Prospects for Rural Regional Development in the De- Agrarianizing Rural Bangladesh
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Prospects for Rural Regional Development in the De- Agrarianizing Rural Bangladesh A dissertation submitted to the University of Hawai’i at Manoa in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Urban and Regional Planning) By Saiful Momen 2016 Dissertation Committee: Clyde (Mike) Douglass, Chair Kem Lowry Krisnawati Suryanata James H. Spencer Reece Jones © Saiful Momen, 2016 ii Acknowledgement I wrote the words in this dissertation. But this dissertation came into being because of the generosity and active labor of many people. Their love (or pity!) for me is unfathomable and I feel enormously grateful to them. Dr. Mike Douglass, my adviser and the fountainhead of the ideas in this dissertation, was unbelievably patient and continued to encourage me to write even when I thought I had hit a wall. His scholarship and originality is only matched by his patience with students. What makes it remarkable is that he did all the helping while retired from his position at UH-Manoa, and away at a demanding position directing an academic/research program at the National University of Singapore. I am thankful for the countless number of hours he gave me over the years, the 3- hr long breakfasts on Sunday mornings, and the conversations we had. My gratitude is more than my command of English language can articulate. Dr. Karen Umemoto, our Chair graciously took personal interest in helping me graduate. Being an extraordinary scholar with a very busy schedule never prevented her from being approachable. On one occasion, she even arranged to pay me what was basically her own money after I was mistakenly not being paid for a work I did as a statistical analyst. It is hard to forget such generosity. Dana Singer, our administrative secretary never failed to encourage us laggards to stay in the right track. She was always ready to go out of her way to help, be it a request sent from Nepal, or a request to help find a place to live, or to find the best recipe for oxtail soup. Her friendship is crucial in making DURP (Department of Urban and Regional Planning) home for people like me who arrive from thousands of miles away. At DURP, I came across a group of people who were very important in whatever intellectual growth I had during the graduate school. I took some great classes, and some of the fellow students became friends with whom it was good to have a discussion/debate and have a drink afterward (or often both together). There were quite a few friends but I must mention the names iii of my friends (late) Dr. Bryan Bushley, Shahin Rahman, Dr. Hao Nguyen, Sara Bolduc, Taian Miao, Jiwnath Ghimire, Annie Koh, and Soo-Sun Choe. I am also thankful to my dissertation committee of professors Kem Lowry, Krisna Suriyanata, Jim Spencer, and Reece Jones. Except for Reece, I have taken classes from them that apart from being some of the best classes of my graduate education, prepared me for this dissertation. To this day, I parrot things from classes I took with them. Dr. Reece Jones graciously agreed to come on-board (after I lost members through their sabbatical and retirement) as a university representative on the committee at a late stage, and yet with his knowledge of Bangladesh provided important tips that helped me in significant ways. I do not have words to describe my wife’s contributions to whatever I got in life. She has suffered a lot for me, and hid all her troubles behind her beautiful smile. Our daughter was a special source of joy. She never embarrassed dad by asking how much longer he needed to turn in his dissertation, never asked for a Disney vacation, and every evening after dinner played something joyful on the piano. There is nothing more uplifting than listening to your own daughter playing Ode to Joy on the piano. Our son, who came along in 2012 made the other three of us happy despite his uncanny ability to annoy his sister every now and then! During my field research, I had the good fortune of meeting people that I will admire for a long time. Many of them provided information that shaped the (rare!) insights one can find in this dissertation. I am enormously grateful to them. iv Abstract Poverty, lack of opportunities, and general socio-economic malaise have become characteristic features of the rural areas in the contemporary low-income world. Amid such a reality, a rarely asked policy question becomes important: Where do rural areas --- their economies and societies --- fit in the road map to a poverty-free world? Contemporary development policy in the mainstream has become somewhat oblivious to this question. Rather the main thrust of recent development policy has been around (a) sectoral development projects such as the ones in agriculture, fisheries and other sectors, (b) macroeconomic policy reform, and (c) large infrastructure projects, often in megacities. Underlying these development interventions is an acceptance of a rural-urban dichotomy in economy and geographic space. This dissertation through an extensive literature survey starts with the position that important synergies are missed in the countryside by separate planning of towns and rural areas. Rather rural regions, comprising both rural areas and towns as an integral part in them, need to be the planning unit. However, policy models for rural regional development, especially in an agrarian setting, are rare. Even as many rural regions continue to de-agrarianize, and at the same time suffer stasis, new models are hard to come by. This dissertation through an extensive review of literature on development policy experience of the past half a century identifies three equally important cornerstones of rural regional development: (a) rural regional productivity increase, (b) capturing as much of the multiplier effect of the economic activities within the rural region as possible, and (c) removal of the historical agrarian and other institutions that encourage leakage from the rural economy, and restrict access of the poor and the disadvantaged to economic opportunities. To what extent these can be achieved is determined by the recent changes in the global economic forces, nature of agrarian transition in a given region, rural regional political economy, and the nature of the state. Rural areas are de-agrarianizing, and getting connected to the larger economic processes beyond their borders. Often these changes are not increasing the life chances of the households in rural regions. This dissertation, through the study of a rural region in the southeast of Bangladesh, identifies some concrete processes and institutions that stand in the way households’ ability to attain prosperity. Some of the major processes identified are elite capture of state apparatus, emigration v and consumptive use of the consequent remittance, delinking of the towns from the economic activities of the rural hinterland, rapid de-agrarianization of the rural economy, and the lack of pro-poor infrastructure. The study helps to identify an outline and some tools of rural regional planning. vi Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENT .................................................................................................................................................... III ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................................................... V LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................................................................... XIII LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................................................................ XIII LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................................................................... XVI GLOSSARY ................................................................................................................................................................ XVIII CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................. 1 1.1 THE MALAISE IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, AND THE PLAUSIBILITY OF RURAL REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT ............................................ 1 1.2 HOW DID THE RURAL REGIONS GET HERE? A BRIEF HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT POLICY AND RURAL REGIONS .......................... 6 1.3 THE MARCH AGAINST POVERTY RUNS THROUGH RURAL REGIONS ................................................................................... 14 1.4 FINDING A NAME FOR WHAT WE WANT: A NOTE ON NOMENCLATURE ........................................................................... 18 1.5 THE IRRELEVANCE OF 1960S STYLE REGIONAL PLANNING, AND THE POTENTIAL FOR RE-INVENTING REGIONAL PLANNING ......... 20 1.5.1 The Irrelevance .......................................................................................................................................... 20 1.5.2 The Need and Potential for Re-inventing Regional Planning .................................................................... 22 1.6 RURAL REGIONAL PLANNING: OUTLINE OF AN AGENDA FOR RESEARCH ............................................................................ 23 CHAPTER TWO: POVERTY AND DEVELOPMENT POLICY ....................................................................................... 25 2.1 DEFINING POVERTY FOR POLICY RELEVANCE ...............................................................................................................