Re-imagining the Rural-Urban Continuum

URBANRURAL DESAKOTARe-Imagining Desakota through a “Toad’s Eye Science” Approach

Dipak GyawaliSTEPS Center Pathways to Sustainability ConferenceContesting Sustainabilities in the Peri-Urban Interface

Re-imagining the Rural-Urban Continuum

URBANRURAL DESAKOTA

Urban

UrbanRural DesakotaRegion

Desakota: the co-penetration of rural and urban systems

Re-imagining the Rural-Urban Continuum

URBANRURAL DESAKOTA

Re-imagining the Rural-Urban Continuum

URBANRURAL DESAKOTA

• Picture of truck/diesel pump

Re-imagining the Rural-Urban Continuum

URBANRURAL DESAKOTADesakota Criteria

• Greater connectivity – physical, electronic, cultural. – This connectivity contributes to time-space collapse.

• Greater penetration of cash economy with remnants of reciprocity mechanisms on the decline.

– Increasing market linkages are facilitating the predominance of a cash economy over reciprocity mechanisms, with much of it in the informal sector rather than the formal.

• Mixed livelihoods drawing upon local and non-local service and manufacturing opportunities.

– Household income baskets contain a mix of rural and urban characteristics.• Greater diffusion of modern production and resource extractive

technologies. – Modern technologies are gaining predominance over conventional and traditional means of

resource harvesting or harnessing, with implications on demands and pressures on natural resources.

• Tensions between formal and informal and traditional institutions for resource management.

– Institutionally, desakota regions are often characterized by a poorly linked mix of formal institutions, declining or evolving traditional institutions and emergent informal institutions filling the gaps and often encroaching across enclave boundaries.

Re-imagining the Rural-Urban Continuum

URBANRURAL DESAKOTAKnowledge Systems

• Disjuncture between ‘high’ science used by global decision-makers and ‘low’ science coming from tradition and everyday experience and interactions

• Need for a communication strategy between global and local decision-making to mutually feed research needs

• Basis for projecting future from historical probabilities are evaporating, requiring new approaches that incorporate higher levels of uncertainty, both physical and social

• Social sciences face the challenge of coping with new categories and concepts beyond past dichotomies such as ‘rural’/’urban’ or ‘formal’/’informal’ divide

• Adaptive learning between locally and globally generated knowledges

Re-imagining the Rural-Urban Continuum

URBANRURAL DESAKOTAEcosystems and Desakota:Institutions

Institutional challenge:- Rapid, informal development- Changing livelihoods, less

dependency on proximate ecosystem services

- Lack of ‘reach’ of existing institutions

- Growth of informal markets for provisioning services, but not on management

- Locational disjuncture between “ecosystem” itself and service it provides

RURALPishin

URBANQuetta

RURALMastung

Urban Influence Rural Influence

Example: Balochistan, Pakistan

Re-imagining the Rural-Urban Continuum

URBANRURAL DESAKOTA

Re-imagining the Rural-Urban Continuum

URBANRURAL DESAKOTA

CLIMAX COMMUNITYniche-dependentinterdipendencek-strategists

COMPOST

Unstructuredfragmentaion

ENCLAVES OF LOW-LEVEL ENERGYUnspeicalized co-operation(energy-fixing)

PIONEER COMMUNITYUnspecialized com-pitetion of omnivo-rous opportunitistsr-strategists

Hierarchism ofResponsibilitesand Power Over (Coercive)

Fatalism of Risk andPower to Resist (bywithholding consent)

Egalitarianism ofRights and Power toLead (moral)

Individualism ofRewards and Powerwith (persuasive)

MunicipalitiesUrban Slums

Rural SubstistenceHinderland

Desakota

Adapted from: Thompson 2008. Organizing and Disorganizing, Triarchy Press UK.

Cultural Theory of Change: Ecology, Economics, Habitat and the Dynamics of Plural Rationalities

Upward Slums

Re-imagining the Rural-Urban Continuum

URBANRURAL DESAKOTADesakota, Poverty and ES

Understanding poverty• Changing concepts of who is

considered “poor”• Understanding factors that contribute

people to move in and out of poverty • Limitations of existing poverty

measures• offers opportunities for moving out of

poverty,• Mobility, diversified livelihoods, non-

farm employment• Transport, access to markets• Communication and knowledge of

markets, technologies

Remittance income

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1995 1998 2002 2004

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Worker's remittance FDI

Re-imagining the Rural-Urban Continuum

URBANRURAL DESAKOTADesakota, ES and Poverty