Published by City Farmer, Canada's Office of Urban Agriculture

International Workshop on Rural-Urban Linkages

Curitiba, Brazil, 10-13 March 1998

For more information, please contact:
Jonas Rabinovitch
Senior Urban Development Adviser
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
jonas.rabinovitch@undp.org
fax (1 212) 906 6973

[The following introductory letter is from Jonas Rabinovitch to City Farmer.]

"I would appreciate it if you could kindly disseminate to your network the information below about the International Workshop on Rural-Urban Linkages to be held in Curitiba, Brazil, from 10-13 March 1998.

"The purpose is twofold:

• 1) To inform interested professionals that the Workshop will take place;
• 2) To request information on rural-urban linkages case studies, specifically in Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa/Arab States.

"I would be interested to receive information on concrete policy-making examples where linkages between rural and urban areas were considered in a complementary way.

"Discussions will include, but will not be limited to, urban agriculture. Issues such as land use changes, the role of intermediary cities, information flows between rural and urban areas, increasing non-agricultural employment in peri-urban areas will be considered.

"The event is being organized by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in cooperation with the Government of the State of Parana in Brazil and with other U.N.agencies, including Habitat/UNCHS.

"It is important to clarify that participants are being requested to provide for their own sponsorship, as UNDP is not in a position to fund participants in general. Participation at the meeting is by invitation only."

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The Aide-Memoire for the Meeting

1. Sponsorship and Purpose:

While the topic of rural-urban relations has a long history in development theory and planning, past policy approaches such as "integrated rural development" have shown limited results. From the Habitat I to the Habitat II Conferences, a clear international consensus has emerged that urbanization is a complex, irreversible, worldwide process that can not be just "curbed" through policy-making. There is wide recognition that urbanization generates many unintended impacts on rural areas and that rural development policy frameworks should be broadened to include negative and positive aspects of urbanization. However, the relationship between urban and rural areas seems to have been left to the market or to destiny, as sound policies in this fundamental field seem rare. From these considerations, the overriding policy question is how to encourage the strengthening of local rural-urban linkages in a complementary manner that benefits both rural as well as urban populations, thus supporting a sustainable and socially just development process.

The International Workshop on Rural-Urban Linkages is organized by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Government of Parana State and supporting UN agencies, including UNCHS/Habitat. The purpose of the Workshop is to provide a forum for local governments, practitioners and experts to identify and discuss key issues, share insights from experiences and best practices, initiate a network among participants, and develop an agenda for further action and collaboration on rural-urban linkages.

2. General Objectives:

The Workshop will provide a forum to:

• Promote a discussion of rural-urban linkages issues among policymakers, experts and practitioners and to assess the "state-of-the-art" of current policies;

• Identify current best practices and draw lessons from these experiences; Promote the concept of "rural-urban linkages" among government officials, civil society organizations, media, international organizations and other audiences.

• Allow participants to witness concrete rural-urban linkages programmes being implemented by the Government of the State of Parana ("rural villages", "rural university", "secondary road networks", "energy/production exchange", among others).

3. Specific Objectives:

The Workshop will focus on:

• Providing further inputs into UNDP's corporate policy instrument on rural-urban linkages.

• Building an international network to exchange information on rural-urban linkages aimed at enhancing policy responses in this area;

• Identifying specific areas that may need further research to elicit policy responses related to rural-urban linkages;

4. Timeframe and Venue:

The dates and venue for the Workshop are 10 to 13 March 1998 in Curitiba, Parana, Brazil. The Workshop will be held at the Barigui Park Meeting Centre in Curitiba.

5. Background:

As a UN agency participating in the Habitat II process and organizer of the International Conference on Governance (July 1997) that invited local government, civil society and non-government organizations to meet together to share experiences on urban and regional governance, UNDP and its Urban Development Cooperation umbrella are actively involved in promoting exchanges of experience and promising initiatives on rural-urban linkages.

As mentioned above, from the Habitat I to the Habitat II conferences on human settlements, and as noted in UNDP's urban development policy paper "Cities, People & Poverty", a clear international consensus has emerged that urbanization is an irreversible, worldwide process that has a positive contribution to make to national development. To ensure a sustainable and socially just process of urbanization, urban policies cannot, however, be treated in isolation of rural-urban linkages. The International Colloquium of Mayors-- part of the International Conference on Governance --concurred that policy approaches to many urban-related issues, such as rural-urban migration, are beyond municipal and urban boundaries.

However, there seems to be a considerable gap between current practices and policy approaches in this area. Quite often, rural development investments are made in an ad hoc manner which only generate increased rural migration into urban areas. Investments also tend to ignore opportunities in peri-urban areas and linkages between rural and urban areas, frequently contributing to increase competition and contrasts between them.

In summary, new policy approaches taking into account a set of new contextual elements, which are briefly described below, are neeed to address these issues.

6. Structure:

The workshop is designed to promote a balance between presentations of best practices and interaction among participants. The suggested structure includes:

• Official opening by organizers and keynote speaker(s)

• Plenary session with panel discussions on selected issues and best practices

• Division of participants into working groups with a focus on elaborating policy guidance and an agenda on rural-urban linkages to improve governance, environment and poverty alleviation aspects, including gender and social capital considerations.

Presentations and discussions should focus on the following:

• Nature of the issue, including an identification of its main causes and constraints in addressing it;

• Assessment of strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches/solutions, including lessons from best practices and thinking about alternative directions;

• Towards policy responses and an agenda for action.

Final plenary session to present the main points of group discussions, identify common themes and elements of a research agenda, discuss further networking arrangements, and make recommendations to UNDP and the international community for developing its support programmes.

7. Expected Outcome:

• A clearer body of organized guidance to UNDP Country Offices in their capacity of co-ordinators of U.N. activities at the country level, including more examples of best practices and elements to be included in concrete policy-making;

• A selection of case studies (not more than 8 single-spaced pages each);
  
  
  

• A set of guidelines on methods to introduce rural-urban linkages policy approaches at the country level, also through the support of UNDP Country Offices.

• A revised UNDP paper on rural-urban linkages. The Workshop is expected to provide inputs into this paper in terms of a clearer definition of key elements of policy approaches on rural-urban linkages in the 21st century.

• The identification of key areas for further policy research on rural-urban linkages, with special attention to focusing on concrete guidance on how to tackle issues of high and immediate importance.

• A more focused and cohesive international position about rural-urban linkages on the part of bilateral and multilateral development agencies, as appropriate.

8. Participants:

Representatives of national and local governments, practitioners, experts and academics, media, representatives of invited non-government organizations involved in rural-urban linkage programmes.

9. Policy Issues

In a globalizing world, a vast array of possible geographical locations could be combined for a discussion on rural-urban linkages, ranging from international rural/urban exchanges to mountainous/remote less densely-settled rural regions. One typical example is the way in which sudden weather changes in the countryside in Ecuador might affect the availability and the price of bananas in New York City, for example. However, while awareness is made of current international commercial trends, the workshop will focus on rapidly expanding metropolitan regions, medium-sized cities and their rural hinterland. Having this focus in mind, under the overall umbrella of "rural-urban linkages" there are a number of commonly identified key policy issues:

• Land-use changes. As cities expand into rural hinterlands, issues arise concerning the conversion of prime agricultural and rural housing land to urban-industrial uses, the weakening of traditional land-use systems and access rights, unscrupulous land title transfers from poorer rural households, and lack of coherent land-use planning at the urban fringe.

• Environmental degradation and natural resource depletion. Urban-industrial growth represents a quantum increase in the human use of energy, building materials and other natural resources; it also results in industrial and urban waste being discharged on agricultural and rural land as well as a push of housing and industry into environmentally sensitive upland and coastal areas around cities.

• Spatial polarization. Strengthening rural-urban linkages results in the well-known tendency to cumulatively favor the flow of resources, people and economic surpluses and multiplier effects to one or a few metropolitan centers. Intermediate cities and smaller rural towns are often bypassed as linkages grow between rural producers and more distant metropolitan and international centers. This pattern also accelerates rural-urban migration of the young and able toward larger metropolitan regions. However, without resources to cover the expenses of migration and job search, the poorest of the poor tend to remain in rural areas while trickle-down mechanisms from metropolitan and other urban areas fail to widely stimulate rural development or slow down rural-urban migration.

• Overspecialization of rural economies. Transfers of investment and human and natural resources from rural areas, national policies oriented toward monocrop production such as self-sufficiency in rice and wheat, and inadequate information about alternative opportunities result in a low capacity to diversify local economies. This risks generating "boom-bust" cycles of economic instability even while rural-urban linkages intensify.

• Slow expansion of non-agricultural employment. The slow expansion of jobs outside of agriculture, especially in non-metropolitan regions, results in the inability of local areas to absorb increases in the rural labor force, which in many countries continues to expand at a rapid rate. Reasons for the slow growth of non-farm employment include the slow growth of rural towns, which, due to larger spatially polarizing forces, are unable to advance as centers of trade, industry and services. This pattern further encourages migration to metropolitan regions.

• The role of smaller cities and towns in rural development. In support of rural development, towns are expected to play a number of vital roles: as market places connecting rural production to national and international markets; as sources of production supplies and machinery; as shopping convenience centers and centers for higher order services, and as sources of information. Most rural towns are found to play some but not all of these roles. In areas where out-migration leads to absolute population loss, local urban functions in local towns may decline. Among the factors in the low performance of towns are rural poverty and the lack of effective demand for central place functions; the absorption of the expected roles by more distant metropolitan regions; and government programs such as grain purchase and distribution schemes that compete with town-based commercial enterprises.

• Local government capacities. Especially in rural areas around rapidly expanding cities or in booming natural resource extraction regions, local governments are often found to be incapable of responding to increases in the need for infrastructure, services, monitoring, management and enforcement. In many cases, the spatial organization of government administration consists of weakly endowed, overlapping jurisdictions. Manpower, trained staff, financial resources and decisionmaking authority are often found to be far below citizen and private sector demands as well as official government performance standards.

• Poverty and social justice. Urbanization is part of a process of social and economic transformation that is typically associated with widening disparities within cities and between rural and urban areas. Included in the this process are the proletarianization of rural labor moving into low-income slum and squatter settlements in the city, the rise of an urban middle class, and the growing wealth of new elites parallels the selectivity of migration, the low level of basic urban and rural services away from larger metropolitan regions, and the "change without development" outcomes of rural-urban linkages that may undermine local economies and practices without generating new bases for raising rural incomes.

• Information flows. While generally seen as a positive dimension of rural-urban linkages, increased flows of information may be controlled by elites and selective in their content to the point of not only ignoring vital information but also disregarding the potential for local knowledge to be generated and used to inform decisions about policies and programmes, for example. In a current context of improved information and communication facilities, an increased two-way flow between rural and urban areas on crop prices, distribution channels or environmentally-friendly products, for example, could significantly contribute towards development objectives. A key question in fostering rural-urban linkages is how to expand access to the production and dissemination as well as the consumption of information.

These and other concerns suggest that while urbanization is viewed as an inevitable process, there is a continuing need to ensure that its contributions to national development are positive and that negative impacts on rural as well as urban areas are mitigated.

As mentioned above, while the topic of rural-urban relations has a long history in development theory and planning, past attempts to develop rural-urban linkage frameworks for policy formulation, such as integrated rural development (IRD) and area development programmes, have shown limited results. At least three reasons account for their lack of success. First, they were typically implemented through central government line agencies that were unable to overcome severe problems of inter-agency coordination, the lack of sustained central government or foreign donor commitment to key programs and projects, and the inability to draw upon local knowledge and citizen participation in assessing rural conditions, problems and potentials. Second, only a minority of IRD programs had an explicit urban or spatial dimension, and those that did were typically restricted to local market towns and a few central place functions, making them unable to anticipate wider national and international linkages and processes -- new forms of international agribusiness, biotechnology, revolutionary advances in transportation and communications -- that would soon have substantial impact on rural areas and their development potential. Third, they tended to assume that technical solutions and infrastructure development would be sufficient to overcome deeply entrenched socio-economic sources of poverty associated with, for example, land ownership and tenure, hierarchies of status and power, and racial, ethnic and gender discrimination.

10. Contextual Considerations

While the relative merits of past rural-urban linkage programs may continue to be debated, fundamental changes occurring over the past two decades in the parameters and context for such programs have been so far-reaching that they point toward the need to develop new ideas and policy frameworks. Among the most important dimensions of these changes are:

• Agricultural transformations. Agricultural production and rural regions have experienced revolutionary changes that suggest new opportunities to stimulate the expansion of national and international markets for local rural production. They also raise concerns about how to draw upon these opportunities in an equitable and sustainable way. Contract farming, nuclear estates, new phases of the Green Revolution, biotechnology and the general change of agriculture into an activity that increasingly resembles urban-industry in its organization and global linkages, suggest a need to rethink the basis for policies to strengthen rural-urban relations. With agriculture now taking on many characteristics of urban industry, supportive infrastructure and services also require new ways of looking at how urban linkages can better support new modes of organizing, processing, packaging, distributing and marketing rural production.

• Governance, the rise of civil society and participation. Along with the call for a more decentralized systems of planning is one for a decentralized system of governance that adheres to the principles of inclusiveness, transparency and democratic practices. Past approaches centering on government as the exclusive provider of infrastructure and services within a regulatory planning framework have been challenged by the rise of civil society around the world. The role of the private sector in providing services has also received widespread recognition. These fundamental shifts in the institutional basis for planning call for new participatory mechanisms for engaging citizens and business in defining and prioritizing issues, choosing among policies and programs, and taking shared responsibilities in their implementation.

• Social capital. Along with the call for more inclusive political processes has come the growing recognition that social capital -- the social and cultural systems of cooperation, voluntary association, mutual help, and civic action -- is an invaluable source of economic growth, shared prosperity, and a translation of material gains into a socially just and environmental sustainability process of development. How to build upon social capital and bring it to bear on policy arenas, including rural-urban linkages, is one of today's most important challenges.

• Sharing and learning from best practices. Past practices of knowledge production and dissemination about how to address common development issues tended to overly emphasize uniform models and solutions formulated in a few global centers of influence. As the realization grows of the need for localized responses to these issues, there has also been a growing interest in local initiatives, many of which seem to go against the grain of conventional models. Sharing these "best practices" from local programs and projects provide an alternative way of learning from real-world experiences that, while not necessarily transferable from one context to another, provide insights into a variety of possibilities and help to link program development to questions participation, social capital and the longer-term viability in implementing and managing programmes.

• The globalization of rural-urban linkages. In a globalizing world, giving more attention to local variations cannot be done in isolation of the wider dynamics of national and international economic linkages. Cities and rural regions are increasingly integrated in worldwide systems of production, contracting, finance, merchandising, and labor markets. In some countries rural labor flows are more strongly linked with foreign destinations than to local cities or metropolitan regions within the country. Most countries do not, however, track or keep accounts of circular migration or other flows of production, commodities, capital, or information between rural and urban areas, and much of foreign labor migration is also undocumented. Although this is not a priority area for discussion at the workshop, new ways of monitoring these flows and uncovering hidden opportunities, especially with regard to international linkages, may be needed to inform policy making on rural-urban linkages.

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