PREFACE TO THE LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN VOLUME

Every modernizing project has inscribed at its core the basic tenet change to consolidate. It is not a question of pretending to make changes so that everything stays the same, but of acknowledging that changes do not take place in a vacuum. They are the result of a particular social journey that draws on the historical legacy of humanity. When changes are profound they do not respond to individual will, although they do demand the sum of many individual wills: they result strictly from a set of experiences and processes that converge at a particular moment to mark the watershed of an era.

It is the duty of the state and society to recognize those moments inscribed with the spirit of change. Good governance requires keeping in step with change. Hasty, uncoordinated, unilateral initiatives undertaken with inadequate social consensus can end up blocking modernizing intentions. At the other extreme, excessive caution winds up extinguishing the vital forces convoked by change.

Each society has arrived at this meeting point by different paths and at divergent moments. What is certain is that the changes we have been a part of have been accepted as a blessing or as fate, driven by some and imposed upon many others. Winners have certainly emerged from the changes in the spheres of commerce, finance communications, culture and geopolitics. But the many losers - or those who see themselves as potential losers - knock on all the doors, even the best-fortified.

What are the most important changes that the Latin American countryside has undergone over the last decade? We can mention four:

One change concerns the new institutionality of agricultural and rural development, promoted by the actions of private, social, governmental and non-governmental social agents. These institutions facilitate diversification of the rural economy with more balanced use of natural and productive resources for achieving sustainable rural development.

Nevertheless there is no point in promoting flexibility, transparency and participation without recognition of diversity and economic and social pluralism.

The important idea is to incorporate the wide variety of strategies and social actors in a wider dialogue that results in inclusion. As de Janvry, Sadoulet and Fafchamps (1989) point out, when the information available is imperfect, it is more important and beneficial for the state to strengthen the negotiating power of the least advantaged than attempt to regulate private contracts.^[1]

This negotiating power (by no means indifferent to economic performance) is a crucial element for producers and the rural poor because in the absence of solid democratic organization and participation, and given the influence of local elites, they will face greater disadvantages under the new conditions of deregulation and flexibility in the organization of production. In other words, it is essential that rural society in all its complexity be reflected in the structure and practices of rural institutions. This will allow the inclusion and consideration of the demands of all social actors, especially those who were excluded from the first phase of reforms.

The second change concerns the feminization of the rural economies of the region. Rural women have assumed the brunt of the burden and the social costs caused by economic globalization. The huge economic transformations undergone in Latin America and the Caribbean in recent decades have had a strong impact on traditional rural life in the region, and rural women have assumed production responsibilities and activities traditionally performed by men. Within their households women develop multiple and varying daily subsistence strategies for feeding their families: they have higher levels of incorporation into rural non-farm jobs than men do, work the family plots, gather and process foods, migrate to the cities to send remittances home and have rapidly entered the salaried workforce. However, those forms of work tend to be more precarious and lower paid and with fewer training opportunities then the work opportunities available to men.

Agricultural and rural development policy must change in order to accompany and facilitate this evolution in the role of rural women. It is unacceptable that there still exist differential restrictions for men and women, such as inequality of access to public services, technical assistance, land ownership, credit and human resources training programmes. These differences are particularly contradictory given that it is often men who have the land but women who work it.

The third change is related to the need for new normative instruments and evaluation methods. Recent experience in Latin America and the Caribbean makes clear that the way that governments deliver assistance to the neediest is undergoing a process of transformation. This process has shown that the design of a model for monitoring and impact evaluation constitutes an essential component of any development programme. The model must allow for orienting day-to-day actions toward an objective and for discovering the real impact of an action on the target population - and its final impact at the level of society as a whole. In the wake of this process, it is essential to recognize that all programmes, policies and projects face limits not only in the area of adoption of technology but also at the level of organizational and institutional capacity, marketing and credit, access to resources and risk management, etc. Such limits affect the various stages of any project from design to execution, so analysis should be repeated over time in order to overcome any “compartmentalization” set out in the original project design.

The role of limitations and restrictions are such that their analysis is placed at the heart of food security programmes and projects. It could be said that all actions performed by a project are essentially responses to explicit or implicit restrictions. Note that such an overall vision turns the concept into a powerful tool for implementing development projects.^[2]

The key to improving project impact lies in involving in the analysis of limitations, from the very beginning, all relevant actors who share a common “territory”: government agencies at all levels, non-governmental organizations, civil society organizations, private enterprise, grassroots organizations and networks.

The analysis of restrictions and limitations must allow for the building of a shared vision of the problems to be overcome as well as the potential of a project. At the same time such an analysis involves identifying a baseline for evaluation. Analyses at the local level should be taken into account to uncover production-level and institutional restrictions, the demand for goods and services, the capacity to communicate that demand and the provision of goods and services that can be made at the local level. Higher-level analyses should also be incorporated, focussed mainly on institutional arrangements regarding the provision of goods and services, private as well as public. The inputs gathered at this level make it possible to (1) generate an “inventory” of public services provided to rural families in the project and (2) identify opportunities for expanding the project to other areas and “scaling up”.

Strategies posed in this fashion have the advantage of separating specific activities aimed at executing a given action (that is, carrying out the strategy) from the ultimate objectives pursued by a development project. As a result, strategies can change constantly over time, but the tools and indicators to measure their impact are held constant during for the course of the project.

The fourth and last change is in relation to rural space and the territorial dimension of development. In recent decades, those trying to implement the prescription of the so-called “Washington Consensus” (privatization, economic deregulation and stabilization), and representatives of civil society opposed to those policies from positions that stress the distributive aspects of development, seem to have joined together in working for decentralization policies (albeit for different reasons). The financial institutions emphasize the importance of an effective and efficient public administration. Many NGOs point out the need to do away with paternalism, corruption and political patronage, and see decentralization as a way to bring about democratization and real citizen participation. The central aspect of a decentralization policy is the redistribution of state power that means - within a democratic general context - returning power in a mutually responsible way to municipalities as well as to civil society organizations and trade associations.

More recently, as a result of the same process of globalization the need has increased for promoting measures focused specifically on reducing socio-economic disparities between regions and cities and optimizing development opportunities. These various measures are now grouped under the term territorial development policies or more simply territorial policy, and they form a fundamental part of regional development.

Regional policies focus not only on the least favoured regions, but on all regions from the richest to the poorest. The goal is not to attract investment to poor regions through subsidies and other benefits for investors, but rather to assure that all regions are capable of maximizing their development opportunities (endogenous development). In pursuing this goal it is crucial to take full advantage of a region’s strengths, the potential draw of its cities and the development of new assets.

Of course it is not a matter of suspending assistance and compensation for the poorest regions that benefit from “financial equalization”, but rather of generating adequate connections and links between those regions that advance at a faster pace and those that do not. Another mainstay of this vision of regional development is the need to involve not only the local authorities but also all members of the community in major decisions. These local supporters are the best means to guarantee that problems are adequately identified, that the solutions adopted are effective and feasible and that the proper priorities have been established.

National competitiveness rests more and more on the strengths and weaknesses of regional economies and on how those subnational territories interact. It is at the local and regional level that possibilities for synergy can be better identified and management/action can be adequately organized. Interactions between economy, environment and society - the determinants of possibly sustainable development - are not uniform across the board.

Two lessons emerge as certainties to orient us in these times of change. The first is that the people, citizens, el pueblo, will oppose any transformation from which they are excluded. The second is that this same pueblo aspires to change that seeks wellbeing but also cries out for identity. The citizens of the world also want to be citizens of their own area, town, neighbourhood or village.