The Antinomies of ‘Financial Inclusion’: Debt,Distress and the Workings of Indian Microfinance

The concept of ‘financial inclusion’ has become a central trope that legitimates a wide range of contemporary development practices. By constructing a new object of development – the ‘financially excluded’ – it facilitates the expansion of an increasingly corporatized microfinance technocracy. The present paper problematizes the underlying binaries of inclusion/exclusion and formal/informal finance upon which this narrative is based. Through an examination of the 2010 Andhra Pradesh microfinance crisis, it demonstrates key contradictions within the discourse and practices of commercial microfinance. In so doing, it demonstrates why the narrative of financial inclusion and its correlate notion of ‘consumption smoothing’ are inadequate tools with which to conceptualize the political economy of contemporary agrarian change.     

Accumulation by Dispossession and Socio‐Environmental Conflicts Caused by the Expansion of Agribusiness in Argentina

Drawing upon the concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, this paper analyses the expansion of agrarian capital in Argentina. A case study illustrates the social and environmental impacts of the expansion of agribusiness in central Argentina and the social struggle – both rural and urban – that has arisen to resist this process. Although government policies after the 2001 crisis differ in many ways from those of the 1990s, current agrarian policies are not significantly distinct from those followed during the pre‐crisis neoliberal period. Rather than ‘post‐neoliberal’, the new model could thus be better described as ‘neo‐extractivist’. With the connivance of the state, agribusiness is producing the largest‐ever transformation of natural capital into economic capital in the history of the region. Moreover, the latest policy developments suggest that Argentina is on the threshold of a new and deeper stage of agrarian capital expansion and wealth concentration, this time operating at a much larger scale.     

The Role of Microfinance in Contemporary Rural Development Finance Policy and Practice: Imposing Neoliberalism as ‘Best Practice’

Microcredit emerged in the 1970s as a mechanism whereby virtually all poor individuals could supposedly escape their poverty through self‐help and individual entrepreneurship. Crucially, neoliberal policy‐makers found the microcredit concept ideologically compelling, and the international development community soon began to provide massive support to establish and expand the microfinance movement. Today, however, even long‐standing microfinance advocates now reluctantly accept that microcredit has actually had no positive impact upon poverty or ‘bottom‐up’ rural development. In fact, those rural communities most exposed to microcredit have been severely damaged in a number of ways, especially through sub‐prime‐style ‘boom‐to‐bust’ episodes. Largely because of its supreme ideological usefulness, the microfinance movement nonetheless still retains some support in the major neoliberal‐oriented international development institutions, pro‐globalization think‐tanks, and in a number of Western governments.     

微型金融的普惠效应实证研究--基于6省4220户农户调查数据

本文利用全国6个省份60县4220户农户的调查数据,运用Probit模型实证检验微型金融机构的普惠效应,即小额信贷是否为中低收入和贫困农户提供信贷支持以及能否利用自身特殊的贷款机制拓展农村金融的覆盖面。实证结果发现,微型金融机构能够将信贷服务向正规金融机构无法覆盖的中等收入群体延伸,其普惠效应主要源自其依托现金流为核心的信贷技术,能够克服传统金融机构大多依赖抵押品的不足。但是,小额信贷的金融普惠程度有一定的局限,无法覆盖那些收入不稳定的贫困程度较深的农户,该结果在采用多层阈值定义贫困农户后依然稳健。     

Land for dignity and struggle for identity: Landlordism and caste in a village of south India

The paper is concerned with the contemporary relevance of caste to agrarian capitalism and the relations of dependency and allegiance it fosters in a village of Andhra Pradesh. It deploys the method of village study to examine the two-way interaction between agrarian class and caste relations and the emerging rural-based informal nonfarm economy. It elaborates the continuation of relations of debt, dependency, and political allegiance fostered by landlordism despite significant diversification to nonfarm by landlords and labour and identifies the crucial role of land inequality and the working of ritual hierarchy in locking Dalit caste in land-based relations of dependency. The paper highlights the importance of expanding the definition of landlordism as the use of social power for accumulation by embedding it in the motives and values generated by the Hindu social order. While the new wave of literature focuses attention on global capital and commodity chains to understand differentiation of rural population and ruralities, the paper emphasizes the persistent significance of landholding provincial capital in shaping class/caste relations and rural politics and argues for a course correction in thinking about the processes of globalization and new forms of labour control and stresses the continuing significance of the agrarian question.     

Effectiveness of Rural Microfinance: What We Know and What We Need to Know

The effectiveness of rural microfinance in improving livelihoods among people living in rural communities remains uncertain. This is not only because of weaknesses in the design and implementation of microfinance, but perhaps more critically because of constraints in the rural financial environment. Despite the existence of limited rigorous studies, this paper presents state‐of‐the‐art evidence on the impact of microfinance on beneficiaries, with particular emphasis on issues of rural finance, and argues that for microfinance to be more effective, not only do new impact methodologies and more diverse types of financial services need to be developed, but also, primarily, risks and operating costs need to be reduced to make rural clients more attractive to financial intermediaries.     

Evo Morales and the MST in Bolivia: Continuities and Discontinuities in Agrarian Reform

There is a widespread understanding in critical scholarly literature that the government of Evo Morales is fundamentally challenging the neoliberal order in Bolivia. The empirical record of Morales' first five years in office, however, illustrates significant neoliberal continuities in the country's political economy. At the same time, the most important social movements that resisted neoliberalism prior to Morales' election have been considerably demobilized in its wake. This gives rise to the critique that the Morales government has merely implemented a more politically stable version of the model of accumulation it inherited. This paper draws on recent field research in Bolivia to make a contribution to this broader research agenda on reconstituted neoliberalism. Our focus is twofold. On the one hand, the paper examines the continuities of agrarian class relations from the INRA law at the height of neoliberalism in 1996 to the various agrarian reform initiatives introduced since Morales assumed office in 2006. On the other hand, the paper traces the mobilization of the Bolivian Landless Peasants' Movement (MST) in response to the failure of the 1996 neoliberal agrarian reform, followed by the movement's demobilization after Morales' 2006 agrarian reform initiative. The paper explores this demobilization in the context of agrarian relations that have remained largely unchanged in the same period. Finally, the paper draws on recent reflections by MST members who, to varying degrees, seem to be growing critical of Morales' failure to fundamentally alter rural class relations, and the difficulties of remobilizing their movement at the present time.     

Agrarian Poverty,Nutrition and Economic Class – A Study of Gujarat,India

This paper analyses poverty and calorific undernourishment in the Indian state of Gujarat, where high and market‐led industrial growth has resulted in rapid economic improvement. The study is carried out through a combination of secondary and survey‐based data. We conclude that the neoliberal agenda of uncontrolled, outward‐looking growth has not resulted in significant reduction of poverty or malnourishment in rural areas. Furthermore, while land ownership is officially used as a proxy for wealth distribution, class position appears a better predictor of poverty status in the rural areas than landownership per se. At the policy level, there is a need to revive the agrarian economy and create new non‐agricultural assets, and the primary focus in the state must shift to the distribution of created assets rather than a single‐minded focus on growth.     

Food Regime Analysis in a Post‐Neoliberal Era: Argentina and the Expansion of Transgenic Soybeans

This paper uses the food regime literature to analyse the political and economic relations promoting the expansion of soybeans in Argentina following the post‐neoliberal turn in the early 2000s. Continuities of the agrarian expansion from the neoliberal to post‐neoliberal model highlight the state's role in supporting a neoliberal food regime. Neoregulation in the post‐neoliberal agenda continues to favour increased production of transgenic food over ecological and human‐health considerations. Moreover, the emergence of new corporate and transnational actors has contributed to a new form of corporate‐agrarian governance premised on biotechnology. First, a food regime lens is used to describe the expansion of transgenic soybeans in Argentina, followed by an analysis of planning documents to show the state's position in reproducing neoliberal discourses and policies favouring the expansion of agriculture. The conclusion discusses the utility of food regime analysis for explaining the new forms of agricultural governance in Argentina.     

Resisting agrarian neoliberalism and authoritarianism: Struggles towards a progressive rural future in Mozambique

After nearly two and a half decades with a Land Law widely considered progressive, Mozambique is preparing to revise its legal framework for land. Land activists accuse the government of pursuing an authoritarian approach, excluding civil society participation, and falsifying public consultations. The revision would mark a major shift in Mozambique's land policy towards an even more neoliberal framework to allow the transfer of individual land titles. This turning point is a crucial moment for popular movements to mobilize against the consolidation of agrarian neoliberalism and fight for pro-poor land policy that benefits small-scale food producers and rural communities at large. While recognizing different rural and agrarian class formations and interests in Mozambique, I argue that embryonic forms of a cross-class alliance are becoming apparent. As deagrarianization proceeds, the National Union of Peasants (UNAC) plays a key role in mobilizing the rural poor — petty commodity producers, farm workers, fishermen, small agrarian capitalists, and agrarian civil society at large — using left-wing populism to oppose agrarian neoliberalism, which takes authoritarian forms.     

United States–Cuba Agricultural Relations and Agrarian Questions

In the wake of Cuba's far‐reaching, halting economic reforms, geopolitical rapprochement and trade openings with the United States (US) offer opportunities and risks for Cuban small‐scale farmers and agrarian cooperatives: pressures, paradoxes and potential abound. Meanwhile, on the margins, agro‐ecologically oriented tours bring admiring US students, farmers and agrarian advocates. Cubans concur that the country must solve key problems in its agricultural sector to overcome the contradictions of its agri‐food model, and that this entails more exchange with the US – but in what capacity and on what terms? The current crossroads begs the classic agrarian question, even as it updates it. Having experienced and survived the promises and disasters of both capitalist and communist agricultural economies, Cuban farmers expand the original ‘peasant’ protagonist. As they navigate new non‐state markets and recent re‐entrenchment of state control of prices, Cuban farmers and cooperatives struggle to avoid monopolizing tendencies of unfettered capitalist as well as communist agricultural economies – both of which have historically been ecologically damaging. US agribusiness courts Cuba, but not as mere unidirectional capture: Cubans are inviting and leveraging trade to end the embargo, which is increasingly being modified altogether. Key Cuban agrarian principles of resilience and cooperativismo have persisted through capitalist and communist crises: could they influence prospects for agro‐industrial hegemony from the North?      

Nonfarm diversification,poverty, economic mobility,and income inequality: a case study in village India

This article assembles data at the all‐India level and for the village of Palanpur, Uttar Pradesh, to document the growing importance, and influence, of the nonfarm sector in the rural economy between the early 1980s and late 2000s. The suggestion from the combined National Sample Survey and Palanpur data is of a slow process of nonfarm diversification, whose distributional incidence, on the margin, is increasingly pro‐poor. The village‐level analysis documents that the nonfarm sector is not only increasing incomes and reducing poverty, but appears as well to be breaking down long‐standing barriers to mobility among the poorest segments of rural society. Efforts by the government of India to accelerate the process of diversification could thus yield significant returns in terms of declining poverty and increased income mobility. The evidence from Palanpur also shows, however, that at the village‐level a significant increase in income inequality has accompanied diversification away from the farm. A growing literature argues that such a rise in inequality could affect the fabric of village society, the way in which village institutions function and evolve, and the scope for collective action at the village level. Failure to keep such inequalities in check could thus undermine the pro‐poor impacts from the process of structural transformation currently underway in rural India.     

Unlocking the Black Box of Institutions in Livelihoods Analysis: Case Study from Andhra Pradesh,India

Weaknesses of sustainable-livelihoods analysis include the neglect of power relations; a focus on the material bases of livelihoods, ignoring social and cultural aspects; and failing to incorporate dynamism. This paper seeks to reinvigorate sustainable-livelihoods frameworks through a broader conceptualisation of institutions which identifies the multiple ways in which they mediate livelihoods. It draws upon Scott's (1995) three pillars of institutions (regulative, normative and cognitive) and the three schools of neo-institutionalism (rational, cultural and historical) to present a more comprehensive approach to understanding the ways in which institutions mediate livelihoods. These approaches are in themselves limited in their understanding of agency and institutional transformation. The paper argues that attention to “complex subjectivities” and contestations over meaning within a broader institutional context can identify entry points for strategic development interventions. The utility of the approach for development practice and research is demonstrated through its application to rural livelihoods in Andhra Pradesh, India.     

A meta-analysis examining the nature of trade-offs in microfinance

This meta-analysis reviews existing evidence on the ability of microfinance institutions (MFI) to achieve social and financial goals simultaneously. Through an initial screen of 3088 articles covering empirical tests on microfinance performance trade-offs, I synthesize 623 empirical findings from 61 studies to identify the dimensions of MFI performance, and study characteristics associated with trade-offs between financial and social objectives Overall, findings suggest that depth of outreach, cost of outreach, and efficiency indicators increase the prevalence of trade-offs, while risk indicators are associated with fewer trade-offs. Profitability indicators and outreach to women are found to have no significant effect on performance trade-offs. Additionally, study characteristics suggest that using an economic frontier methodology or publishing in development journals increases the incidence of trade-offs, while time trends reveal that trade-offs become less acute as the industry matures. Consequently, MFIs face difficult decisions in relation to the possibility that social goals need be sacrificed to achieve financial sustainability.     

The winding paths of peripheral proletarianization: Local labour,world hegemonies,and crisis in rural Colombia

This paper analyses the spatial and temporal patterning of Colombia's rural coffee, banana, and coca‐producing labour regimes. The violent labour repression and endemic crises of labour control characterizing these regimes challenge the market despotism paradigm that predominates in scholarly analysis of 21st century labour and agrarian struggles. Instead, I draw from early and later writings of Giovanni Arrighi and his collaborators to develop a new labour regime framework that is sensitive to the experiences of capitalist development in “hostile environments” (i.e., peripheral market conditions) and “hostile times” (periods of world hegemonic decline). In doing so, I highlight the deep social contradictions—crises, violence, and labour militancy—that result from processes of peripheral proletarianization and the ways that these contradictions were mitigated and/or exacerbated by the rise of U.S. global hegemony, Colombian developmental policy, and local agrarian struggle.     

Reframing ‘Crisis’ in Fair Trade Coffee Production: Trajectories of Agrarian Change in Nicaragua

A focus on crisis provides a methodological window to understand how agrarian change shapes producer engagement in fair trade. This orientation challenges a separation between the market and development, situating fair trade within global processes that incorporate agrarian histories of social change and conflict. Reframing crisis as a condition of agrarian life, rather than emphasizing its cyclical manifestation within the global economy, reveals how market‐driven development encompasses the material conditions of peoples' existence in ambiguous and contradictory ways. Drawing on the case of coffee production in Nicaragua, experiences of crisis demonstrate that greater attention needs to be paid to the socioeconomic and political dimensions of development within regional commodity assemblages to address entrenched power relations and unequal access to land and resources. This questions moral certainties when examining the paradox of working in and against the market, and suggests that a better understanding of specific trajectories of development could improve fair trade's objective of enhancing producer livelihoods.     

Claiming the Grounds for Reform: Agrarian and Environmental Movements in Indonesia

This essay examines the convergences, tensions and mutual influences of agrarian and environmental movements in Indonesia and their connections to transnational movements under state-led development and neoliberal governance regimes. The authors argue that environmental movements of the last quarter of the twentieth century affected the strategies, struggles, mutual relations with, and public discourses of resurgent agrarian movements in diverse ways. Environmental movements had significant influences on national policy, law and practice within a decade of their emergence under the state-led development regime of President Suharto. Environmental activists used the appearance of technical 'apolitical' concerns to their advantage. They mobilized at multiple scales, targeting laws and other institutions of state power at the same time as organizing the grassroots. The repression of the Suharto regime forced agrarian reform activists underground, while environmental issues were mainstreamed. Agrarian movements in Indonesia today, under a decentralized regime dominated by neoliberal policies, have faced new opportunities and constraints due to national and transnational influences of environmental and agrarian reform discourses and networks. We show how these influences have changed the political fields within which Indonesian agrarian movement groups operate: forming, shifting and struggling over critical alliances.     

Land Tenure and Tenure Regimes in Mexico: An Overview

This article provides an overview of the evolution of land tenure and tenure regimes in rural Mexico from colonial times to the present. It shows how, by the late nineteenth century, the dual system of indigenous communal tenure and Spanish and criollo landholdings was undermined by liberal legislation that sought to privatize community lands. This resulted in a process of disappropriation and concentration of land in a few hands, which created the setting for rural upheaval during the Mexican revolution and for the subsequent redistributive land reform and the creation of a 'social sector' consisting of ejidos and agrarian communities. By the 1960s, however, the reform sector began to enter into crisis. A reform of the Constitution and new agrarian legislation of 1992 opened the way to privatization of land in the social sector, expecting that this would dynamize production. It is shown that this has not been the case. In a context of globalization and asymmetric free-trade relations the crisis has only deepened.     

From Agrarian Reform to Ethnodevelopment in the Highlands of Ecuador

Through an examination of interventions in the agrarian structures and rural society of the Ecuadorian Andes over the past 40 years, this article explores the gradual imposition of a particular line of action that separates rural development from the unresolved question of the concentration of land ownership and wealth among the very few. This imposition has been the consequence, it is argued, of the new development paradigms implemented in Andean peasant communities since the end of land reform in the 1970s. The new paradigms emphasize identity and organizational aspects of indigenous populations at the expense of anything connected with the class‐based campesinista agenda, which was still operational in the indigenous movement in the early 1990s. The essay concludes with some thoughts on the remarkable parallels between the 1990s neoliberal and counter‐reformist models of action, and the pre‐reformist indigenist policies of the period that ended in the 1960s.     

Institutional Diversity and Capitalist Transition: The Political Economy of Agrarian Change in Arunachal Pradesh, India

This paper contributes a preliminary analysis of the process of agrarian capitalist transition in Arunachal Pradesh, one of the least studied regions of India. Primarily based on information collected through a field survey in eleven villages, the paper seeks to explain the nature and implications of institutional unevenness in the development of capitalism. Institutional diversity is not simply mapped across space, it is also manifested in the simultaneous existence of market and non-market institutions across the means of production within the same village or spatial context. In addition, there is a continuous and complex interaction among these institutions which both shapes and is shaped by this capitalist transition. Primitive accumulation emerges as a continuing characteristic of the on-going agrarian and non-agrarian capitalist transition. Institutional adaptation, continuity and hybridity are as integral to the emergence of the market economy as are the processes of creation of new institutions and demise of others. There is no necessary correspondence between the emerging commercialization of the different productive dimensions of the agrarian economy. These uneven processes are deeply influenced by existing and emerging power relations and by the state. Framed by the Bernstein–Byres debate about the contemporary (ir)relevance of the agrarian question, evidence is presented to justify the conclusion that although the processes at work are far from the classical models of the transition to capitalism, all aspects of the agrarian question remain relevant.