive state, without which all other anti-povertyoptions -- including growth -- are reduced in efficacy.

But suppose we were to agree on the conditions for verifiably pro-poor policy and theywere historically rare or fragile -- as seems to be the case? If it is true that competitive socialdemocracies hold the most promise for poverty alleviation, the policy community is left with a gapbetween what is desirable and what is subject to policy. Social democracies have longdevelopmental trajectories. Moreover, if the notion that fragmented, poorly institutionalized politicalparty systems are not very friendly to the poor -- and indeed may raise primordial grounds forcompetition in ways that reduce political stability -- then pressure for premature elections of theWestern European sort may prove counter-productive. Hothouse democracies levered byconditionality may then be the worst possible outcome.

The research agenda then turns to determining what sets of policies combine povertyreduction with some package of broadly acceptable outcomes given political dynamics of particularpolities. There will be no easy answers; the ethical position is to proceed with humility, caution andcareful empirical work rooted in particular places. A separate research agenda is to determine thoselevers and conditionalities which are both normatively acceptable and effective. Unfortunately, thereare again likely to be trade-offs. Everyone would like to believe that all good things come in thesame package -- policy reform, growth, poverty alleviation, democracy, environmental

32

sustainability, human rights protection, gender equity and ethnic peace. Conditionalities as desideratahave multiplied over time and at some point become mutually exclusive or contradictory (McHughforthcoming). Moreover, conditionalities encroach on sovereignty. The final set of political conditionsfor poverty alleviation is then in the hands of international and bi-lateral development institutions:what are their priorities and how far are they willing to commit themselves to insistence on particularchange in order to achieve them? To the extent that poverty alleviation is at the top of the list, anadditional coalition partner with clout makes agrarian reform more feasible than the impossibilitytheorem suggests.

33

References

Abelmann, Nancy (1996). Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent. Berkeley, University of CaliforniaPress.

Adger, N (1997). Property Rights, Nature Conservation, and Land Reform in South Africa.Environmental Sustainability: Practical Global Implications. Boca Raton, Fla, St. Lucie Press: 213-231.

Agarwal, Anil, Darryl D’Monte, et al., Eds. (1987). The Fight for Survival: Peoples Action for theEnvironment. New Delhi, Centre for Science and Environment.

Agarwal, Bina (1992). “Gender Relations and Food Security: Coping with Seasonality, Drought andFamine in South Asia.” Unequal Burden: Economic Crisis, Persistent Poverty and Women's Work.L. Beneria and S. Feldman. Boulder, Westview Press: 181-218.

Agarwal, Anil and Sunita Narain (1992). Toward a Green World. New Delhi, Centre for Scienceand Environment.

Agarwal, Bina (1997). “Environmental Action, Gender Equity and Women's Participation.”Development and Change 28: 1-44.

Arnison, C (1996). The First Stages of Land Reform in the Former Soviet Union: SomeUncomfortable Experiences. Rural Practice Research Conference, Cirencester, Royal Institution ofChartered Surveyors.

Banuri, Tariq and Frederique Apfell Marglin, Eds. (1993). Who Will Save the Forests? Knowledge,Power and Environmental Destruction. London, Zed Books.

Bardhan, Pranab (l995). “Research on Poverty and Development: Twenty Years AfterRedistribution with Growth.” The World Bank Research Observer.

Bardhan, Pranab (1993). “Analytics of the Institutions of Informal Cooperation.” WorldDevelopment 21(April): 633-639.

Baviskar, Amita (1995). In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in theNarmada Valley. Delhi, Oxford University Press.

Beneria, Lourdes and Shelley Feldman, Eds. (1992). Unequal Burden: Economic Crisis, PersistentPoverty and Women's Work. Boulder, Westview Press.

Bensel, Richard (1990). Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America,1859-1877. Cambridge, New York. Cambridge University Press.

34

Bernstein, Henry (1998). Social Change in the South African Countryside? Land and Production,Poverty and Power. Journal of Peasant Studies 25(4): 1-32.

Besley, Timothy and Robin Burgess, Eds. (1998). Land Reform, Poverty Reduction and Growth:Evidence from India. The Development Economics Discussion Paper Series. London, LondonSchool of Economics.

Bethell, Tom (1995). Land Reform Lost Vietnam. The American Spectator 28(6).

Binswanger, Hans, Klaus Deininger, et al. (1995). Power, Distortions, Revolt, and Reform inAgricultural Land Relations. Handbook of Development Economics. J. Behrman and T. N.Srinivasan. Amsterdam. 3.

Blaikie, Piers and Harold Brookfield (1987). Land Degradation and Society. London, Methuen.

Brysk, Alison (forthcoming). Indian Market: The Ethnic Face of Adjustment in Ecuador.Development Assistance and Ethnic Conflict. M. J. Esman and R. J. Herring. Ann Arbor, Universityof Michigan Press.

Bullard, R and H. Waters (1996). Land Tenure: The Root of Land Ownership Conflicts in SouthernAfrica, the Past, Present and Future. Rural Practice Research Conference, Cirencester, UK, RoyalInstitution of Chartered Surveyors.

Burgiel, Stas and Lynn Wagner (1999). “Workshop on Agricultural Biotechnology and RuralDevelopment.” Sustainable Development 26(1).

Conway, Gordon (1997). The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the 21st Century. NewYork, Penguin Books.

Cousins, B (1997). “How Do Rights Become Real? Formal and Informal Institutions in SouthAfrica's Land Reform.” IDS-Bulletin 28(4): 59-68.

Cronon, William (1983). Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England.New York, Hill and Wang.

Dawkins, Kristin (1997). Gene Wars: The Politics of Biotechnology. The Politics of the Earth. J.Dryzek. New York, Oxford University Press.

Delehanty, James and Kathryn Rasmussen (1995). “Land Reform and Farm Restructuring in theKyrgyz Republic.” Post-Soviet Geography. (November): 565-568.

Dryzek, John (1997). The Politics of the Earth. New York, Oxford University Press.

Echeverri-Gent, John (1993). The State and the Poor: Public Policy and Political Development in

35

India and the United States. Berkeley, University of California Press.

El-Ghonemy, M Riad (1990). The Political Economy of Rural Poverty: The Case for Land Reform.London, Routledge.

Engedayehu, Walle (1995). “Ethiopia: Failure of Land Reform and Agricultural Crisis.” Studies inComparative International Development 30(2).

Enriquez, Laura J (1991). Harvesting Change: Labor and Agrarian Reform in Nicaragua, 1979-1990. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press.

Epstein, T Scarlett, A P Suryanarayana, et al. (1998). Village Voices: Forty Years of RuralTransformation in South India. Walnut Creek, London, New Delhi, Alta Mira Press.

Esman, Milton J and Ronald J Herring, Eds. International Development Flows and Ethnic Conflict.Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press.

Ezigbalike, I C, M T Raki, et al. (1996). “Cultural Issues in Land Information Systems.” LandReform, Land Settlement and Cooperatives (FAO): 21-36.

Foner, Eric (1989). Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York,Harper and Row.

Gadgil, Madhav, N V Joshi, et al. (1993). Power to the People: Living Close to Nature. The Hindu.Madras: 58-62.

Gadgil, Madhav and Ramachandra Guha (1995). Ecology and Equity. New York, Penguin Books.

Gaiha, Raghav and Vani Kulkarni (1998). “Is Growth Central to Poverty Alleviation in India?”Journal of International Affairs.

Gaiha, Raghav, P D Kaushik, et al. (1998). “Jawahar Rozgar Yojana, Panchayats, and the Ruralpoor in India.” Asian Survey XXXVIII(11): 928-949.

Goodwyn, Lawrence (1976). Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America. New York,Oxford University Press.

Gordillo-de-Anda, G (1996). “The Reconstruction of Rural Institutions.” Land Reform, LandSettlement and Cooperatives (FAO): 98-119.

36

Guha, Ramachandra (1989). “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Protection: AThird World Critique.” Environmental Ethics 11(1).

Guha, Ramachandra (1989). The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in theHimalaya. Delhi, Oxford University Press.

Guha, Ramachandra and J Martinez-Alier (1997). Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North andSouth. London, Earthscan Publications.

Gulati, Leela (1990). “Agricultural Workers' Pension in Kerala.” Economic and Political WeeklyXXXV(6 (February)): 339-343.

Gupta, Anil K (1996). Technologies, Institutions and Incentives for Conservation of Biodiversity inNon-OECD Countries: Assessing Needs for Technical Co-operation. Investing in BiologicalDiversity, Cairns Conference of the OECD, Cairns.

Gupta, Anil K (1998). Rewarding Local Communities for Conserving Biodiversity: The Case of theHoney Bee. Protection of Global Biodiversity: Converging Strategies. L. D. Guruswamy and J. A.McNeely. Durham, Duke University Press: 180-189.

Haque, T and L Montesi (1997). “Tenurial Reforms and Agricultural Development in Viet Nam.”Land Reform, Land Settlement and Cooperatives (FAO): 66-77.

Heller, Patrick (In Press). The Labor of Development: Workers and the Transformation ofCapitalism in Kerala, India. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press.

Heller, Patrick (1994). The Politics of Redistributive Development: Class and State in Kerala, India.Berkeley, University of California.

Helvarg, David (1994). The War Against the Greens. San Francisco, Sierra Club Books.

Hendrix, Steven (1996/97). “Pride of Ownership: Land Tenure and Conflict Resolution.” HarvardInternational Review 19(1): 40-43.

Herath, S, M Sugiyama, et al. (1995). “Comparison of Agricultural Land Utilization Laws of SriLanka and Japan: A Review.” Research Bulletin of the Faculty of Agriculture, Gifu University(Japan)(60): 75-86.

Herrera, A, J Riddell, et al. (1997). “Recent FAO Experiences in Land Reform and Land Tenure.”Land Reform, Land Settlement and Cooperatives (FAO)(1): 52-64.

Herring, Ronald J (1980). “Abolition of Landlordism in Kerala: A Redistribution of Privilege.”Economic and Political Weekly XV(26 (June 28)).Herring, Ronald J (1983). Land to the Tiller: The Political Economy of Agrarian Reform in South

37

Asia. New Haven, Delhi, Yale University Press, Oxford University Press.

Herring, Ronald J and Rex M Edwards (1983). “Guaranteeing Employment to the Rural Poor:Social Functions and Class Interests in the Employment Guarantee Scheme in Western India.”World Development 11(7 (July)).

Herring, Ronald J (1988). Stealing Congress Thunder: The Rise to Power of a CommunistMovement in South India. When Parties Fail. P. M. a. K. Lawson. Princeton, Princeton UniversityPress.

Herring, Ronald J (1989). “Dilemmas of Agrarian Communism.” Third World Quarterly 11(1(January)): 89-115.

Herring, Ronald J (1990). “Resurrecting the Commons.” Collective Action and Ecology 44(4).

Herring, Ronald J (1993). Contesting the 'Great Transformation': The 'Factory Acts' in South Asia.

Herring, Ronald J (1998). Celebrating the Local: Scale and Orthodoxy in Political Ecology.Governance Issues in Conservation and Development. G. Hayden. Gainesville, Conservation andDevelopment Forum.

Herring, Ronald J (1999). Embedded Particularism: India's Failed Developmental State. TheDevelopmental State. M. Woo-Cumings. Ithaca, Cornell University Press.

Herring, Ronald J (1999). Nature, State and Market: Implementing International Regimes in India.South Asian Environments in a State-Society Perspective. S. T. Madsen. London, Curzon Press.

Herring, Ronald, J and Erach Bharucha (1999). Embedded Capacities: India's Compliance withInternational Accords. Engaging Countries: Strengthening Compliance with International Accords.E. B. Weiss and H. Jacobson. Cambridge, MIT Press.

Herring, Ronald J (forthcoming). Contesting the Great Transformation: Local Struggles with theMarket in South India. Agrarian Studies at the Cutting Edge. J. Scott. New Haven, Yale UniversityPress.

Hirtz, F (1998). “The Discourse that Silences: Beneficiaries' Ambivalence Towards RedistributiveLand Reform in the Philippines.” Development and Change 29(2): 247-275.

Jackson, M (1997). Political Economy of Agricultural Reform in Romania. Political Economy ofAgrarian Reform in Central and Eastern Europe. J. F. M. Swinnen. Aldershot, UK, AshgatePublishing Ltd.: 283-320.

Jansen, K and E Roquas (1998). “Modernizing Insecurity: The Land Titling Project in Honduras.”Development and Change 29(1): 81-106.

38

Jannuzi, F Tomasson (1974). Agrarian Crisis in India: The Case of Bihar. Austin, University ofTexas Press.

Jeffrey, Robin (1993). Politics, Women and Well Being: How Kerala Became a Model. Delhi,Oxford University Press.

Johnson, Natalia (l995). Rural Reforms Fail to Take Root. Business Mexico Vol 5 No 3 p 24 ff.

Kannan, K P and Pushpangadan (1998). “Agricultural Stagnation in Kerala.” Economic andPolitical Weekly XXIII(39): A-120-128.

Kinsey, B, K Burger, et al. (1998). “Coping with Drought in Zimbabwe: Survey Evidence onResponses of Rural Households to Risk.” World Development 26(1): 89-110.

Kirsten, J (1998). “What Went Wrong With Land Reform in South Africa?” Farmer'sWeekly(October 30): 28, 30-31.

Kohli, Atul (1987). The State and Poverty in India. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Kothari, Smitu and Pramod Parajuli (1993). No Nature Without Social Justice: A Plea for Culturaland Ecological Pluralism in India. Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict. W. Sachs.London, Zed Books.

Kothari, Ashish (1996). Understanding Biodiversity: Life, Sustainability and Protected Areas. NewDelhi, Orient Longman Limited.

Kothari, Ashish, Neena Singh, et al. (1996). People and Protected Areas. New Delhi, SagePublications.

Krishnaji, N (1979). “Agrarian Relations and the Left Movement in Kerala.” Economic and PoliticalWeekly XV(9 (March)).

Lacy, William B and Lawrence Busch (1991). The Fourth Criterion: Social and Economic Impactsof Agricultural Biotechnology. Agricultural Biotechnology at the Crossroads: Biological, Social andInstitutional Concerns. Ithaca, NY, National Agricultural Biotechnology Council: 153-169.

Lipton, Michael with Richard Longhurst (1989). New Seeds and Poor People. Baltimore, JohnsHopkins University Press.

Lipton, Michael (1993). “Land Reform as Commenced Business: The Evidence Against Stopping.”World Development 21(4): 641-658.

Lipton, Michael (1997). “Editorial: Poverty-- Are There Holes in the Consensus?” World

39

Development 25(7): 1003-1007.

Litfin, Karen T (1998). The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics. Cambridge, The MIT Press.

Macilwain, Colin (1998). “When Rhetoric Hits Reality in Debate on Bioprospecting.” Nature 392:535-540.

Mallick, Ross (1990). “Limits to Radical Intervention: Agrarian Taxation in West Bengal.”Development and Change 21(1 (January)).

Mallick, Ross (1993). Development Policy of a Communist Government: West Bengal Since 1977.Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Mamdani, M (1996). Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of LateColonialism. Cape Town, David Phillip.

Manji, Ambreena (1988). “Gender and the Politics of the Land Reform Process in Tanzania.” TheJournal of Modern African Studies 36(4): 645-667.

Maybury-Lewis (1994). The Politics of the Possible: The Brazilian Rural Workers Trade UnionMovement, 1964-1985. Philadelphia, Temple University Press.

McHugh, Heather S (Forthcoming). USAID and Ethnicity: An Epiphany? Development Assistanceand Ethnic Conflict. M. J. Esman and R. J. Herring. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press.

McReynolds, S A (1998). “Agricultural Labour and Agrarian Reform in El Salvador: Social Benefitor Economic Burden?” Journal of Rural Studies 14(4): 459-473.

Meer, S (1997). “Gender and Land Rights: The Struggle Over Resources in Post-Apartheid SouthAfrica.” IDS-Bulletin 28(3): 133-144.

Mencher, Joan P (1980). “The Lessons and Non-Lessons of Kerala: Agricultural Labourers andPoverty.” Economic and Political Weekly XV(41-3).

Mengisteab, Kidane (l990). Ethiopia: Failure of Land Reform and Agricultural Crisis. New York,Greenwood Press.

Merchant, Carolyn (1983). The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution.San Francisco, Harper and Row.

Moore, Barrington (jr) (1966). Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Boston, BeaconPress.

Niles, Kimberly (1998). Poverty Alleviation as a Survival Strategy in Southeast Asia. Annual

40

Meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago.

Paoletti, Maurizio G and David Pimentel (1996). “Engineering in Agriculture and the Environment:Assessing Risks and Benefits.” BioScience 46(9): 665-673.

Parayil, Govindan (1996). “The 'Kerala' Model of Development: Development and Sustainability inthe Third World.” Third World Quarterly 17(5): 941-957.

Peluso, Nancy (1992). Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java.Berkeley, University of California Press.

Petras, James (1997). “The Resurgence of the Left.” New Left Review: 223: 17-47.

Petras, James (1998). “The Political and Social Basis of Regional Variation in Land Occupations inBrazil.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 25(4): 124-133.

Piccioni, N (1997). “The Commitment of a Young Nation: Eritrea and Follow-up to the WorldFood Summit.” Land Reform, Land Settlement and Cooperatives (FAO): 86-94.

Poffenberger, Mark and Betsy McGean (1996). Village Voices, Forest Choices. Delhi, OxfordUniversity Press.

Polanyi, Karl (1957 [1944]). The Great Transformation. Boston, Beacon.

Potts, Deborah and Chris Mutambirwa (1997). “The Government Must Not Dictate: Rural-UrbanMigrants' Perceptions of Zimbabwe's Land Resettlement Programme.” Review of African PoliticalEconomy 24(74): 549-566.

Powelson, John P and Richard Stock (1990). The Peasant Betrayed: Agriculture and Land Reformin the Third World. Washington DC, Cato Institute.

Prosterman, Roy L and Jeffrey M Riedinger (1987). Land Reform and Democratic Development.Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.

Putzel, James (1992). A Captive Land: The Politics of Agrarian Reform in the Philippines. London,New York, Catholic Institute for International Relations, Monthly Review Press.

Qian, Yingyi and Barry Weingast (1994). Beyond Decentralization: Market-Preserving Federalismwith Chinese Characteristics. Palo Alto, Stanford University, Hoover Institution.

Ravallion, Martin (1992). Poverty Comparisons: A Guide to Concepts and Measurements.Washington D C, World Bank.

Reid, Walter V (1996). “Gene Co-ops and the Biotrade: Translating Genetic Resource Rights into

41

Sustainable Development.” Journal of Ethno-pharmacology 51: 75-92.

Riedinger, Jeffrey M (1995). Agrarian Reform in the Philippines: Democratic Transitions andRedistributive Reforms. Stanford, Stanford University Press.

Rudolph, Lloyd and Susanne (l987) In Pursuit of Lakshmi : The Political Economy of the IndianState Chicago. University of Chicago Press.

Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, Evelyne Huber Stephens, et al. (1992). Capitalist Development andDemocracy. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Salamon, Lester M (1979). “The Time Dimension in Policy Evaluation: The Case of the New DealLand-Reform Experiments.” Public Policy XXVII(2 (Spring)): 129-183.

Seligmann, Linda J (1995). Between Reform and Revolution: Political Struggles in the PeruvianAndes, 1969-1991. Stanford, Stanford University Press.

Sidel, John T (1998). “The Underside of Progress: Land, Labor and Violence in Two PhillipineGrowth Zones, 1985-1995.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 30(1 (January-March)): 3-12.

Sinha, Subir and Ronald J Herring (1993). “Common Property, Collective Action and Ecology.”Economic and Political Weekly.

Sinha, Subir, Shubhra Gururani, et al. (1997). “The 'New Traditionalist' Discourse of IndianEnvironmentalist.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 25(3): 65-99.

Sittenfeld, Ana M and Annie Lovejoy (1998). Biodiversity Prospecting Frameworks: The INBioExperience in Costa Rica. Protection of Global Biodiversity: Converging Strategies. L. D.Guruswamy and J. A. McNeely. Durham, Duke University Press: 223-246.

Srinivasan, T N and Pranab K Bardhan (eds) (1988). Rural Poverty in South Asia. New York,Columbia University Press.

Swinnen, Johan F M, Allan Buckwell, et al., Eds. (1997). Agricultural Privatization, Land Reformand Farm Restructuring in Central and Eastern Europe. Aldershot, England, Ashgate Publishers.

Tharamangalam, Joseph (1998). “The Perils of Social Development Without Economic Growth: TheDevelopment Debacle in Kerala.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 30(1): 23-34.

Thiesenhusen, William C (1995). Broken Promises: Agrarian Reform and the Latin AmericanCampesino. Boulder, Westview Press.

Tornquist, Olle and P K Michael Tharakan (1996). “Democratization and Attempts to Renew theRadical Political Development Project of Kerala, India.” Political and Economic Weekly(June 13):

42

1847-1858.

Uphoff, Norman (1993). Learning from Gal Oya: Possibilities for a Participatory Development andPost-Newtonian Social Science. Ithaca, Cornell University Press.

Veltmeyer, Henry (1997). “New Social Movements in Latin America: The Dynamics of Class andIdentity.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 25(1): 139-169.

Wade, Robert (1988). Village Republics. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Weiss, Charles and Thomas Eisner (1998). “Partnerships for Value-Added ThroughBioprospecting.” Teachnology and Society 20: 481-498.

Williams, Donald (1996). “Reconsidering state and society in Africa: the institutional dimension.”Comparative Politics 28(2).

World Bank (1997). India: Achievements and Challenges in Reducing Poverty. Washington, D.C.,World Bank.

World Bank (1997). World Development Report: The State in a Changing World. New York,World Bank.