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Rural-urban interactions for sustainable livelihoods : a case of commuters in Bugisu region, Eastern Uganda
Abstract
This study is premised on the understanding that rising trends of urbanisation have led to increasing levels of interactionsbetween rural and urban settings and vice versa across the developing world. It is also envisioned that, rural-urban interactions play a significant role in supporting livelihoods especially of commuters. The overall objective of the study was to analyse the role of rural-urban interactions in supporting livelihoods of the commuters in Bugisu region. The study contributes to the understanding of livelihoods across spatial and sectoral boundaries looking at the synergistic coexistencefound between rural and urban and urban and rural settings. The study examined patterns of interaction and commuting activities in Bugisu region, looking at the influence of policy factors on commuting activities and commuter livelihoods strategies. The key concern was to establish a “fit” between rural-urban interaction and their potential for sustainable livelihoods. This study was conducted in Bugisu region, eastern Uganda covering the five districts of the then greater Mbale namely; Mbale, Manafa, Budduda and Sironko. The study employed both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis.In examining patterns of interaction and commuting activities in Bugisu, the studynotes that rural Bugisu relates more closely with its urban centres. Mbale town, one of the oldest towns in the region serves as the hub of Bugisu region with, 69% of commuting activities in the area centred in it.
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The discussion is divided into two main parts. In the first we assess the results of the strategy of accelerated industrialization in India, Indonesia, West Malaysia, the Philippines, Republic of Korea, and Thailand. The traditional paradigm has generated contradictions of crisis proportions in the structure of national development. These contradictions of 'dualistic dependency' are intensified by the present transition of the world capitalist economy from an era of high sustained growth to one of structural imbalance and stagnation. A strategy of accelerated rural development is seen as the most appropriate response to the emerging conditions. The question of a spatial policy for implementing the new strategy is considered in Section 2. Current efforts are inadequate to meet the needs of the new strategy. -Authors India Indonesia West Malaysia Phillippines Korea Thailand national development dualistic dependency structural imbalance accelerated rural development
A regional network strategy incorporating rural-urban linkages and interdependecies in its analysis and policy framework is proposed to overcome the continuing rural–urban divide in development theory and planning. The strategy is illustrated by drawing from variations in regional contexts in Indonesia. A comparison of a virtuous cycle with a truncated process of rural regional development is used to set an agenda for policy research. Research on five types of rural-urban flows --people, production, commodities, capital, and information --is needed to provide baseline data to align policies with a more reciprocal relationship between rural and urban development.
This paper discusses upon the changes of Bote community of Nepal, in case of Patihani V.D.C. These changes are influenced by process of urbanization, globalization which has created constraints and opportunities on "Bote people of Patihani VDC". Historically these people had their livelihood from agriculture. Land was a major household asset and crop production (maize, millet, paddy, wheat etc.) was the means of survival. But the rapid process of urbanization and globalization has pushed them in transition both with opportunities as well as constraints. The household assets have undergone rapid modification. Now they have no option other than modifying the traditional occupation. Land fragmentation and change in social institution are resulted from the urbanization and globalization. The livelihood diversification and foreign employment have recently emerged as how livelihood strategies in the study area. Due to the proximity to the market, the influence of the urbanization is more apparent in the Bote Village. Most of the households follow the multiple occupations besides agriculture. The role of agriculture activities in their life is substantial. Although a few households sell their crops however most of them sell vegetables. The livelihood strategy of Bote community in the study area is in transition. It is shifted from agriculture to non-agricultural one. It is necessary to ensure access to resources and increase social and political participation of Bote community for integral development of rural community in Nepal. Keywords: poverty; urbanization; commercial farming; tarai ethnic group; traditional occupation DOI: 10.3126/dsaj.v4i0.4524 Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol.4 2010 pp.247-260
International Institute for Environment and Development IIED is an independent non-profit organisation which aims to provide expertise and leadership in researching and achieving sustainable development at local, national, regional and global levels. In alliance with others, we seek to help shape a future that ends global poverty and delivers and sustains efficient and equitable management of the world's natural resources.
R ural residents across the develop-ing world earn a large share of their income—35–50 percent— from nonfarm activities. Agricultural households count on nonfarm earnings to diversify risk, moderate seasonal income swings, and finance agricultural input purchases, whereas landless and near-landless households everywhere depend heavily on nonfarm income for their sur-vival. Over time, the rural nonfarm econ-omy has grown rapidly, contributing sig-nificantly to both employment and rural income growth.
This paper reports levels of income inequality and poverty in four Central and Eastern European countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Russia. Unlike many previous researchers who examine transition economies, we aggregate the detailed individual-level income surveys made available through the efforts of the Luxembourg Income Study at the regional level of analysis. Although national-level investigations have contributed much to our understanding of the income distribution dynamics, these studies mask intracountry variance in levels of income inequality and thus may not capture the true distribution of household income and accurately reflect individual wellbeing. Accordingly, we compute summary measures of inequality and relative poverty rates, using both local and national relative poverty lines, for the most recent waves of data available. We offer comparisons between regional and national median …/…
This paper describes differences in the impact of the Economic Structural Adjustment Policy (ESAP) on Zimbabwe's rural and urban areas through the views of recent migrants to Harare. Although the outcomes of ESAP have been more acutely felt in the city than in the countryside, rural populations have also suffered from Increases in the prices of basic commodities and in public services fees. Retrenchment and increasing poverty in the city affect rural households, as remittances decline and migrants return to their rural homes, increasing the burden there. Due to the strength of rural-urban interactions and the economic interdependence between city and countryside, the Impact of structural adjustment is not clearly geographically defined.
This paper revisits the question of how best to characterize settlements on the metropolitan fringe of developing countries. We examine the socioeconomic composition and structure of such urban fringe settlements, using three sets of household surveys undertaken in Bangkok (Thailand), Jakarta (Indonesia), and Santiago (Chile) during June-August 1990. The findings reveal the metropolitan fringe areas to be populated mainly by middle- and lower-middle-income households formally employed in service occupations. Informal economic activity exists, but is not significant. Micro-enterprises are the exception. Most fringe residents had moved from other neighborhoods within the capital city rather than from rural settlements. Linkages to rural areas and to agriculture are largely absent; the fringe is spatially and functionally well-integrated into the metropolitan economy. The paper recommends that foreign-assistance program officers and local planners resist global “common themes” or approaches to development planning unique to metropolitan fringe areas.
The purpose is to provoke discussion by exploring and elaborating the concept of sustainable livelihoods. It is based normatively on the ideas of capability, equity, and sustainability, each of which is both end and means. In the 21st century livelihoods will be needed by perhaps two or three times the present human population. A livelihood comprises people, their capabilities and their means of living, including food, income and assets. A livelihood is environmentally sustainable when it maintains or enhances the local and global assets on which livelihoods depend, and has net beneficial effects on other livelihoods. A livelihood is socially sustainable which can cope with and recover from stress and shocks, and provide for future generations. Current and conventional analysis both undervalues future livelihoods and is pessimistic. Ways can be sought to multiply livelihoods by increasing resource-use intensity and the diversity and complexity of small-farming livelihood systems, and by small- scale economic synergy. The objective of sustainable livelihoods for all provides a focus for anticipating the 21st century, and points to priorities for policy and research. -from Authors
This study is concerned with the rural-urban fringe as a complex transition zone on the periphery of growing urban areas in Western countries. Case studies of the fringe and related areas are reviewed, and a definition of the rural-urban fringe is suggested. Further, the urban fringe is differentiated from the rural fringe, the former constituting the subzone of most rapid exurban invasion. Hypotheses are postulated regarding the residents, accessibility, and land and dwellings in the fringe, and suggestions for future studies are outlined in the conclusion.
The study analyzed four urban communities in four very different regions: Chawama, in Lusaka, Zambia; Cisne Dos, in Guayaquil, Ecuador; Commonwealth, in Metro Manila, the Philippines; and Angyalfold, in Budapest, Hungary. Although these four case studies revealed interesting contrasts, they also showed important similarities. The findings show that a community's ability to cope with the stress of economic difficulties, is largely affected by its material well-being, as expected. But they also show that a community's coping ability is influenced by its social capital - the trust, reciprocal arrangements, and social networks linking people in the community. Not surprisingly, the study's findings bring out the role of women in vivid relief. Their networks are therefore extremely important as a defense against increased vulnerability and as a basis for action to overcome the conditions of extreme poverty.
Small towns can be effective instruments in developing countries to improve rural-urban linkages, expand market-based agricultural activity, and stimulate non-farm employment opportunities. This article illustrates the basic aspects of a small towns programme in situations where market-based development is the goal. It specifies a set of selection criteria and guidelines for the choice of small towns to be included in such a programme. It discusses a variety of implementation problems which can be anticipated and provides a general schedule for implementation. Finally, it introduces Kenya's Rural Trade and Production Centre. Programme, which can be considered a prototype of a small towns programme, and discusses the processes of location selection, implementation and evaluation of the programme. -Author
Land reform has been high on the development agenda for Uganda since the early 1990s. This paper examines, from an implementation perspective, the processes by which land issues have been integrated into the broader development agenda by first outlining the major linkages between land access, ownership and poverty, then chronicling the treatment of key policy issues in the making of the Constitution of 1995 and the Land Act of 1998. The paper illustrates how the parameters set down in the Constitution defined the scope of redistributive reforms on tenanted land and leasehold land, and the nature of rights to be determined for customary landholders. It then turns to a review of the emergence of discord between the objectives and the resource requirements of the Land Act and the imperatives of national macroeconomic management and national poverty reduction policy as enshrined in the Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAT). The emergence of new methods to bring about greater harmony between the land-reform process and the national poverty reduction strategy since 2000 is elaborated. Finally, the paper highlights some general lessons from the experience of implementation of Uganda's land reform.
Focusing on a dynamic agricultural town in central Brazil, the author analyses that country's transition in popular housing strategies from permissive to restrictive modes of control. In the former, poor urban settlers were allowed ownership of large lots which they could develop as they wished, enabling them to consolidate their domestic economic base in town and expand kinship networks. With increasing migration from the countryside, and an accompanying distrust of these new populations, local planners have implemented tighter controls on housing recipients' use of urban land. This has made housing recipients less self-reliant and more mobile within the city.
The Bicol River Basin Project in the Philippines was designed to clarify the relationships between urban and rural development and to test analytical and planning methodologies. Socio-economic, demographic and physical profiles of the municipalities in the area were prepared and from these centrality, functional complexity and hierarchy analysed. This led to an examination of spatial linkages with respect to transport, communication, economic activity, social interaction and administrative, political and service links. It was possible to identify a set of appropriate services and institutions needed at each of three levels of settlement (rural service, market town and regional urban centre) such that regional economic development would be stimulated - these services and infrastructure are tabulated. -D.Hilling
This paper places the process of extended metropolitanisation within the context of the global-local nexus, or 'glocalisation'. Using the illustration of industrial location decision making in the Extended Bangkok Metropolitan Region, we assess the influence and importance of external and internal forces in giving shape to the process of industrialisation within the region. Research reveals the dominance of international capital and national and local business élites in this process, with the state largely relegated to the role of facilitator, rather than controller. Meanwhile, Thai citizens seem increasingly destined to dance to the tune of international and national capital.
Asian urbanization is entering a new phase that differs significantly from the patterns of city growth experienced in other developing countries and in the developed world. According to a recent hypothesis, zones of intensive economic interaction between rural and urban activities are emerging. The zones appear to be a new form of socioeconomic organization that is neither rural nor urban, but preserves essential ingredients of each. The landscapes in these extended metropolitan zones have changed little over decades. Most people live in villages, and almost all of the land is under cultivation. However, most income now comes from non-agricultural sources. Village and small-town industries provide employment for some family members, who help out in the fields only at planting or harvesting time. Others commute to jobs in the central cities. Still others live in the cities and their satellites, remitting portions of their salaries to the family. This study elaborates on this hypothesis through studies of urban areas in China, India, Indonesia and Japan. Contributors offer different perspectives from a variety of disciplines including geography, regional planning, sociology, economics and public administration. All seek to determine how rapidly, under what circumstances, and on what scale the extended metropolis is emerging.
The authors use a large data set from Ethiopia that differentiates tenure security and transferability to explore determinants of different types of land-related investment and its possible impact on productivity. While they find some support for endogeneity of investment in trees, this is not the case for terraces. Transfer rights are unambiguously investment-enhancing. The large productivity effect of terracing implies that, even where households undertake investments to increase their tenure security, this may not be socially efficient. In Ethiopia, government action to increase tenure security and transferability of land rights can significantly enhance rural investment and productivity.
Explores recent trends in developing and transitional economies in rural-urban, rural, and urban inequality of income and poverty risk, and the offsetting trends in inequality hypothesis (OTI), which claims that, underlying the overall inequality trend, there has been a tendency for rising intrasectoral inequality to be offset by falling rural-urban inequality. The data reviewed in the chapter refute OTI with the possible, partial exception of Latin America: first, the data show no overall tendency for within-country rural-urban inequality to increase or decrease since the 1980s; second, while modest national and regional tendencies exist, they do not, on the whole, offset trends in overall inequality. Urban-rural ratios of both mean consumption and poverty risk have commonly either risen or fallen alongside total inequality, or even been trendless. Changing urban-rural ratios of poverty or per-person consumption need not imply changing urban bias; they may be caused by exogenous changes in relative returns to urban activities, plus entry or exit barriers, although rural-urban inequality trends in 'human development' indicators (literacy, longevity, etc.) do suggest rising urban bias. The chapter is arranged in three sections: Introduction and Summary; Rural-Urban and Intrasectoral Contributions to Changes in the Overall Inequality of Consumption or Income-an econometric analysis; and Changing Rural-Urban Poverty Ratios and 'Urban Bias'. © United Nations University/World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU/WIDER) 2004. All rights reserved.
There is widespread dissatisfaction among African policy makers with the spatial distribution of population and in particular the degree of urban primacy. This paper documents the increasing importance of national urban development strategies in African development plans and examines factors associated with the adoption of these spatial development policies. In particular, the paper finds only a weak relation between urban primacy and the adoption of spatial policy. Other factors such as the stability of governments and the level of national autonomy exhibit a stronger relation with the adoption of both urban system policies in general and policies that focus on market towns and rural service centres. -Author
"This research is stimulated by the preliminary insight that rural households, even if they are poor and/or located in so-called subsistence-oriented regions, are dependent on a variety of farm, nonfarm, and nonagricultural income sources. The scale and nature of these income sources and their relationship to the major economic sectors (agriculture, rural manufacturing, and services), through backward and forward linkages, need to be better understood for priority setting in development policy. The objectives of this study are threefold: 1) to identify employment and income sources of rural households of different socioeconomic characteristics in regions and countries at different stages of agricultural transformation and development; 2) to trace income and employment strategies (as revealed by these) of rural households, and, thus, to broaden the information base for policy priorities for integration of the poor into a sustainable growth and development process. 3) to look into distributions below and above the poverty line in order to identify relevant differences in demographic, income, and employment characteristics of poor and nonpoor rural households and, thereby, assess the scope for "targeting" income sources of the poor as a poverty alleviation strategy. Poverty is essentially, but not always, a matter of low incomes, where the cost of acquiring a certain commodity bundle determines the income- or expenditure-based poverty line. An income-based indicator is an indirect means of measuring poverty. In this study, poverty is measured directly through consumption, given certain commodity characteristics and behaviors, rather than in directly through incomes. A central and fundamental characteristic of absolute poverty is insufficient food consumption for an active and healthy life. The poverty line (cutoff point) is defined here by calorie consumption being 80 percent of the recommended consumption for an active and healthy life." from authors' abstract
Using 2002/03 and 2005/2006 nationally representative household surveys, poverty headcount index declined from 38.8% respectively. The corresponding poverty gap ratio declined from 11.9% to 8.7%. While all Ugandans enjoyed an increase in consumption between the sample periods, the rate of growth in consumption was slightly higher for the lower percentiles. The led to a significant improvement in the distribution of income as demonstrated by the decline in the Gini coefficient from 0.428 to 0.408. The urban areas continue to have higher rates of inequality, nonetheless, they witnessed a significant improvement. the Gini coefficient declined from 0.483 in 2002/03 to 0.432 in 2005/06. Overall, the improvement in the distribution of income had a positive impact on poverty reduction. The poverty headcount in 2005/06 would have been higher by 1.2 percentage points if distribution of income had remained constant at the 2002/03 level. Using static decomposition techniques to examine the pattern of inequality in real consumption between regions and educational attachment of the household head increased over the sample periods. but inequality declined between rural/urban subgroups.
This article compares two approaches to planning the locations of urban functions in developing rural regions. The prevailing functional integration approach gives more weight to integrating and articulating an urban hierarchy than to increasing the access of rural populations to urban-based services. It relies on supply-side descriptions of functional urban hierarchies and linkages and fails to consider effective demand when assessing the provision of services. A demand-based location-allocation approach can be used instead to develop rigorous plans that provide the rural population access to urban facilities, and contain the costs of providing services.
Among migrants in China, one of the most difficult groups to define and measure is that referred to as the floating population (liudong renkou ), a rapidly growing population concentrated largely in urban areas. But who belongs to this floating population? Although this term conjures up images of unsettled persons lacking permanent residence, it is often used ambiguously or denotes distinctly different groups of people. This paper discusses these ambiguities and identifies a variety of definitions that we think are pertinent. The clarification of these definitions leads to a discussion of major sources of data (censuses, migration surveys and household registration lists). Along the way, we review some key empirical findings on China's floating population. We also discuss factors that have affected recent trends and are likely to affect future trends in migration and the floating population.
In Agriculture on the Road to Industrialisation, John Mellor brings together a distinguished group of contributors to examine the lessons drawn from those less developed countries whose success in agricultural development allowed for successful overall economic development. The framework for discussion includes three components: increased productivity resulting from technological change in the agricultural sector; the use of increased agricultural income; and consequent expansion of other sectors of the economy. The volume includes nine case studies. Thailand and Argentina serve as examples of successes due to the expansion in land area given over to agriculture, while Taiwan, Punjab (India), and the Philippines represent contrasting cases because they indicate little agricultural growth through expansion. Kenya, Costa Pica, and Colombia show how acceleration results from the changed composition of production and resulting growth in agricultural exports. Volume editor John Mellor provides an introduction and conclusion drawing out what can be learned from these cases.
Melvin Webber's seminal papers of 1963/64, which posited the arrival of a Nonplace Urban Realm and called upon planners to abandon their obsession with space, have proved highly prescient: metropolitan areas have deconcentrated and spread as he suggested, and the arrival of the informational age further reinforces these trends by creating a spaceless economy. But urban agglomeration economies do continue to operate, and traditional urban nodes will remain important in the new space‐economy.