IS CLASH OF INSTITUTIONS A CAUSE OF RURAL POVERTY?

Category: Resource Constraints

Access to resources is regulated through institutions. For example, in parts of Africa if a widow wishes to invest in a farm she may not be able to do so because the land is owned by her late husband's family. The institution of land ownership determines her poverty. Institutions are sometimes defined as the "rules of the game". Escape from poverty depends on the rules determining access to vital resources. Sometimes the market is the institution that prevails. Land or seeds can be bought. In such a case the rules governing market transactions are generally clearly specified and upheld by courts. For this reason the market is often termed a "formal" institution. But in other cases the "rules of the game" are tacit and locally variable. Communities may have varying notions of how individuals or families should acquire land, whether a young men has to supply labour "free" to those who give him a wife, or whether seeds are communal heritage not to be bought or sold. These customary rules are not always documented and protected by national law. Such institutions are termed "informal". Real societies are a historically determined mix of varied and sometimes competing "formal" and "informal" institutions.

It is sometimes proposed that "clash of institutions" (e.g. tensions between a land market and family rules of land inheritance) is a factor determining poverty in developing countries. Serfdom and family land tenure have been proposed as sources of conflict and poverty in some war-affected African countries. The advance of the market is widely seen as a solution to poverty in such circumstances, but it is not always clear how this advance is to be engineered where community informal rules defend the common interest of the poor (as in the case of African "family" land tenure, for example). Adding further to the analytic challenge are the different traditions of institutional analysis. Economists, for example, may treat only "formal" institutions, while anthropologists fly to the other extreme, and study only those "informal" institutions deeply embedded in local cultures. A bias to either extreme is not a sound basis for objective assessment.

The present research is a cooperation between anthropologists and economists intended to ensure a rounded approach to the full range of institutions at play in determining poverty and poverty-alleviation. The work will be done in a conflict-recovery region because war often leads to the collapse of institutional arrangements, and post-war recovery reveals how prior institutional arrangements are rebuilt or new ones devised, and whether old (or new) clashes re-ignite. The idea of an institution as "rules of the game" is the key to our research strategy, since we deploy an experimental methodology based on games devised by both disciplines to test key hypotheses concerning institutional behaviour. We run these games with village populations to assess (through statistical means) whether and to what extent institutional values clash - e.g. whether patronage relations inhibit profit maximizing behaviour. We then work with participants to develop a reflexive understanding of the institutional values in play, where conflict exists, and where it could be eased, especially to the benefit of the poorest and most marginalized groups. We think the results will be important to a wide range of stakeholders, starting with village participants, but also to civil society groups, development agencies and government policy makers implementing post-war recovery and reform programmes, and to entrepreneurs seeking to provide new services such as seed supply and rural banking. The work will be done in Sierra Leone and cross-border communities in Liberia and Guinea - a heavily war-affected region. There will be case studies on land, labour, seeds and rural credit.

In addition to academic impact (as described under "Academic beneficiaries") the project aims to provide new insights for governmental and non-governmental organizations concerned with market reform, development and post-conflict reconstruction. In Sierra Leone, there are currently a number of policy debates and reconstruction initiatives aimed at reform of informal institutions (focusing on land tenure and family law, for example). Our work intends to facilitate debate and intervention around these issues by providing a clearer framework for thinking about formal-informal institutional interaction effects. Better knowledge of institutional interaction dynamics should assist policymakers, civil society activists and rural development organizations to better articulate their reform goals and to shape tailor-made interventions (in particular those addressed to the needs of historically marginalized groups of women and youth).

A number of sector-specific stakeholder groups in Sierra Leone engaged with this reform agenda have expressed interest in our research. These include (i) the Governance Stakeholder Forum, which includes all relevant organizations that work on governance issues and invite experts to share and translate knowledge into concrete actions and (ii) the Governance Transparency Working Group which includes previous DFID grantees that work with various local partners and (iii) the network belonging to the Partners in Conflict Transformation program. Professor Conteh's connections with the rural banking and agri-business sector will also be important as a pathway to impact for our findings in the rapidly changing agricultural sector. We also intend to further develop our links with the conservation sector through the policy advice and research results we currently make available to the Gola Forest Project and Trans-Boundary Peace Park.

Change in informal institutions can only, eventually, come from within, so it is also very important that we create impact pathways for communicating results of village experiments to villagers themselves. Anthropological observations upon these experiments have proven, already, to be an interesting way to generate an agenda of discussion points for engaging villagers in reflexive debates about how local, informal institutions work, and whether and how they might work differently. We plan to make this kind of "debriefing debate" a more regular part of our research output, and will seek to organise village feedback as research results take shape. This will be a particular responsibility for the Njala team under guidance of Professor Richards. They will then look for opportunities to incorporate the approach in the regular work of civil society consortia currently working towards rural institutional reform in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia.

Workshop activity for stakeholders, at the beginning of the project, will be an important means to open up some of these pathways to impact, and to generate interest in the study among members of the potential user community. These activities are fully budgeted within the proposal.

We also intend to convene a small advisory board of key academic/policy experts (a combined team of top anthropologists and economists) for quality assurance throughout the project and provide for yet another channel to disseminate our research to the wider academic community and (international) policy arena. Wageningen University will bear all costs associated with having a functional advisory board. We will seek to invite them at the stakeholder workshop and envision another meeting halfway through the project. In between we will consult them through virtual meetings including webinars, conference calls and email correspondence.