Chapter 3

The Rural-Urban Dichotomy Reexamined: Beyond the Ersatz Debate? (Page 47

to 67)
BRUCE KOPPEL

Socioeconomic evolution in Asia during the last four decades has been extraordinary,
both for what has changed and what has not. Certainly two major motifs in any
summary of this evolution are urbanization and rural development -- two processes,
commonly studied independently but tacitly recognized to be linked if not always
correlated.

Conceptually, what the links are and how they actually function have been the subject
of much debate. A cardinal characteristic of this debate that is not well recognized is
the delusory alternative it has pressed upon its protagonists. On one path are the
arguments about how the evolvements, interests, and destinies of one process
(urbanization or rural development) constrain, liberate, or otherwise influence the
evolvements, interests, and destinies of the other. The best-known example of this
path is the urban bias debate. On what has unfolded as the "other" path are the
arguments that neither urbanization nor rural development is as discriminating or
incisive a force as others that not so much link but transcend rural-urban relations --
most notably class, but also, through vehicles such as area studies, themes of history,
culture, and politics. 1

Thus, there are two paths: urban-rural relations as different forms of equilibrium and
urban-rural relations as subordinate to other societal processes. Within the landscape
bounded by these two paths, the arguments about urban-rural relations in Asia can be
stratified according to a number of criteria, as any listing of disciplinary subfields in
Asian development studies will attest. It has been acknowledged periodically that the
conduct of the urban-rural relations argument is organized in such a way. However, it
has been less readily acknowledged that the most serious cumulative consequence of
the urban-rural relations debate has been its contribution not to the stratification but
rather to the polarization of development studies. 2 In "urban" as well as propositions
about linkages have all become increasingly elliptical, while dialogue between
proponents of the concepts has been reduced to near ritualized exchanges of
stereotypes.

The alternatives in the debate as it is understood are a deceptive dilemma because the
choice is artificial. It is an ersatz debate. Between and perhaps alternative to the two
alternatives, there is a middle ground that has never been adequately mapped. The
middle ground consists of the linkages, which have by and large been consistently
ignored as having any independent reality. Linkages in the urban-rural relations
debate are presented either as fundamentally derivative of urban or rural realities (e.g.,
seasonal and circular migration, nonfarm labor markets, roads) or as illusory
misspecifications altogether, better replaced by other kinds of articulation concerns
(e.g., the conflicts between class formation and division of labor processes at local,
regional, national, and global scales; between culture and resources; and between
history and the state).

There are good reasons now to argue for the middle ground, for the reality of rural-
urban linkages not as derivations or reflections, but as representative and indicative of
independent social facts -- taking form, evolving, and varying for reasons attributable
to urbanization and rural development; to look at a number of other social, economic,
and political processes; and to explore causes that are idiosyncratic to these linkages
in specific cultural and historical circumstances. Once the conceptual inertia,
institutionalized in both intellectual and political paradigms, is exposed and
acknowledged, then numerous anomalies and issues arise where few have been seen.
The anomalies and issues will be uncovered by exploring the question, "What is the
future of rural Asia?"

OVERCOMING INERTIA: ANOMALIES IN ASIA

Asia presents many fundamental social, cultural, political, and economic changes --
some underway for a considerable amount of time -- as well as some significant
examples of preservation. These processes do not always dovetail with the concepts
"urban" and "rural." Some people are now sensing that the scope and implications of
change under way in Asia may be seriously misunderstood if strict adherence to older
distinctions is maintained and question whether the rural-urban dichotomy (or is it a
continuum?) offers the best foundation for understanding of these processes.

One can begin with a simple acknowledgment of the spatial connotations of "rural"
and "urban" and then proceed to the complex understandings that have grown about
and around the idea of "the urban"what amounts to a quarantining of conceptual
development processes, concepts of "rural" and and "the rural" in Asia, ideas ranging
from the political economy of the urban bias and the liberal economy of the
expanding market to the geographic progression of urban culture and the urbanization
of rural space. However, when these themes are "tested" against both historical and
contemporary evidence of what has happened and is now happening within and
between "urban" and "rural" Asia, what soon emerges bears little resemblance to the
well-ordered landscape promised by the dichotomy.

The following antonymous pairs are striking: (1) converging material cultures
coexisting with diverging ethical-religious cultures; (2) converging
"commercialization" of economic relations coexisting with diverging social and
political foundations of exchange; (3) converging patterns of social practice
coexisting with diverging patterns of cultural interpretation; (4) converging patterns of
class formation and political expression coexisting with diverging patterns of
economic organization and social movement; and (5) converging patterns of human
settlement and material culture coexisting with diverging patterns of social
community and historical consciousness. The rural-urban dichotomy can certainly
array the processes referenced in the pairs, but in doing so do "rural" and "urban"
become metaphorically translucent lenses diffusing considerably more light than they
focus?

For instance, despite rapid levels of Asian city growth in recent decades, it is still true
and it is likely to remain true for some time to come that most people in Asia live in
what are usually called "rural places." Similarly, rapid growth in the numbers of
people living in very large metropolitan areas will undoubtedly continue. These are
not unrelated or unimportant facts, but does intelligibility of these facts require the
primacy of a rural-urban distinction to illuminate the processes these facts represent?
Could the rural-urban distinction fix excessive attention on facts such as population
densities and a particular view of their underlying processes, and divert attention from
other facts that may be indicators of concurrent processes of equal or superior
importance? As settlements designated as urban (often only because of passing some
threshold size) proliferate throughout the countryside, as agrarian modes of
production are increasingly supplemented by nonagrarian modes in rural areas and
industrial modes of production are supplemented by nonindustrial modes of
production in urban areas, and as population densities in both agrarian and
nonagrarian areas increase, does a rural-urban appellation offer the most incisive
appreciation of what is going on?

What kinds of systemic understandings, spatially and temporally, do the rural-urban

distinction yield? Two key contributions have been diffusion and urban hierarchies.
Diffusion studies have been impressive
in tracking the movement of items of material culture across space and time.
However, diffusion research has been weak in comprehending and incorporating
broader systemic processes from which material culture draws substance. Research on
urban hierarchies has drawn attention to linkages between settlements, relying heavily
on land use, transportation, and markets as both causes and products of a presumed
evolutionary process. Nevertheless, urban hierarchy research has been stronger at
documenting relationships within the hierarchy between primary and secondary cities
than at documenting the significance of lower order associations or in offering a
nontrivial view of what is excluded by the entire hierarchy.

As settlement hierarchies become more complex in Asia, an important stress is

revealed: while "rural-urban" is often proclaimed as a continuum (permitting
gradations, for example, of urban functions across space), it is almost always applied
as a dichotomy. The dichotomy is implicit in the assumption that rural equals a
peasant mode of production, whereas all market-oriented forms of agriculture are
considered incipient expressions of urban functions. Is the problem one of
measurement, or is rural-urban inadequate as a continuum vision? In terms of first-
order differences, there are meaningful distinctions between primate cities and
unsettled wastelands, but moving from these end points toward the middle, does
urban-rural continue to discriminate the most important differences or identify the
most important similarities? Has the concept of an urban hierarchy yielded a view of
system definition and boundaries that cannot comfortably accommodate an overlap in
urban-rural relations?

A PATH THROUGH THE MIDDLE GROUND: RURAL TRANSFORMATION

Throughout Asia, a fundamental change is under way in what rural societies are, what
life in rural societies means, what relationships of rural societies to nations-at-large
signify, and what rural societies are becoming. A transformation has been unfolding
that encompasses agriculture and agrarian society within a broader set of social,
economic, political, and cultural relationships. Within these broader relationships,
traditional distinctions and meanings that have served so long to maintain the unique
identities of rural societies are losing their legitimacy. The questions "what is rural
society?" and "does rural society have a future?" are real.

For example, increasingly, visions of rural society's future in Asia are stylized,
sometimes idealized, portraits, and their staunchest advocates cannot be certain
whether they are valid or durable. Distinctions between rural and urban, agricultural
and industrial, socialist and capitalist, public and private, growth-oriented and equity-
oriented, bottomup and top-down -- each of which formerly helped organize
understandings of rural development processes and outcomes -- now appear
dramatically less appropriate and compelling when set against the complexities of
Asia's rural transformation. Cut loose from these anchors, how is one to understand
where rural society is going and why? How is one to discern the difference between
change that marks new direction and change that represents only a deviation from
trend? Too many of the attempts to answer these questions are weakened by the
failure to step outside prevailing dichotomies or to recognize that the dichotomies are
part of the problem. And too many attempts have been obscured by broad debates
pitting conviction of historical inevitability and global incorporation against faith in
self-determination and managed interdependence.

Dimensions of Transformation
Some of the broader dimensions of Asia's rural transformation are relatively well
known and widely discussed. These dimensions include the relationships of social,
cultural, political, and economic change in rural areas with processes of urbanization
and industrialization. There are other relationships and processes, closely related to
urbanization and industrialization, that are both distinct and significant. For example:
(1) the increasing importance for national economic development of international
trade in rural natural and human resources (primarily agriculture, forestry, and mineral
products, as well as labor) is influencing organization, control, and content of rural
resource valuation, allocation, and utilization; (2) the widening scope of rural
participation in domestic trade relationships and the increasing importance of nonrural
economic power in rural economic life are influencing the fundamental
socioeconomic organization of rural systems; (3) the increasing complexities,
capacities, and ambitions of contemporary national administration, communication,
and political systems increase the susceptibility of rural areas and societies to
tradeoffs and even reorganization defined (and sometimes imposed) by nonrural
forces; and (4) agrarian vision -- a core component of long-held national policy
premises and developmental visions about the fundamental distinctiveness of rural
areas -- is undergoing reconsideration, conducted in a context that transcends
traditional agrarian society. Clearly, the overall transformation is multidimensional
and is taking different forms. These different forms illustrate at least three broad
common characteristics of rural transformation processes.

First, Asia's rural transformation has historical momentum. Contemporary

transformation processes are closely associated with urbanization and specifically
industrialization, but it would be misleading to conclude that rural transformation is
simply the underside of urbanization and industrialization. In many cases both
processes are more closely associated with even broader changes in international and
domestic development patterns, changes that have already had significant social,
cultural, economic, and political consequences. The most notable examples are the
experiences of colonialism, incorporation into national and global trading systems, the
demographic transition, and the increasing mobility of population, technology, and
information.

Second, the transformation process is uneven in terms of which individuals, groups,

areas, structures, processes, and functional relationships are affected and when and
how they are affected. Rural transformation occurs on two not entirely distinct scales.
On a scale internal to rural society, transformation is an evolution of the structure,
composition, and functions of traditional social, political, and economic institutions.
On a scale external to rural society, transformation is historically more discontinuous,
characterized by the imposition of relationships, structures, and processes that can
significantly modify and ultimately displace existing patterns of rural resource
management, economic development, social mobility, and political determination.
The transformation can occur on both scales simultaneously. Rural manifestations of
religious and cultural fundamentalism often have both external and local origins.
Similarly, while the technological change and institutional and policy supports
associated with Asia's Green Revolution were "external," their agrarian effects were
significantly shaped by patterns of rural organization and change that were "internal."

Third, although it is meaningful to speak of a transformation, it is more substantive in

context to seek and recognize multiple processes, multiple transformations. The most
subtle unevenness of the transformation of rural societies in the Asia-Pacific region is
the coexistence, but not necessarily the correlation, of numerous transformations.
Equating rural transformation with only one process, which is commonly done when a
transformation is described as a nonmarket to market or capitalist transition or a rural
to urban metamorphosis, ignores many other processes also occurring that may have
very complex and possibly distant relationships. These numerous transformations
might include processes of political assimilation, mobilization, dissolution,
imposition, and cooptation; processes of social differentiation, interrelation,
interdependence, insulation, and dependence; processes of cultural innovation,
revitalization, suppression, and restoration -- multiple processes that can be expressed
in multiple forms of human organization, activity, and belief and that can be
interrelated in a wide range of tapestries.

Rural Transformation: Some Points on the Middle Ground

A transformation perspective reaches beyond dichotomies and discontinuities to
issues of interrelationships and continuities. This is not to suggest that transformation
is a "theory" or otherwise an alternative to the rural-urban categorization but rather
that transformation can be one perspective from which to assess when, to what
degree, and under what circumstances a rural-urban understanding is appropriate.
However, for a transformation perspective to play this role, the perspective cannot be
bound to the assumption that there is a "middle" ground or that it is defined as lying
between rural and urban.

Questions have to be asked that go beyond the lines of existing debates. For example,

If (and as) fundamental changes occur in what rural society is, what will happen to the
other social, cultural, economic, and political forms that are the pillars of the
contemporary Asian state? If (and as) the metaphor of the rural society "dies," can the
allegory of a national society long "live"?

Agrarian development must move well beyond established and important concerns
about the social organization of production to fundamental questions. What is
agriculture becoming as a mode of production? How is the ecological, economic,
political, and social significance of agriculture changing? How are the relationships of
agriculture and agrarian society with other modes of production changing?

Employment generation must move well beyond the important concerns of wages and
job tenure to more fundamental questions. What is work? How are the demographic,
economic, political, psychological, and social meanings of work changing? With what
implications for strategies that would "develop" employment?

Indeed, even rural development must move well beyond the important concerns of
productivity and equity to more fundamental questions. What is rural society? How
are the economic, moral, political, and social meanings of rural society changing?
With what implications for strategies that would "develop" rural societies?

Such questions, even in very abbreviated form, can have significant implications for
understanding rural Asia. To see these implications more clearly, it is useful to
consider an illustrative agenda of rural transformation themes and to ask what types of
questions might be raised in the course of understanding the meanings of such
themes. An eightitem agenda will be considered. As a thematic agenda is considered,
it is important to emphasize that the idea of transformation is not linked to any
specific "theory" for organizing understanding of rural Asia nor is it intended as a
fashionable code word to veil an inadequate understanding of rural Asia. The idea of
transformation stands as a perspective from which to reassess what needs to be
understood about rural Asia; indeed, the idea of transformation stands as a perspective
from which to consider whether the very concept of rural Asia is everywhere and
equally meaningful.

Rural Transformation: A Thematic Agenda

The Future of Agriculture. The transformation of agriculture in Asia is an ongoing
story, but it is clearly a story that has unfolded at a more rapid pace during the last
three decades. Since the early 1960s, production of major food grains in Asia has
increased as a result primarily of technological innovation represented by higher-
yielding varieties (the Green Revolution), infrastructure improvement represented by
significant investments in roads and irrigation, and more intensive cultivation
represented by double-cropping on newly irrigated fields and the opening of new
agricultural areas. In many parts of Asia, meat products and processed foods have
become more important parts of human diets, generating new types of agricultural and
food enterprises in both rural and urban settings and new demands for agricultural and
food imports. The organization of postharvest operations for major food grains, from
milling and processing to reconstitution and marketing (especially in urban areas), has
become a larger scale and more complex operation; involving a mix of state and
private actors, mobilizing both domestic and foreign capital. Food policy -- the effort,
in principle, to strike a balance between low consumer prices (consistent with
reducing inflationary pressures on wages) and high producer prices (consistent with
ensuring incentives for adequate domestic production and possibly reducing
incentives for rural-urban migration) -- has had a mixed record and, in some
countries, may even have resulted in suppressing both agricultural incomes and
productivity without noticeably improving price stability or overall nutrition levels.

These and related research and policy concerns will remain important, but additional
and potentially more important issues are emerging. It is increasingly apparent that
what agriculture is today and what agriculture will become will not be purely or even
predominantly the outcome of factors and relationships internal to agriculture.
Instead, the future of agriculture is being increasingly mediated by processes that are
external to agriculture. Some of these processes, most notably the expansion of
agriculture's relationships to broader product and factor markets and changing
relations of production and exchange characteristics of agriculture, have been under
way for some time. 3 Contemporary indicators of these processes include the
increasing importance of purchased inputs "imported" into producing areas, the
increasing share of production that is marketed outside producing areas (even when
food needs in producing areas have not been met), the increasing proportion of farm
household income that comes from off-farm sources, and the increasing share of
disposable farm household income that goes to food purchases. On the horizon,
however, are even more fundamental changes in the content and significance of
agriculture.

In what currently still are viewed as "marginal" areas, population movements,

accelerated patterns of natural resource exploitation, and the juxtaposition of
"traditional" and "modern" agricultural systems together create the potential for
altering the socioeconomic and ecological foundations of agricultural evolution. In
question are what agriculture is becoming in many "secondary" agricultural regions,
and what changing levels of contact with regional and domestic commodity and factor
markets and increased accessibility to the national agricultural support system mean
for the structure, content, and control of agriculture in marginal areas. 4

A technology transformation is also in progress. Science and technology are holding

out the subtle but enticing prospect of substantially increased and less variable
production in the framework of production systems that may be very different from
those common today. What then will hybridization of basic food crop seeds mean for
the relationships between Asia's small farmers and domestic agricultural support
systems? For the vulnerability of small farmers to periodic food security episodes?
For the ability of the state (and the market) to "enforce" grades and standards? Who
will be the agents and the benefactors of the more proprietary technology
dissemination systems likely to be facilitated? What will the increasing privatization
of germplasm materials and germplasm-based research mean for the "publicly"
supported agricultural support system? For the management of the specific natural
systems where these germplasm materials currently exist in the wild? What will
happen to land prices, tenure systems, and usufruct arrangements when variation in
land quality can be overcome through relatively low private investment in the
application of technology rather than relatively high private investment in land
infrastructure?

Biotechnology and other forms of technology transformation and, more important,

their political and economic correlates already show significant potential not simply
to modify (or in some cases enhance) existing technological bases of agricultural
production, food processing and animal husbandry, but also to be very compatible
with a reorganization of the economic, institutional, and political foundations of
agriculture. 5

Transforming the State's Rural Development Support System. In recent decades,

the institutions constituting the public support system for rural (principally
agricultural) development have been among the most visible and readily recognized
features of rural transformation in Asia. For example, much of the discussion on how
agricultural productivity has been increased focuses on the roles and performance of
the support system. Similarly, much of the contemporary discussion on participatory
rural development strategies focuses on perceived needs for changes in these roles.
The support system comprises the organizations that support, regulate, and manage
production, processing, transport, storage, marketing, credit, and education as well as
a range of agricultural and economic policy administration systems. Together, these
institutions have served as mechanisms for bringing goods and services both to and
from rural areas as well as influencing the allocation of land, labor, and capital within
rural resource systems.

It is less frequently recognized, however, that these institutions also function as policy
arenas within and through which social, economic, and political interests both within
and outside the institutions operate to allocate scarce administrative resources. 6
Because of the roles the institutions have acquired in allocating goods and services,
processes affecting the allocation of administrative resources can influence the
management and distribution of rural resources and the social, economic, cultural, and
political features of the rural landscape. In effect, the institutions and policy arenas are
playing important linkage functions.

Relationships between the state and the rural sector reveal a complex web of
relationships. 7 The state's relationships with rural society are multidimensional,
employing policies, institutions, and the technology transformation noted earlier as
instruments. Policy reform purportedly designed to reduce government's role in the
rural economy (e.g., removing input subsidies) becomes a basis for increasing the role
of the state in rural economic organization (e.g., through preventing wage inflation).
The state is called upon to intervene selectively, sometimes to provide a safety net for
those hurt by structural adjustment, sometimes to institutionalize "rent-seeking"
behaviors by those standing to gain from structural adjustment.

In this context, is policy reform a strategy for reducing government's role in rural
commodity markets, or is it actually a strategy for enhancing the state's role by
depoliticizing important dimensions of the transformation process? If most economic
policy regimes in Asia have discriminated against agriculture, does it follow that
reforming these policies is for the benefit of agriculture or agrarian society? This is an
important question in the rural-urban dichotomy because, as the debate around the
urban bias argument has shown, it draws attention to possibly more complex webs of
interests and state roles than would be normally permitted or recognized by a rural-
urban perspective.

The rural development support system will be a prime example of where and how
such questions are answered. What interests are influencing the support system's
development? What are the relationships between issue definition and policy
formation processes concerning rural resources within the support system and
between the support system and other processes that define issues and form policy
about rural resources? Similarly, what is the significance for the state's rural
development support system of processes (e.g., sociocultural revitalization
movements, political parties, lateral marketing networks) that build "horizontal"
support linkages among rural communities? Are these alternatives or competitors to
the state's support system? How far can these processes go without requiring
fundamental accommodation from the state? These questions involve broad issues of
relationships among processes of agrarian reorganization, social class development,
and changing roles of the state. Focusing on the rural development support system,
the "formal" institutions that link the state and rural change, offers one possibility for
understanding how these broader transformation processes are working.

The Reconstruction of Rural Politics. In many places rural politics were, and in a
few cases they still are, a form of agricultural and agrarian politics. The political
arenas, the normal participants in issue formation and resolution, and the issues
themselves reflected commodity (normally agricultural) interests and parity (primarily
agrarian) interests. National political coalitions required the support of these interests
in order to acquire and hold power. National bureaucracies included agencies
essentially under the control of rural interests.

However, as the basic rural (and national) context has changed, the status of rural
politics has become problematic. Changes in traditional forms of specialization within
national political arenas (e.g., from regional or ethnic interests to occupational or
class interests) pose a fundamental challenge to the national dimensions of traditional
rural politics. The processes here are not uniform, but in many places what can be
seen is rural support of national coalitions being replaced by national control of rural
coalitions. Illustrations include (1) the changing functions of political parties, from
aggregating and projecting specific interests to centers of national power to
mobilizing and reshaping those interests in support of national power; (2) the
changing distributive dimensions of national political arenas, shifting from
confirming locally based claims of power and privilege to rewarding acknowledgment
of centrally based claims; and (3) the changing relationships between class formation
and the evolving roles of the state, where rural-urban distinctions as bases of political
organization are replaced by class-oriented foundations. For example, in the
Philippines, the substitution of the president's Kilusang Bagong Lipunan party in the
1970s for the more traditional Nacionalista and Liberal parties replaced decentralized,
"loose," and significantly landownership-based political coalitions with a much more
centralized, directed, and state grant-based coalition with functions highly
instrumental for the state. In the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Pakistan
(among other countries) the mediation of the relationship of political parties with the
state by the military can effectively modify the terms of political relationships
between rural interests and "national" interests.

In some cases, conversely, rural and agricultural interests still appear able to
effectively project and promote certain apparently rural and agricultural, interests in
national political arenas (e. g., Japan's domestic rice subsidies, exemptions from land
reform given landowners growing export crops in the Philippines, subsidization of
agricultural input costs in most countries). If these are cases of "survival," how and
why have they happened? Are they likely to continue? Are these, in fact, examples of
the persistence of traditional rural and agrarian politics or indications of the decline or
"capture" of that politics?

A reconstruction of rural politics is under way -- a reconstruction of what rural

politics is about, of who participates, and of what "rules" politics follow. A
reconstruction is also under way of what rural politics is not about, who does not
participate, and what rules govern participation and interaction that no longer are
dominant. 8 In some cases, the reconstruction is clearly characterized by a decline of
traditional agricultural and agrarian interests and establishes a basis for stresses and
conflicts. Formerly "nonrural" issues (e.g., industrial siting, human settlement waste
management, land-use restrictions) are now issues in a surprisingly large proportion
of Asia's rural areas.

A widely recognized but often misinterpreted change is occurring: the significance of

agriculture in the national economies of virtually all countries in the region is
declining. The rural-urban dichotomy makes much of this decline, assuming
frequently that it marks the advance of urban economic influences. Such a conclusion
is, of course, possible but when carried too far or applied too simplistically it can miss
more subtle and potentially more important dimensions of the process. As a case in
point, the complex consequences of agriculture's declining relative share of gross
domestic product for the organization and significance of rural and national politics
have not been appreciated adequately. Consequences might include the decline of
agrarian-based politics, possibly to be replaced by urban-based politics, but other
candidates include region-based, ethnic-based, religious-based, and class-based
politics. Further consequences might include efforts to "revive" agrarian politics
(through steps varying from religious and cultural fundamentalism to collective
organization and violence), and the cooptation of agrarian political symbols as a
strategy for further manipulation of rural politics for national purposes.

An interesting illustration of these complex consequences in motion is provided by

the events surrounding the construction and management of the New Tokyo
International Airport at Narita. 9 The new airport, presented as a symbol of Japan's
postwar rehabilitation and global industrial ascendance, provoked a domestic political
reaction that challenged the scope of the state's role in economic development. This
reaction began with a comparatively narrow appeal to environmental values at the
Narita site but expanded to a much more broadly based manipulation of values
associated with an older agrarian order. In other cases, some sections of traditional
agricultural and agrarian interests (often larger landowners and export crop producers
and millers) remain dominant, even though the social and economic context in which
politics functions is less and less agricultural and agrarian. It is significant in such
circumstances to ask, what is the future of rural politics? Of politics based on
distinctly rural interests? Of the symbols of rural politics?

Transforming the Foundations of Rural Commerce. Two of the most important

characteristics of the changing international economic order are (1) the increasing role
of international trade in national economic development and (2) the expanding role of
trade in services. Although these and other characteristics of the changing
international economic order are receiving considerable attention in Asia, much less
recognized is that these characteristics are intersecting with an ongoing change in
rural market systems to produce a transformation in the foundations of rural
commerce. 10 Certainly participation in international trade is not new to rural areas.
Much of what has been traditionally described as developmental in rural areas has
involved the export of primary natural mineral and biomass resources from rural areas
to international markets. Contemporary developments, however, are adding new
elements to this ongoing process. International trade affects rural areas not only
through traditional resource-based exports from rural areas but also through effects on
a range of other rural resource markets, especially land and labor. For example, labor
migrations to the Middle East have altered female roles in farm management,
influenced household formation timing, affected labor availability and costs, and
injected new income streams in rural Asia from Pakistan to Korea.
Expanded international linkages tie rural factor and product markets more firmly into
international factor and product markets. These broader markets reflect cost and
investment profiles distilled from a wide variety of economic, political, and
technological conditions that are not restricted to the simple interplay of supply and
demand. Trade conflict combined with discriminatory domestic economic policies can
be associated with a range of "distortions" in market behavior for rural resources.
Similarly, domestic economic adjustment strategies, adopted to redress international
trading difficulties, can have significant effects -- both positive and negative -- on the
status of rural resources. For example, many economic adjustment strategies include
the introduction of floating foreign exchange rates to correct the distortions created by
fixed and often overvalued rates. This adjustment is frequently associated with
(temporarily) high domestic inflation rates. While smallholder food producers might
not have benefited from fixed rates and attendant discriminatory domestic terms of
trade, under floating rate regimes they may face rapid rises in (imported) input prices.
However, government food policy objectives (which often emphasize low urban retail
prices) may not permit commensurate increases in farm gate prices. Farmers are
squeezed, leading to reduced productivity and, in some cases, sellouts. For similar
reasons, real wages may decline, with serious welfare implications for rural
households dependent on wage labor income.

The acceleration of state intervention to control rural commodity systems, purportedly

for the purposes of stabilizing domestic prices and production in the face of volatile
international markets, appears to be a pervasive phenomenon. Strategies such as
vertical integration and risk shifting through alliances between market power and state
action become important dimensions of change in the organization of rural
commodity systems. Precisely against this background what are now commonly
called "parastatal" organizations have arisen. These are quasi-state corporations that
have been delegated government powers to regulate, allocate, and tax but are not
routinely accountable to "normal" government staffing, financial management, and
reporting conventions. Parastatals have acquired important roles as exclusive agents
of the state for commodity trading in many countries of the region. What, it can be
asked, are the implications of these kinds of changes for the organization and
performance of affected commodity markets in rural areas? What are the implications
of these kinds of changes for the emergence (and state endorsement) of monopsony
power in rural resource marketing systems?

Similarly, the expanding role of trade in services is not a new process, but there are
some important new elements. Services to rural areas are becoming considerably
more than the traditional provision of production credit, transport, and storage to
agricultural commodity systems. A broader range of financial services and
infrastructure are required to support more diverse rural economies. Moreover,
information -- about domestic and international factor and product markets,
technology, policy trends and actions -- has become an increasingly important
component of services to rural areas. However, the bigger change is in the redefining
of services from rural areas. Many rural resources now have status as resources for the
larger economy because, from the national perspective, they can fulfill service
functions. Examples include national requirements to allocate and use rural land, rural
water supplies, rural labor, rural capital, rural organizational resources, and even rural
"culture" and environment. Conventional economic accounting does not normally
refer to most of these resources as "services," but, in fact, that is the functional role
they increasingly play in economic transactions between rural areas and the rest of the
economy.

Treating rural resources as services has implications for the types of markets and
market processes that develop to allocate the control and use of rural resources.
Perhaps the most significant of these implications is that rural resources, considered
as service resources, derive attributions of value from terms of reference that may not
be comprehensible to traditional rural resource valuation processes and criteria.
Markets for services are increasingly international, and it is increasingly within an
international frame of reference that rural resources as service resources are valued.
This shifting market has already had consequences not only for the organization of
rural commodity systems, but also for the relevance of traditional rural processes for
determining what are resources, what resources are worth, and how resources should
be managed. Are these changes continuous, or are there discontinuities in the changes
and their consequences? How will basic patterns of organization and participation in
rural commerce be influenced?

Work and Occupation. Occupational differentiation is a central dimension of rural

transformation. 11 In this context, labor absorption in agriculture, off-farm
employment, and sometimes occupational mobility receive attention. As important as
these are, however, there is a deeper current that has not been adequately
comprehended nor properly connected to the ongoing documentation of employment
differentiation. This deeper current is a fundamental change in the cultural, economic,
political, psychological, and social meanings of work and occupation.

Work and occupation derive their content from the division of labor in rural society
generally. From this broader perspective, at least three important and closely related
issues come into view. First, how are the content and significance of occupational
differentiation related to changes in the organization and roles of rural households,
local organizations, and communities? Second, how is occupational differentiation
related to the distribution of access to those goods and services that permit rural
households and communities to sustain acceptable life-styles? Third, how are patterns
of occupational differentiation related to changes in the management, organization,
and roles of rural resource systems? These broader issues lead to a number of
questions that simply have not been sufficiently addressed beyond exploring
employment consequences of technological change in agriculture associated with the
Green Revolution and the periodic resurgence of interest in off-farm employment.

How is the meaning of "occupation" changing? Is a female landless laborer in

Bangladesh principally a female, a laborer, or are more contextual categories needed?
How are the evolving meanings of "occupation" related to the evolving meanings of
"work"? What is occupation an attribute of, and how does this relationship relate to
the social, economic, and cultural content of "work"? What are the connections, if
any, between changing meanings of occupation and work and processes of class
formation, social mobility, cultural assimilation, and demographic change?

We may further ask, how are the organization, allocation, and valuation of work
related to the social, cultural, economic, and political processes that define, value, and
organize access to rural resources? How, if at all, is any of this changing? What are
the systematic and systemic consequences in terms of particular groups, areas, and
skills? How are individuals, groups, and areas perceiving the relationships between
work, welfare, and rural resources? How, if at all, are they attempting to cope with,
adjust to, defend against, or establish control over those changes that are most salient?
How are these reactions and probable capacities and orientations toward reaction
related to the distribution of social, cultural, economic, and political assets? 12

Community and Communities. Rural communities have been the primary objects of
the more idealized pictures of rural Asia as well as the more denigrating. Moreover,
the growth of some rural communities into market and administrative towns has been
of keen interest for those who would extend notions of the urban hierarchy to the
countryside. What has been missing, however, is comprehensive and comparative
assessment, across different arrays of material indicators, of how the meanings of
"community" are changing. Community finds meaning in three processes: cohesion,
conflict, and collective action. Of particular importance are the relationships of the
changes in meaning in these areas to each other and to the broader characteristics and
consequences of transformation in social, cultural, economic, and political terms.
Many of Asia's most significant social, economic, political, and cultural innovations
and expressions have taken place through transformations in communities by means
of rural protest, revitalization, rebellion, and revolution.

An additional and especially important question is whether patterns of conflict and

collective action from other parts of society are increasingly being reproduced in rural
areas as rural transformation proceeds. Similarly, are patterns of rural social conflict
or collective action being extended to or absorbed by other parts of society? In either
case, what processes and institutions would support the transmission and linkage of
conflict, cohesion, and collective action patterns across different parts of society?
How are these processes and institutions organized and controlled? What do the
coexistence of forms of social cohesion, conflict, and collective action based on
varied and possibly inconsistent forms of differentiation or mobilization imply for the
meaning of community in the rural transformation?

One case in which such questions might be applied is in determining what a

"disorganization" of rural areas might imply for the stability of natural resource
management systems in rural areas and resource utilization systems in urban areas.
Another example is the growing incidence of youth unemployment and cultural
disaffection that is appearing throughout rural and urban Asia. It is not difficult to
invoke explanations for this from a rural-urban perspective, in effect arguing that the
phenomenon may not be the same in both settings. However, explanations can be
invoked that transcend the rural-urban distinction. In either case, what such processes
mean for community organization is frequently ignored.

Faced with changing dimensions of social conflict and changes in how such conflict is
institutionalized, questions to be asked include how different rural groups are
affected. Further, how do different rural groups attempt to maintain or overcome their
exposures in institutionalized social conflict, and what are the meanings of the social,
political, or moral action they may take? Such questions direct attention to the
relationships among cohesion, conflict, and collective action. 13 What do answers to
these questions mean for the politics of rural transformation? For the "governability"
of rural areas? For the incidence of conflict and the effectiveness of local conflict
management processes? The Cultural Foundations of Rural Transformation.
Rural transformation is a cultural phenomenon, a system of vision and values that
identifies, interprets, legitimates, and appraises the "facts" of rural transformation for
those living through it. But what is the significance of rural transformation as cultural
expressions? Are these expressions extensions of agrarian culture or invasions of
urban cosmopolitanism? Are they projections of ethnic identities or reproductions of
class ideologies? Are they refinements of religion or the signposts of secularism? Is
rural transformation really just a process of cultural convergence, reflecting increasing
involvement in a common social division of labor; a process of cultural domination,
reflecting increasing control over rural society by other interests; or a process of
cultural divergence, reflecting the erosion of the insularity of rural culture but not the
loss of rural culture's fundamental identity? Is the very term "rural culture"
inappropriate or idealized, in which case it would be necessary to reconsider the
appropriateness of the proposition that rural transformation is a cultural phenomenon?

Does the term "rural transformation" imply the substitution of a new or different
social base for cultural expression, or is the essence of rural transformation the
disjunctions between the cultural bases of a rural social order and the social basis of a
rural cultural system? For any country, are the cultural implications of rural
transformation the fate of a specific (rural) cultural system or common to changing
relationships among many (rural and other) cultural systems? What are the
implications of cultural pluralism for the status of social cohesion, conflict, and
collective action in contemporary rural societies? For the role of politics as a vehicle
for expressing cultural understandings? For the role of the state as a "manager" of
cultural pluralism and assimilation? These are all very difficult questions, but
fundamental to any understanding of what the transformation of rural society means is
an understanding of the cultural dimensions of the transformation.

Managing Urban Places in an Era of Rural Transformation. That urban society

depends for its existence on a broad number of economic, social, and political
relationships with rural society is intuitively recognized. Yet, the thrust of research on
the rural-urban dichotomy has been to give greater attention to the reverse
proposition: the dependence of rural society on a broad number of relationships with
urban society. But there is a dialectic in the relationship, a possible limit: how far can
rural transformation proceed before the security of the future of urban society is
jeopardized? 14

At a first level of analysis, this issue is really concerned with agrarian transformation
and urban food security. A rural transformation that significantly reduces the viability
of rural food production can create problems for an urban society that must "import"
all its food supplies, either from within the rural areas of its own country or the rural
areas of another country. But even at this level, the urban future is vulnerable to upper
limits in agrarian change that go beyond food security. For example, agrarian
transformation has often been associated with large-scale social dislocation and rural-
urban migration. In some societies, contemporary urban infrastructure -- in physical,
social, and political terms -- would have great difficulty supporting considerably
larger numbers of low income and frequently unemployed people. Changes in rural
land use can have significant effects on urban areas even when food production is not
sacrificed. For example, extensive modifications in the hydrology of the central
Thailand delta to facilitate agricultural intensification is a major contributing factor to
Bangkok's accelerated rate of sinking. In the Philippines, the dry season brings direct
competition between the drinking water and hydroelectric requirements of Manila and
the irrigation demands of the agricultural areas producing food for Manila.

However, rural transformation is more than agrarian transformation. Rural

transformation as social, cultural, and political mobilization can introduce forms of
rural cohesion, conflict, and collective action into urban places, potentially without
the supporting social infrastructure. The results can be problematic, as for instance in
a failure to "import" appropriate modes for conflict management. Conversely, when
urban management attempts to insulate urban places from the effects of rural
transformation (e.g., through regulating rural migration, forced relocation of urban
squatters to sites outside a city, or urban zoning), the results often include an
exacerbation of some of the conflict and welfare-loss dimensions of rural
transformation. Poorer, lessskilled, less politically connected, and ethnically marginal
persons are effectively excluded from a rural-to-urban migration stream, leaving
greater proportions of such individuals in rural areas while an urban-torural stream of
such individuals, effectively precipitated out of the urban milieu, is encouraged. 15

All eight areas discussed above suggest an important interactive process. Rural
transformation affects life in urban places. Attempts to better manage the life and
future of urban places inevitably affect life in rural places. The nature and intensity of
the mutual impact will vary from place to place, but the effects are likely to be more
pronounced and, over time perhaps, more significant within areas touched by the
outreach of evolving metropolitan systems. This possibility is explored by several of
the chapters in this volume. Whatever the relationship, managing rural transformation
and managing the future of urban places need to be understood together. The
challenge is to know whether they can be undertaken together in a manner that does
not actually substitute the power of the state for the metaphor of urbanrural
integration.

CONCLUSION
Why Were Linkages Discounted?
Is rural society in Asia dead? Is urban society in Asia a myth? Obviously, there are
rural places and there are urban places, so what purposes are served by such
questions? The answer is that development studies generally, and Asian studies in
particular, have inherited and continue to employ specific metaphors to describe
complex social, cultural, economic, and political realities and processes, whether or
not these categories do now or have ever done their scientific jobs especially well.

To understand why the inertia has been sustained, it is important to recognize the
functions of metaphors. At one level the job of the metaphor is to facilitate
understanding by defining and organizing knowledge. The metaphor offers an
internally logical picture. When the picture is colored with appropriate social facts,
the metaphor can provide a compelling depiction of what these facts mean and how
they interrelate. "Urban" and "rural" have proven to be exceptionally powerful in this
function. At another level, however, the metaphor is a political instrument
legitimating the socialization and assimilation of those who will practice under it as
well as establishing the grounds for excluding those who do not share in that
community. At this level metaphors serve an ideological rather than an
epistemological function.
Metaphors are maintained even when the price is an ersatz debate not only because
the metaphors continue to satisfy methodological canons associated with the first
(epistemological) function, but also because the metaphors are associated with
specific patterns of control over crucial resources. 16 The crucial resources are
arguably those of the state along with "ownership" of national development visions.
To bestir a desultory debate, the metaphors in the debate have to be challenged by first
demonstrating plausible falsification and then instigating delegitimation. From the
intellectual and political anomalies a new debate is generated.

Beyond the Ersatz

The rural-urban dichotomy has been a pillar of development thinking. However, it is
imperative in the case of Asia to move development studies beyond the most perverse
aspects of the dichotomy: the inexorability of urbanization and the (imminent)
obsolescence of rural organization. These expectations are undoubtedly accurate in
some form in some cases, but that they have been applied so widely reveals both the
strength of metaphors and the ultimate weaknesses of empiricism. Too often, when all
is said and done, the rural-urban dichotomy boils down to issues of population density
and particular configurations of material culture. There is no denying that there are
large cities, just as there is no denying there are rural places. The dichotomy has fallen
into trouble, however, by assuming that the social, economic, and political relations
that accompany material culture in either the Primate City or agrarian setting will
accompany facets of that culture wherever and whenever they are found. And it is the
failure to seriously engage the middle ground that has yielded the most debilitating
conceptualization: rural conceived as peasant agriculture unconnected to markets,
media, or the urban masses; urban conceived as everything else.

The idea of a rural-urban continuum has been recognized, but applications have
generally faltered because definitions of urban have been practically coterminous with
development. The result is a continuum within the urban category, not between the
rural and urban categories. One step that would move affairs forward would be to
examine the continuum as both a conceptual and an empirical possibility, first by
suspending the temptation to refer to the middle ground using hyphenated forms of
"urban," such as "peri-urban." As pointed out throughout this volume, there exist
areas (e.g., the Bandung-Bogor-Jakarta triangle in Indonesia, the Canton-Hong Kong-
Macao triangle and the Sunan area in China, the Central Luzon Plains in the
Philippines) where there is a significant incidence of unusual and intense land use
mixtures. In these zones of interaction issues such as work, class, politics, and culture
should be examined carefully. Do these areas exhibit inherently transient or unstable
forms of socioeconomic organization? If so, what influences the rate, scope, and
direction of their evolution? Or are these not really transient but rather distinct forms,
evolving on trajectories that have significant degrees of autonomy from both urban
and rural influences?

The questions are plentiful. What has been lacking is the conceptual and empirical
innovation to address them.