The Asia and Pacific Forum on Poverty

Asian Development Bank
Manila, Philippines - 5-9 February 2001

Bruce H. Moore
Coordinator
International Land Coalition

From Parallel Actions to a Common Agenda

Lessons learned from the process of merging the experience of civil-society and intergovernmental organisations into a common strategy to address rural poverty

Lessons learned from the process of merging the experience of civil-society and
intergovernmental organisations into a common strategy to address rural poverty

Lessons from Experience

The history of poverty reduction strategies has shown that government-led development without the active support of civil-society and civil-society movements without the institutional and enabling support of government have both failed. The experience of the 1990s has confirmed that the active participation by communities in the planning and implementation of development policies and programmes is an essential prerequisite to sustainable human development. The record of official development assistance affirms that sustainability requires that people are empowered as the agents of their own development. These lessons point to the need for revitalised alliances linking governments to their civil-society organisations, coupled with the moral and financial persuasion of the international community.

International institutions with a mandate to foster development often lack the necessary community involvement. At the same time, civil-society organisations often lack access to decision-making and policy setting that directly affects their livelihood systems.

National governments, responsible to establish legislation, to serve the well-being of their citizens, are struggling to meet these responsibilities in a global market place that is often beyond the nation's regulatory control. The dramatic rise in the number and nature of civil-society organisations reflects the growing call by the public to participate in setting policies and in designing the programmes and services of governments. There is rising public concern for social justice, equity and the livelihood opportunities for the poor and marginalised.

This paper examines an innovative coalition of civil-society, intergovernmental and governmental organisations whose mandate is specifically focused on the needs of the rural poor. It describes the origins, vision and activities of The International Land Coalition. While this paper is based on the experience of the International Land Coalition , the underlying knowledge can inform organisations, regardless of their sectoral interests, of the modalities that contributed to harnessing the energies of different actors into a coordinated mechanism for reducing poverty. The lessons learned are transferable to other civil-society, government, academic, business community, intergovernmental and donor efforts to forge pro-poor collaborations.

Searching for a Common Agenda

From the Stockholm Conference on the Environment in 1972 to the World Food Summit in 1996, international leaders and heads of state have collaboratively searched for solutions to poverty under the auspices of the United Nations. Were these international campaigns combined into a unified effort, the plan of action would call for increasing access by the poor to productive resources, closing the gap in the distribution of wealth, improving the participation of the poor in decision-making processes and reforming macroeconomic policies adversely affecting them.

Each Summit examined a pending crisis - the environment, development, energy, population and food. Of the many conclusions, the one of most significance is that there are no separate crises. They are all one and the same. An analysis of the Summit declarations finds that the single most common cause and effect is poverty.

Poverty is at the Centre

Approximately 800 million people struggle daily to meet their basic food requirements and 1.2 billion live on less than one dollar a day. Sixty per cent or 500 million are rural people living in environmentally sensitive areas of low agricultural productivity. As far back as 1988, 18% were landless. In many countries the numbers of land poor are growing. For the poor in the countryside, home to the majority of the world's poor, access to land is the primary basis of their subsistence and the most promising way to accumulate assets for a more secure future. Addressing poverty requires policy and institutional reforms to the systems by which land is regulated and property rights are enforced. Secure access to assets determines the incentives and opportunities for the rural poor to:

• ensure their household food security;
• earn income by producing marketable surpluses;
• accumulate capital and assets;
• access financial services;
• invest in alternative income-generating strategies;
• use their own labour to sustain the natural resource base;
• build reserves to cope with drought and preserve their assets during periods of agricultural stress; and,
• transfer assets to reduce inter-generational poverty.

For both rural and urban households, the food security challenge is growing as the poverty gap widens, both within and between nations. As the gap in access to productive resources grows, the gap becomes a growing threat to household food security, environmental sustainability and international peace. The gap is a dramatic indicator of the imbalances that contribute to a culture of exclusion that denies the poor access to opportunities for development. In 1960, the top 20% of the world's population had incomes 30 times the poorest 20%. Today, the gap is 60 times. In a world of plenty, this is morally unacceptable and environmentally unsustainable.

Commitments Require Action

Understanding the pre-requisites and strategic thrusts for poverty reduction are not new. In spite of the compelling arguments, efforts to implement pro-poor policies are often met with substantive political and economic obstacles. For example, even in countries committed to improving access to land and the security of tenure, implementation is often slow, delayed or manipulated by the power of vested interests and the landed class. In other cases, the lack of beneficiary participation has limited the impact and sustainability of reform efforts.

Even in the face of these failures, the increasing efforts of civil society, the rise of democratic institutions and an increased awareness of the political consequences of neglecting poverty are factors producing more favourable enabling conditions. There are also indications that economic liberalisation and institutional reforms may reduce or eliminate distortions that have historically favoured the powerful. For the rural poor this may mean greater access to land, assuming that government policies and market conditions will eliminate subsidies that have favoured large-scale farmers. Land taxes can be a further incentive by making the practice of holding land for speculative purposes more costly.

The importance of vibrant partnerships of civil-society, governments and the international community has been prominent in all United Nations conventions and global summits. For example, the 145 governments at the 1979 World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development declared that developed and developing countries as well as the international community must contribute to the immense effort required to eliminate poverty. The forward to the WCARRD programme of action, commonly called The Peasants' Charter, states that "the rural poor must be given access to land and water resources, agricultural inputs and services, extension and research facilities; they must be permitted to participate in the design, implementation and evaluation of rural development programmes; the structure and pattern of international trade and external investment must be adjusted to facilitate the implementation of poverty-oriented rural development strategies. Growth is necessary but not sufficient; it must be buttressed by equity and, above all, by people's participation .".

The culture of exclusion, exposed in the Peasant's Charter, has been addressed in each of the post-1979 Summits. However, commitments require action.

Local Actions are Necessary, but not Sufficient

The past has shown that approaching poverty through narrow interventions, as a means to initiate broader policy dialogue and institutional reform, is generally not successful. It has also been recognised that the work of civil society, governments and the intergovernmental community has, most often, been parallel but separate, because of historical events that have created cleavages that continue to be difficult to bridge.

New partnerships need to be built on a foundation consisting of information sharing, dialogue involving affected groups, consensus building and the collaborative formulation of policy. New pro-poor partnerships benefit from joint pilot projects that can help to build new ways of work and better target existing resources to the poor.

Clearly, the systemic policy and regulatory frameworks that prevent the poor from building assets, both physical and human, has a critical bearing on the social fabric of societies and on overall economic development. From the standpoint of the poor, the past failures of trickle down economics must give rise to bottom up participation. For vast numbers of the rural poor, empowerment means securing resource rights and fostering direct participation in the integrated planning and management of land, water and common property. Resource management strategies in the past tended to neglect social, economic and institutional factors and concentrated almost exclusively on technical aspects. Urban and peri-urban poverty strategies have also aimed for a "technical fix". Today, rural decision-makers are beginning to understand the interactions between poverty, land rights and the sustainable use of natural resources. The expansion of this understanding has, in recent years, resulted in the gradual re-focusing of national and international agendas on the revival of agrarian reform.

Globalisation is changing the old adage of "Think Globally, Act Locally" to "Act Locally and Globally". The challenges of poverty and its threat to peace, security and the environment require advocacy and action from the local to the international level. Two key tools for engagement of a broad coalition of cross-sectoral interests are knowledge and capacity building. It is here that the International Land Coalition  is innovative. The International Land Coalition  recognises that effective multistakeholder alliances begin with understanding the programmes of all partners. This is because the real value of a coalition is in adding knowledge and capacity to its partners, capturing the opportunities for synergy, establishing new ways of collaboration between diverse partners, and influencing one another to incorporate into their organisations the improvements that arise through coalition analysis, demonstration projects and action research.

The formation of the International Land Coalition  has widened the space for dialogue involving civil-society, governmental and intergovernmental organisations. For the International Land Coalition  this also means influence at the highest levels of the UN system. The terms of reference of the United Nations Administrative Co-ordinating Committee (ACC) on Food Security and Rural Development include a mandate to support the programme of action of The International Land Coalition. Accordingly, the International Land Coalition  can support and link the work of community-based organisations in local decision-making with influence at the highest international levels.

From Parallel Actions to a Common Strategy

Frequently, civil-society organisations, governments, United Nations agencies, intergovernmental and international financial institutions are pursuing what seem to be parallel paths and objectives.

The 1995 Conference on Hunger and Poverty, sponsored by the International Fund for Agriculture Development, brought together a diverse group of stakeholders, including inter-governmental organisations, civil society organisations, NGOs, government officials, bilateral agencies and international financial institutions. It produced a consolidated analysis on the constraints to sustainable human development. It called for urgent action to revive agrarian reform on national and international agendas. The organisations made a commitment to form a coalition of equals that would unite their common concerns into one agenda to empower the rural poor through improved access to productive assets. They determined that the International Land Coalition  should give particular emphasis to the experience of civil-society in gaining resource rights and participating in decision-making.

The International Land Coalition  established itself as a distinct mechanism with separate governance by a Coalition Council comprised of seven regional civil society/NGO networks and five intergovernmental partners. The seven civil-society representatives are selected by their peers and represent the regions of the Asia/Pacific, Africa, North Africa and the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America and Europe. The intergovernmental partners are the International Fund for Agricultural Development, which serves as the international focal point, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the World Food Programme, the World Bank and the European Commission. While these are the current governors, the coalition partners include further intergovernmental and civil society organisations.

The International Land Coalition  aims to build strategic and innovative alliances between these diverse development organisations in order to empower the rural poor through improved access to assets and effective participation in decision-making affecting their livelihood systems.

The International Land Coalition  is not a new organisation, but it is a new mechanism. Some key lessons from the establishment of the International Land Coalition , that time is proving to have been essential to its current strategic and operational progress, are:

• the stakeholders initially came together to share their analysis of the problematic;
• the analysis evolved a common perspective on the conditions and strategies for action;
• the common perspective revealed that the required policy and institutional reforms and actions were beyond the spheres and specialities of any one stakeholder; and,
• the coalition needed to be a neutral space where dialogue and differences could be negotiated, with a flexible framework for engagement. As such the coalition is not an extension of any one of its partners. This offsets any partner regarding the coalition to be something they were helping another organisation to do. Instead, as a distinct mechanism, the roles and responsibilities are those of its owners - being each and every partner.

The strength of the Coalition is the different spheres of influence of its partners which range from community-based organisations to United Nations agencies and international institutions. The Coalition has significant capacity to make a difference by bringing the existing policies and resources of its partners into coherent and well-targeted country programmes. The vision is for the partners to incorporate the successful results and lessons learned from the initiatives jointly undertaken through the International Land Coalition  into their own organisations.

Forming Alliances Committed to Pro-Poor Choices

While a generalisation, all to frequently poverty, as with agrarian reform, is seen to be a technical matter. However poverty, as with agrarian reform, is about sustainable development. Sustainable human development is essentially about people and the way they organise their social, economic and political systems to make the critical decisions on who has the right to use which resources or access which employment opportunities, in which ways, for how long and for which purposes.

Accordingly, overcoming poverty is primarily about changing inequitable relationships. First, it aims to change relationships obstructing the poor from acquiring assets. Second, it aims to change the current culture of exclusion so that the poor gain access to opportunities, such as education and training, credit, technology, markets, other productive services and income earning possibilities. Third, it aims for the poor to be active participants in the development of government policies and programmes affecting their communities and livelihoods.

However, the obstacles facing the poor, such as the resource rights of the land poor, touch on fundamental inequities. Much of the cultivated, fertile land is held by a small number of powerful landowners and elites. It follows that tenurial security and property rights can reduce landholding inequalities, prevent rural conflicts, contribute to improved food security and increase the incomes of the rural poor. Secure access to land can catalyse practices of sustainable resource use and soil management including combating desertification. Analysis reveals that a similar chain of societal benefits flows from liberating the potential of the poor in the cities.

Despite these convincing reasons, few countries have undertaken major agrarian reform measures or pro-poor urban revitalisation. In many countries, the political and economic difficulties associated with pro-poor reform have been formidable. As difficult as it may be, the challenge to overcome poverty is rooted in the political courage to take pro-poor decisions.

Today, eradicating poverty, expressed in rural areas as agrarian reform, is returning to the agenda based on a recognition of its importance to economic, social and political stability. Asset ownership by the poor is increasingly recognised as being essential to sustained and broad based economic growth. World wide, social justice and equity are becoming common values. And, good governance and political stability are being accepted as prerequisites to economic growth and the eradication of poverty.

The International Land Coalition's  programme of action is informed by three key lessons from the past:

• a broad based and comprehensive approach to pro-poor reform involves consensus building and policy dialogue;
• political sensitivities to powerful vested interests will require that the viability of proposed approaches are effectively demonstrated before policy makers will consider adopting reform on the scale needed to meaningfully reduce poverty; and,
• community organisations need to be strengthened in order to become effective interlocutors with government in policy development and programme delivery.

Instruments for Common Action

From the experience of the International Land Coalition , a first instrument for common action has been the formation of a knowledge network to capture the lessons learned from the practical work of civil society. The International Land Coalition  Agrarian Reform Network (ARnet), equips communities attempting to address a particular issue with experience from those who have overcome similar constraints elsewhere. This knowledge strengthens the policy dialogue between civil society organisations and their governments. Further knowledge also results from forums and studies on emerging resource access methodologies undertaken by a cross-section of the coalition partners.

The International Land Coalition  also supports the replication and scaling up of successful initiatives as a way of demonstrating the benefits of incorporating these experiences and the underlying principles into public policies and programmes. Through the coalition international, regional, national and grassroots organisations are gaining from each other's knowledge and collaborating to promote the successful practices, policies and innovative institutional arrangements linking civil society and government.

The Community Empowerment Facility is a second instrument of the International Land Coalition . It has been created to support local groups to build their own institutional and analytical capacity. Communities will become better equipped to place their particular issues on the agenda with their civic and political officials.

The Community Empowerment Facility:

• strengthens the negotiating ability of the poor, especially women and indigenous peoples, to achieve secure access to land including common property, water and associated support services;
• facilitates community participation in policy dialogue and representation in local governance;
• builds on traditional organisations and community practices;
• strengthens people's organisations in solidarity with others;
• supports policy and institutional reforms;
• facilitates conflict resolution processes;
• replicates and scales up pro-poor models; and,
• disseminates best practices and lessons learned.

In recognising the need for wider political space, a third initiative is a programme to popularise agrarian reform. The aim is to place the issues in the public domain, in both the south and the north. The goal is to build consensus among the many stakeholders on policies and strategies for implementation.

Lessons Arising from the Formation of The International Land Coalition

A confluence of factors contributed to the commitment to form The International Land Coalition, to actively participate in its implementation and to jointly solicit the required resources. The primary enabling processes and understandings were:

• an open debate and process of stakeholder analysis of the problematic;
• full participation by all stakeholders in establishing a vision for an international conference to examine the issues;
• the emergence of a common perspective of the constraints to eradicating hunger and poverty;
• a consensus view of the strategic policy and institutional reforms required for action;
• a common programme of specific actions in contrast to a goal of broad-based institutional collaboration;
• an understanding that the necessary actions required the joint efforts of civil-society, governments and international level organisations;
• the critical combination of complementary capacities, spheres of influence, resources and networking necessary to engage the diverse constituencies was not feasible by any one stakeholder on its own;
• the need for a neutral space for dialogue and action that would be flexible and would not reflect a dominance by any one partner and would also not commit all partners to the outcome of debate on each and every issue or subject. As a neutral forum the debate would be a place to enhance the views of each partner, but would respect the rights and orientation of each partner organisation.
• an acknowledgement that civil-society experience often remains localised and thereby does not get replicated, scaled-up, analysed and incorporated into public policies;
• a commitment to strengthen civil society, especially community-based, organisations so that participation is on a knowledgeable basis and ongoing. This commitment is to overcome the, all to often situation, in which communities lack access to information, remain inadequately prepared and are consulted only on an occasional basis such as during project preparation after overarching policies have been determined;
• the need to mobilise political will based on broad- based public understanding of the issues involved.
• an appreciation and mutual acceptance of the mandates of the partners on the basis of which it was not necessary to establish a new organisation. Instead the coalition based itself on exchanging knowledge, building capacity and supporting innovation and action research that is aimed at transferring lessons learned to its partners for incorporation into their policies and programmes in order that their mandates to eradicate hunger and poverty will be strengthened.

Today, the way forward is framed by globalisation. It is here that it is important to recognise that while markets can distribute goods and services they can not address social justice and the goals of equity and opportunity for the poor. It is here that governments, intergovernmental and civil-society organisations need to build wider common space for engaging on public issues of development, especially the eradication of hunger and poverty. Developing new ways of work is often difficult, especially where NGOs have aggressively mobilised to change government policies. In some cases the first step is to overcome a past where the term non-government was seen to be anti-government. The building of trust among civil society, governments and intergovernmental organisations is a first step. This is the foundation of The International Land Coalition.

6 February 2001