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SEMINAR 2001 |
THE ARKLETON TRUST
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[CONTENTS] [NEXT PAGE] |
2: Contexta: post-industrial rural conditionsThe older alliances in richer countries between rural and urban actors - for example, between small farmers and industrial labour unions - have collapsed as rural demographic pressures vanished and the presence of the latter diminished on the national stage. Instead, new alliances are being formed, including those with urban-based environmental movements and NGOs and/or human rights movements. However, these can be problematic since what happens on rural land still remains subject to urban power and dreams.As systems of taxation change from direct to indirect (consumption-based) taxes, so different people and social groups now pay for resource- transfers from urban to rural places. This fact has to be seen alongside the changing composition of the urban populations, and the latter's weakening family links with rural people and land. National and global economies have become more centralised, more urban, not less. People in their own communities have their own contexts and own contextual understandings of the issues facing them. If we come in with our understandings, we risk patronising them. In this context, 'empowerment' comes when the different understandings of context are combined - they can strengthen each other. Contextual understandings can help us simplify and warn of dangers. In terms of context, just as there is 'differential economic policy' which is context-dependent, so too we need 'differential social policy' which acknowledges the diversity of local identities and contexts, and incorporates them as the bases of it's fundamental strength.
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