Joachim von Braun Franz W. Gatzweiler Editors Marginality Addressing the Nexus of Poverty, Exclusion and Ecology Marginality Joachim von Braun • Franz W. Gatzweiler Editors Marginality Addressing the Nexus of Poverty, Exclusion and Ecology Editors Joachim von Braun Franz W. Gatzweiler Center for Development Research Center for Development Research University of Bonn University of Bonn Bonn , Germany Bonn , Germany ISBN 978-94-007-7060-7 ISBN 978-94-007-7061-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7061-4 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg New York London Library of Congress Control Number: 2013946367 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and the Author(s) 2014. The book is published with open access at SpringerLink.com. Open Access This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. 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While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Foreword on “Marginality and Development” Development is a process through which an individual, a community or a nation can progress economically, socially, culturally, psychologically and spiritually. The centre of any development is the human being, and human wellbeing is the ultimate goal of development. Major development concerns worldwide are eradication of poverty; improvement of health, nutrition and educational status of the people; removal of discrimination along gender, racial, and ethnic lines; and protection of environment for ensuring inter-generational equity. These are concerns that have fi gured prominently in setting the millennium development goals. Signifi cant progress has been achieved in the reduction of income poverty in the developing world through economic progress, targeted safety nets and social protection programs. But economic growth and targeted transfers may not be suffi cient to achieve development. We must address structural factors such as ecological vulnerability, discrimination and deprivation of rights caused by poor governance and other socio-political and cultural drivers, and forces of ecological diversity and climatic change that cause vulnerability and erode the resource base for livelihoods of the people, particularly for those who are at the margin of subsistence. All this calls for a broader perspective on development policies and programs through which the nexus of poverty, discrimination and environmental degradation can be addressed. It points to the need of understanding the increasingly complex drivers of persistent poverty at societal and ecological margins. This is where the marginality concept and framework as introduced by this book become extremely relevant to understand the complexities of under- deve lopment and poverty. Amartya Sen has infl uenced recent development thinking by introducing the concept of social exclusion, a subset of the concept of marginality, the theme of this book. Social exclusion widens the concept of poverty and points to the need of formulating development policies and programs beyond the narrow goals of eradicating income poverty that many nation states have been pursuing. The UNDP has taken the concept forward by articulating Human Development Index, a measure of multi-dimensional poverty that incorporates deprivations in the dimensions of health, education and living standards. v vi Foreword on “Marginality and Development” The governments and the civil society organizations have already started designing and implementing programs to address the issues of marginality. Realizing that the pockets of extreme poverty remain in the ecologically marginal areas throughout the world, the international agricultural research centers under the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) system have recently diverted their attention to developing improved agricultural technologies for these areas. Notable progress has been made in developing innovations for marginal ecologies under climate stress, such as submergence-tolerant and salt-tolerant rice and heat-tolerant wheat varieties, and efforts are underway to incorporate drought- tolerance and cold-tolerance in many crops. Many NGOs, both international and national, have been addressing the issues of gender inequality and injustices, insecurity and poor governance, and education, health and water and sanitation in hardest to reach geographies and communities (such as indigenous and tribal people) that the governments have found diffi cult to reach or to address through mainstream development interventions. Some of them have extended their operations by establishing social enterprises or businesses to provide services to people at the bottom of the pyramid that the corporate sector has not been able to reach adequately, and to overcome problems of missing markets or market failure. This book uses the marginality lens to understand and explore the links between poverty, exclusion and ecology. It provides a conceptual framework of marginality and explains how it links with the concepts of poverty and underdevelopment. It looks at marginality from the ecological perspectives and revisits basic econo mics to understand social exclusion. It maps the physical locations and societal positions of marginalized people and communities, and traces formal and informal rules, regulations and institutions that govern access to land, water and biological resources fundamental to operations of the livelihoods of their choice. A section of the book addresses the environmental drivers of marginality, understanding the interface between land degradation and poverty, taking into account the role of nature in providing livelihoods opportunity to the extreme poor. The authors emphasize that resource endowments and land degradation are critical determinants of poverty, and identify agricultural development strategies in a framework of different opportunity costs of land and labor. They point to the need for accelerating investment in targeted R&D focusing on crops and traits that are important for the marginal ecologies to address the environmental limitations that the poor face in these regions. With recent advancement in biological sciences and invention of tools and techniques in the fi eld of biotechnology, the probability of research success in these diffi cult domains of technological advancement has improved greatly in recent years. The book then reviews recent attempts to address marginality through development interventions in selected countries in Asia and Africa through a number of case studies. This part of the book throws light on the complexities of marginality and social exclusion, and diffi culties to address them. The degree of pro-poor income growth is compared between various agricultural and non-agricultural livelihoods, rural and urban areas, and among ethnic caste and religious groups. The development actors of other countries can substantially gain from the experiences and lessons learnt from these cases of development interventions already undertaken to address marginality. Foreword on “Marginality and Development” vii Marginality is not a matter exclusive to public policy and rights, but also an issue that can be addressed by business and civil society organizations. The role of the corporate sector in combating marginality and addressing the demand for service of the bottom of the pyramid are reviewed and discussed in the last part of the book. This part also reviews the experience and effectiveness of social protection measures taken by the government and civil society organizations, particularly conditional cash transfer programs that are increasingly becoming part of the national poverty reduction and development strategies to address market failure for the poorest. This book provides new evidence and constructive insights in support of a vision of a world free from exploitation and discrimination where everyone has the opportu- nity to realize their potential, as we pursue it at BRAC, and to empower people and communities in situations of poverty, illiteracy, disease and social injustice. Our interventions at BRAC aim to achieve large scale,