staying secure, staying poor: the “faustian bargain”

Staying Secure, Staying Poor: The ‘‘Faustian Bargain’’

GEOF WOODUniversity of Bath, UK

Summary. — The determining condition for poor people is uncertainty. Some societies performbetter than others in mitigating this uncertainty. In such societies we observe welfare regimes whichreduce the uncertainties of the market to provide for all citizens minimum conditions forreproduction. Such societies are in a minority. Elsewhere, destructive uncertainty is more pervasive.Under these conditions, the poor have less control over relationships and events around them. Theyare obliged to live more in the present and to discount the future. Risk management in the presentinvolves loyalty to institutions and organizations that presently work and deliver livelihoods,whatever the longer term cost. Strategic preparation for the future, in terms of personal investmentand securing rights backed up by correlative duties, is continuously postponed for survival andsecurity in the present––the Faustian bargain.� 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Key words — South Asia, poverty, insecurity, vulnerability, political economy, livelihoods

1. INTRODUCTION

The key condition under which poor peopleenact their capabilities for self-improvement isthe need for social security (Nussbaum, 2000;Sen, 1982; and the UNDP Human Develop-ment Reports). Governments, which are genu-inely poverty-focused, try to create enablingconditions for people to move individually, orcollectively, from the condition of being poorinto a more secure, sustained, nonvulnerablestate of well-being. Most governments fail,however usually because they and their sup-porters are implicated in reproducing the social,economic and political conditions which createthe uncertainty and insecurity barriers to thatmovement. When governments fail in this way(rights, social protection etc.), poor people haveto rely upon more personalized resources in thepursuit of security. This becomes a desperatesearch for security (Wood, 2001) in whichlonger term goals of autonomous improve-ment (Doyall & Gough, 1991) have to be puton hold, maybe forever. Alienation becomesa deliberate strategy of survival in presenttime. This paper continues to explore a line ofthought opened up in Wood (2001), and in amore recent paper trying to calibrate the west-ern origins of social policy to the immaturecapitalisms and predatory states of postcolonialeconomies (Wood, 2003).

The argument is developed through somecritical engagement with the literature on vul-

nerability, livelihoods, poverty and social de-velopment. The main conclusion from thecritique of present livelihoods and vulnerabilityliterature is that the vast majority of poorpeople face chronic rather than stochastic in-security. Epistemologically, the paper then of-fers a phenomenology of insecurity locatedwithin assumptions about surrounding hostilepolitical economy, drawing upon the idea of thepeasant analogue. This is then represented as atradeoff between the freedom to act indepen-dently in the pursuit of improved livelihoodsand the necessity of dependent security, illus-trated through what might best be termed as‘‘stylized ethnography,’’ drawing from threedecades of field level interaction with mainlyrural, but sometimes urban, poor people inSouth Asia. 1 It is clear from these encoun-ters that poor men and women are dominatedby dysfunctional time preference behavior, inwhich the pursuit of immediately needed secu-rity places them in relationships and structureswhich then displace the longer term prospectsof a sustained improvement in their livelihoods.This is the reference to the ‘‘Faustian bargain’’of the title.

2. SOCIALLY CLASSIFYING POVERTY

In the vast literature on poverty, there is acurious reluctance to distinguish between types

World Development Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 455–471, 2003� 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

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of poverty in terms of agency and social action.The capabilities literature get close, but do notreally offer an anthropological insight into ca-pacities for social action in a hostile politicaleconomy. We need that insight because in thecircumstances of inequality and the associatedarbitrary exercises of power, ‘‘graduation’’ (theindividual or collective movement away frompoverty and vulnerability) has to include con-frontation and struggle as well as personal hu-man resources investment (i.e., a mixture ofMarx and Herzen 2 respectively). Thus, whenconsidering the social and political routes topoverty eradication, 3 the poor can and shouldbe significantly classified by the extent of theircapacity for social action. Not all types of poorpeople can effectively act for themselves, even ifsupported externally to do so. Thus we haveidiosyncratic, chronic poverty comprising var-ied but extreme incapacity for social action: theelderly; orphans (thus perhaps only transitory);widows in patrilineal and patriarchal societies;people with disability (physical as well aslearning difficulties); people with long-term ill-ness and morbidity. To these groups, we mightadd outgroups of various kinds whose exclu-sion reduces their capacity for social action:migrants; ethnic minorities; minority religioussects within dominant cultures. 4 Thus peoplemay have reduced agency either for individualor for broader ascriptive reasons. In the ab-sence of other help, such people really do haveto rely upon responsible and accountable gov-ernments, prepared to uphold a broad conceptof human rights and prepared to offer mean-ingful social protection via affirmative actionand welfare. They are not well placed, however,to bring about such responsibility in govern-ment, and have to rely upon the agency ofothers, who are capable of social action to thisend. Failing this, they have to rely upon thedirect agency of others bound to them by somesense of morality and community to offer socialprotection through informal arrangements.But, even for the capable poor the constantprobability of retributive action, by those inpower over them, sets severe limits to their so-cial action for poverty eradication in the senseof structural confrontation for institutional re-form. Thus while it is easily understandablethat the idiosyncratically, chronic poor have toopt for dependent security as their only survivaloption, we are making the more generic argu-ment that the socially inherent characteristic ofmost poverty requires the same equation:staying secure, staying poor. Dependent for-

tunes are better than the risk of no fortunes atall.

Why should this be so? A further definingcharacteristic of poverty is uncertainty: beingunable to guarantee future stocks and flows.This induces short-term behavior and theavoidance of riskier, longer term investmentsin economic or personal projects. To be poormeans, inter alia, to be unable to control futureevents because others have more control overthem. This is why a sense of political economyis essential to understanding the constrainedchoices and options facing the poor. People arepoor because of others. Securing any kind oflonger term future requires recruiting the sup-port of these others, but this only comes at aprice: of dependency and the foreclosure ofautonomy. Becoming a client, in other words.This involves the acceptance of truncated am-bitions of self-improvement and advancementin order to secure basic welfare. Perversely,therefore, we encounter the deliberate strategyof choosing a coping level of poverty as thesocial condition of securing a sustained, albeitlow level, livelihood.

3. STRUCTURAL POVERTY:NONIDIOSYNCRATIC COVARIANCE

When understanding the poor in a poorcountry context, the peasant is a stronger ana-logue than that of employed worker. 5 Insecu-rity and uncertainty induce risk aversebehavior, by leaving poor people more exposedto livelihood threatening risk. This insecurityand risk is partly an issue of time and partly anissue of social capital and social resources.‘‘Time’’ refers to the discounting issue and iselaborated elsewhere in Collard (2001), Wood(2001) and JID (2000). Certainly the ‘‘snakesand ladders’’ analogy is useful here (Room,2000). Across the tenuous uncertainty of time,precarious families are stretching out a survivalstrategy, but always dominated by a hand tomouth reality, which prevents the necessarypreparation to cross the chasms and avoid thetraps that reside en route. Room discusses thisin terms of endowments as resources and rela-tionships which can offer ladders to bliss ifaided by passports, or which offer only snakesleading to social exclusion unless inhibited bybuffers. Passports and buffers are createdthrough the public/private partnerships of so-cial policy, but unfortunately the institutional

WORLD DEVELOPMENT456

prospects of achieving them are lowest wherethe need is greatest.

With social resources so unevenly distributedwithin the society, the problem for the poor isthat they are exposed to the weaknesses ofsocial capital (as a public good), withoutany prospect of meaningful social resources(personalized networks) to compensate. Theirclaims across the Institutional ResponsibilityMatrix (IRM) 6 are weak, as a result. Thereinlies their major source of risk. Moreover,without the social options to manage that risk,they have to rely more heavily upon their im-mediate family and less upon transactions withless intimate others. Hence the shrinking moraluniverse, and the validity of the peasant ana-logue.

This exposure to risk is multiple and covari-ant. The World Development Report 2000/2001 (WDR) discusses risk in various places,distinguishing between micro-, meso- andmacro-levels of risk in Chapter 8, and covariantrisk, particularly induced by conflict in Chapter3 (see especially Box 3.2) and Chapter 7 (WorldBank, 2000). The WDR claims to encompassthe risk terrain by also distinguishing betweencovariant and idiosyncratic risk (Chapter 8),such as illness, injury, old age, violence, harvestfailure, unemployment and food prices (WorldBank, 2000, p. 136). But nowhere does thediscussion acknowledge the chronic 7 aspectsof risk induced by inequality, class relations,exploitation, concentrations of unaccount-able power and social exclusion as absence of‘‘community’’ membership. In other words, aninstitutional and relational account of risk ismissing. This is a key objection to much of thecontemporary livelihoods discourse: it fails toexplain the microcircumstances of poor peoplein terms of meso- and macro-institutional per-formance, which express political economy andculture.

A ‘‘resources profile’’ approach to vulnera-bility (see Lewis, Glaser, McGregor, White, &Wood, 1992 for the original discussion),wherein households are understood as havinga range of material, human, social, culturaland political resources to deploy, is basicallya framework of nonidiosyncratic covariance,with weakness on one dimension triggeringweakness on another with an unraveling affecton livelihood security as a whole. Some ele-ments of this covariance are more familiar thanothers. For example, we expect poverty, sea-sonality of incomes and food availability, nu-trition levels, morbidity, acute illness and loss

of employment to go together, leading to lossof assets and further spiraling decline. Untilrecently, we might not have connected strengthin social resources to human resources such ashealth and education; or labor participation(under a ‘‘material resources’’ heading: i.e., in-come flows) to common property access wherean ability to contribute labor constitutes mem-bership.

It is this covariance of risk which needs todefine policy process and content: understand-ing in context which type of intervention offersthe most leverage on strengthening the liveli-hood portfolio as a whole via identification ofkey risk linkages. The WDR addresses thispartially in its ‘‘Mechanisms for ManagingRisk’’ (World Bank, 2000, p. 141). Here itdistinguishes between reduction, mitigation andcoping objectives on the one hand; and between‘‘IRM’’ categories of response divided bet-ween informal (individual/household and groupbased) and formal (market and publicly pro-vided) on the other. But since the WDR is de-rived from and therefore limited by its prioranti-septic, depoliticized treatment of the issue,it continues to be na€ııve about social and po-litical institutions and the constrained oppor-tunities for positive action via the rulesembedded in those institutions. Thus an ana-lytic focus upon physical incapacity of maleadults for the labor market might not matter ifthere is no labor market, or if access is heavilysegmented ethnically and culturally. Prices onessential agricultural inputs, or a leveling out ofseasonal fluctuations in local level food prices,could be much more significant than capabili-ties for local peasants and casual, agriculturalwage laborers in determining real income enti-tlements. Of course prices are themselves out-comes of an only partially commodifiedpolitical economy, characterized by segmenta-tion and embedded interlocking, in which thepoor are, by definition, price takers rather thanprice makers.

These arguments set up a proposition. Thebehavioral imperatives of risk aversion in thepresent may deliver short-term security whilereproducing the conditions for long-term inse-curity in the future. This causation exists par-ticularly strongly in the social domain. Theindividual and household needs for functioningsocial resources in the context of overall weaksocial capital require either overstrong relianceupon internal family relations (which may bereciprocal or hierarchical) or allegiance to otherproviders (hierarchical) at the cost of dependent

STAYING SECURE, STAYING POOR 457

and sometimes bonded loyalty (adverse incor-poration). But such risk avoidance extends toother behavior, which has to favor meetingimmediate needs over future ones within apeasant analogue. Examples might be crop di-versification and subsistence preferences re-gardless of prevailing prices which might rewardspecialization; or a deliberate strategy of debtacquisition foreclosing future investment op-tions (e.g., raising dowry capital versus invest-ment in education); and so on (Wood, 2001).Thus, when poor social actors are nego-tiating their institutional landscape, their cog-nitive maps comprise: discounting; managingimmediacy within severely constrained choices;awareness about long-term loss for short-termgain; and frustration about never being able toget ahead of the game for long enough to reallycommit resources for the future.

How can these time preferences be altered toconvince poor people of sufficient present se-curity to invest in their future? Certainly we canconceive of social protection, safety nets andwelfare more generally, whether delivered for-mally or informally, as having a fundamentaldevelopment function by altering time prefer-ences. In policy terms, there seems to be a basicchoice of response, depending on whether thediagnosis emphasizes a security or capabilitiesstance, leading to social protection or socialinvestment respectively (see Matin and Hulme,in this issue, for an analysis of a program thatseeks to combine ‘‘livelihood protection’’ and‘‘livelihood promotion’’ to help poor peopleescape the Faustian bargain). But, given thesecurity approach pursued in this paper, howfar is it appropriate and ethical 8 to shift thebalance of effort in social policy from the stanceof intervention to compensate for market out-comes (social protection) to the stance of sup-porting poor people�s higher level of entry pointinto labor, commodity, services markets (socialinvestment). The implication of such a shift isto leave it to people�s agency for the perfor-mance of real markets to improve poor people�slives. In response to this elementary problem ofagency and time preference behavior, the con-dition of insecurity reflects vulnerability andthe pursuit of a secure livelihood entails rightsand correlative duties, which are likely to beinformal in the context of poor governance.First, insecurity and vulnerability; followed bya discussion of the precariousness of rights andcorrelative duties in overcoming insecurity.This leads into the idea of a phenomenology ofinsecurity, illustrated by the notion of the

‘‘peasant analogue’’ before turning to a generaldescription of the conditions which produceinsecurity and how that plays out in differentsearches for dependent security as the defaultoption for insecure individuals and families.

4. INSECURITY AND VULNERABILITY

In making the link between vulnerability andinsecurity, there is no need simply to reproducethe thinking of other recent texts on livelihoodsand vulnerability (see Loughhead, Mittal, &Wood, 2000; Room, 2000; Wood & Salway,2000 for critical summaries of recent stances).But a few presumptions, arising in that litera-ture, will inform our position. First, vulnera-bility is not synonymous with poverty, so thatthe nonpoor vulnerable need to be included in apro-poor social policy. Second, therefore, weare dealing with dynamic categories: individu-als and families are always in a process, some-where along their domestic cycle, experiencingtroughs and peaks of financial and other secu-rity. The WDR refers to the transitory poor,others to poverty churning (see Hulme andShepherd, in this issue, for further discussion ofthese categories). Thus, third, in trying to catchthat sense of movement, livelihoods thinkingshould use the present continuous categories of:improving, coping and declining. This is notentirely satisfactory unless one is clear that weare confining these terms to an analysis of thepoor, and are not seeking to apply them topeople who are in nonvulnerable, secure con-ditions. 9 Fourth, the better known attempt tocapture aspects of this dynamism has beenCarney�s model (Carney, 1998) of sustainablerural livelihoods (SRL), which has its ownroots in the work of De Waal (1989), Lewiset al. (1992), Moser (1998), Swift (1989) andWood (1994). The SRL has been recentlycritiqued in Wood and Salway (2000) for:overprivileging social agency; unrealistic as-sumptions about poor people�s social action;confusion between social capital and social re-sources; having a stochastic approach to shocksas a decontextualized rather than chronic fea-ture of poverty; and an inadequate account ofpolitical economy and power (similar criti-cisms, in effect, to those of the WDR, above).

As a counter to some of these criticisms,Room (2000) offers ‘‘snakes and ladders’’ as amore obvious framework for understandingthe dynamic ‘‘careers’’ of people in contrastingtrajectories of poverty: improving or ‘‘gradu-


ating;’’ coping; and declining through irrevers-ible ratchets/traps (unless assisted by socialprotection in general and safety nets in partic-ular). Although ‘‘snakes and ladders’’ offersonly limited additionality to its predecessors, 10

its importance to a security perspective is:––it tracks individuals and groups throughgateways of opportunity and disaster, withsome indication of what happens to themon the way (it is a ‘‘career’’ approach);––it is thus consistent with a poor actor-ori-ented epistemology of agency negotiatingstructure, expressed as a hostile politicaleconomy;––and it therefore offers a model for under-standing how people negotiate the institu-tional responsibility matrix. 11

The main conclusion from this critique is thatthe vast majority of poor people face chronicrather than stochastic insecurity. The basicconceptual issue here is that shocks are notshocks but hazards. 12 In policy terms, thisprompts a distinction between ‘‘relief’’ typeinterventions (when shocks are shocks, whoseunpredictability requires rapid mobilization ofshort-term response) and ‘‘preparation’’ for themore predictable hazards which affect sub-setsof the population chronically. Thus ‘‘relief’’responds to situations where security has bro-ken down in surprising ways: e.g., flash floodsin Italy. But ‘‘preparation’’ should be in posi-tion for the predictable hazards of flooding inBangladesh, in a well-functioning, nonhostilepolitical economy (i.e., one with good gover-nance, economic growth, public revenues andpolicies of redistribution via state instruments).This notion of ‘‘preparation’’ is thus directedat improving the capacity of poor people tonegotiate their institutional landscape, whichfeatures hazards more significantly than it doesshocks. It consists of the creation and mainte-nance of security, especially when that securityis predictably threatened by life-cycle events.

5. INSECURITY, RIGHTS ANDCORRELATIVE DUTIES

Who performs the functions of either relief orpreparation? The key question for poor peoplein poor countries is: where do security inducingrights and correlative duties most securely andpredictably reside if neither the state nor themarket can be relied upon? The argument isthat in the context of societies with poor gov-ernance, nonlegitimate states and political in-

security, poor people have to rely on (in shorthand) a gemeinschaft rather than gesellschaftbasis of rights.

For the market, we have the classic debatesbetween Granovetter (1985), Platteau (1991)and Scott (1976), and now Fukuyama (1995),Putnam (1993) and dozens of others, about thecapacity of emerging societies to evolve moral-ities of exchange, and therefore trust, beyondface to face, personalized transactions withperfect information toward generalized ex-change between strangers under conditions ofimperfect, asymmetrical information. Clearlythe issue of rights and entitlements in the marketincorporates a notion of fairness into the rela-tionship between scarcity, quality and price.And as we know from Sen (1981), the principleof fairness can break down catastrophically forthe poor, as sudden scarcity, whether real ormanipulated, dominates the exchange equation.Under such conditions, there are no ‘‘moraleconomy’’ restraints to speculation or concernover disastrous outcomes for some, since thereis a low level of moral proximity between thegainers and losers in distant markets, as enti-tlements collapse. So, rights in markets beyondthose circumscribed by the moral economy arecontingent and precarious. The prevailing po-litical conditions of insecurity in many parts ofAfrica reflect such fragility. But in the peasantanalogue, applicable to other parts of Africa aswell as South Asia and other poor regions andpockets, significant proportions of poor peoplehave significant proportions of their economictransactions within more localized, moral ar-rangements where a residual sense of fairnesspersists and therefore rights to entitlementsexist.

In a welfare regime approach to poverty al-leviation 13 (Esping-Andersen, 1990, 1999), theamoral market, producing unsustainable out-comes for poor people, is compensated for bythe state: residual in the ‘‘dualist’’ liberal re-gimes; targeted in the conservative; and uni-versal in the social-democratic. The maincriticism of this approach is that it represents adecontextualized view of the state, benignlydelinked from the morality of the prevailingpolitical economy. Thus the idea of rights em-anating from the legitimated state, serviced byintermediary organizations (social capital in thePutnam, 1993) constituting civil society, is al-most laughable as a responsible description ofthe evolution of political institutions of powerand authority in sub-Saharan Africa. SouthAsia evolved differently, with respect to civil


society, with a longer and more educated basisto an organized critique of the colonial state,alongside an incorporated set of intermediaryinstitutions. But even in South Asia, the tradi-tion of an expected set of rights defined by thestate, realized and maintained through civilpressure, is much stronger in contemporaryIndia than its neighbors in Bangladesh andPakistan.

Thus the idea of rights enshrined in the stateremains a weak and contestable phenomenonin the cognitive maps of social actors (rich andpoor alike). Rather, rights have a tenuous po-sition in the state and market arenas of thedomestic IRM given the real history of actuallyexisting social capital. Where do they actuallyreside most securely in the minds of social ac-tors in poor countries? Where are the universalrights and needs most nearly provided for inthe domestic, and sometimes globalized, IRM?If the domestic state and market domains con-tinue to be problematic, then clearly we have tolook to the ‘‘community’’ and household, kinand clan domains.

A small logical digression is necessary beforeproceeding further. It is axiomatic that wecannot conceive of society without some es-tablished acknowledgement of need, and a no-tion of rights to ensure the meeting of need. Inother words, rights and perceptions of needhave to reside somewhere to fulfil the condi-tions for calling a collectivity of people ‘‘a so-ciety.’’ Otherwise, we are only looking atanarchy and war; i.e., such a state of insecuritythat no one�s interests can be met, so that thereis no reason for that particular collectivity toexist. Bevan (2001) gets close to that positionwhen being pessimistic about Africa, though, ofcourse, she is arguing that the insecurity con-ditions support the interests of a few powerfulpeople and some of their followers for a while.

Outside the domain of the state and thereforelaw, such rights and entitlements are usuallyreferred to as ‘‘informal’’ in contrast to formal.As suggested above, the alternative institu-tional domains to the state and the market canbe designated as ‘‘community’’ and household.Of course, there can be many ambiguities interms such as community and household. Bothare heavily contested terms. ‘‘Community,’’ forexample, can stretch from imagined ones (An-derson, 1983) to closed, locational and resi-dential ones, with other variants in between.Some communities can be more moral thanothers (Bailey, 1966). They can be characterizedby reciprocity and hierarchy, sometimes si-

multaneously. For social actors, the experienceof community is variable, according to cir-cumstances of conflict and unity, of fission andfusion. In other words, they are fluid, not fixed,and our understanding of them has to dependupon an actor-oriented epistemological per-spective. Sometimes, the construction of com-munity reflects kin structures, thus blurring thedistinction between community and household.Indeed, we have preferred the term ‘‘house-hold’’ over ‘‘family’’ precisely to enable kinrelations to appear under a community head-ing, while reserving the term household to referto much closer, hearth-bound, interdependen-cies and senses of responsibility. 14 Thus, within‘‘community’’ we can include clans and lineageswhich offer social actors crucial identities aswell as the social frame within which rights ofallocation of scarce resources occur, such asland, water, access to pasture, places to buildhomesteads, and so on. This would apply withequal force to say Northern Pakistan and ruralEast Africa.

Kin dimensions of community also offer akey basis of ‘‘membership,’’ and with mem-bership goes rights, which are connected toprevailing presumptions about needs and enti-tlements. To lose ‘‘membership’’ is to be ex-cluded. People lose membership under variousconditions: migration; resettlement; urbaniza-tion (until ‘‘membership’’ is regained, or re-established); failure to conform or perhapscontribute; being elderly or infirm (e.g., in theWest); being cast as a minority in the context oflarger-scale events (e.g., Jews in Germany in the1930s and 1940s); or being outcasted in variousways in South Asia and Africa.

Within the political economies of poorcountries, especially in the poorest ones ofSouth Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, whatgeneral informal rights pertain? Given thevested interest of the rich in prevailing struc-tural inequalities, we need to distinguish be-tween rights through hierarchical relations andreciprocal ones. Rights through hierarchicalrelations basically operate within relations ofadverse incorporation and clientelism. Theycan be classed more as welfare ones than de-velopmental. That is to say, clientelist relationswill offer relief but rarely invest in the long-termsecurity of others through, for example, edu-cation or capital transfers on easy terms. Reliefor welfare transfers, for example, through tiedlabor, long-term debt or interlocked tenancyagreements, occur in return for loyalty andother ‘‘dependent’’ favors which contribute to


the reproduction of the initial inequality. Suchrelations are as likely to occur between closekin as between others more distant. 15

With market penetration and a widening ofeconomic opportunities, the shrinking of moralties further reduces the sense of responsibilityfor others, especially at the community level.Indeed, with the ‘‘welfare regime’’ ideology,growing in the minds of the rich, of the inter-dependence between markets and states, thesense that poor people are the responsibility ofgovernment grows and community level rightsabout welfare correspondingly decline. At thesame time, especially in rural contexts, com-munity leaders/elders and stronger classes arereluctant to see whole poorer families or poorrelatives completely outcast or cast out. Where,in Northern Pakistan, for example, access tocommon property remains an important partof the family livelihoods portfolio, then thoseunable to fulfill the conditions for membershipare often assisted to that effect: for examplewidows and the elderly or infirm (includingmentally). 16

Other basic needs rights might also be guar-anteed locally:

––allocation of homestead land;––allocation of agricultural and pasture land(where the community or extended kingroup traditionally disposes);––access to drinking water (but much less soto irrigation water);––access to materials (wood and mud) forbuilding construction;––access to fuelwood or peat; access to wildfish stocks and forest products (i.e., gather-ing and hunting rights);––a share in communally engineered newland (via forest clearing, new irrigationchannels, and feeder roads opening up newphysical access);––and, access to primary health care andeven education facilities possibly with somemeans tested adjustment to expected cost re-covery.

Where the provision of these rights, in thesense of correlative duties to honor them, arehierarchical via the collectivity of richer, dom-inant families in the community, then we mightimagine a collective version of adverse incor-poration, where there is a strong expectationfor poorer, aided, families to express gratitudeby not challenging the basic arrangements ofthe political economy which reproduces theirpoverty in the first place. In this way, we ob-serve institutional and plural clientelism at the

community level, alongside the more private,individualized form which emphasizes intensepersonal loyalties and dependencies. Thus wehave collective and individual patronage, withthe former offering more long-term securitythan the latter.

Rights through reciprocal relations can beproblematic in other ways. Basically rights of-fered and guaranteed by those with little powerin the society or local community are not worthmuch in longer security terms. Thus the poordo not have much to offer each other beyondvery micro, immediate transfers plus sympathy.But, such a dismissive remark needs to bequalified in at least two opposing directions.First, reciprocal relations, offering rights be-tween the poor, are further limited by thestructural conditions of poverty which placethe poor in competition with each other forscarce resources, including those social re-sources of patronage. Solidarity is not neces-sarily natural. But secondly, movements tobuild solidarity among the poor have preciselyemerged from the interrelated analysis ofstructural inequality and the need to overcomethe ‘‘within poor’’ competition that resultsfrom it. Such movements intend to create thesocial resources for the poor that are naturallylacking, and thereby contribute to the forma-tion of social capital (i.e., institutions) moreconducive to their long term interests. Proshikain Bangladesh would be a good example of thisapproach. 17 So reciprocal relations can beenhanced, and this has to be a major ingredientof any poverty-focused agency in poor condi-tions. But, it is these socio-political character-istics of poverty, as revealed through theprecariousness of rights and correlative duties,which have to be interwoven into a securityperspective.

6. PHENOMENOLOGY OF INSECURITY

How then should we construct a model inwhich security is sought at the price of con-tinuing poverty? Several concepts have to besqueezed into a holistic understanding, encap-sulated by the idea of the peasant analogue. Theway into this understanding can be describedas the phenomenology of insecurity, supportedby a ‘‘poor actor-oriented’’ epistemology. 18 Inanother language, we have to be ‘‘emic’’ in ourmethodological approach. 19 Poor people in thepoorer parts of the world can be characterized


by discourses such as ‘‘peasant’’ and/or ‘‘cli-ent,’’ reflecting the particular embedded natureof livelihood options in a noncommodifiedsocio-political economy. Countries in SouthAsia and sub-Saharan Africa remain predomi-nantly agrarian and pastoral, and even thoughthis will demographically change over the nextquarter century, the associated principles ofsocial organization will persist perhaps indefi-nitely, since we cannot equate urbanization witha linear route to commodified modernization(see, e.g., Roberts, 1978). At the same time,while these countries have operating nation-states (just) their problems of governanceand effectiveness remain (Landell-Mills, 2001;UNDP, 2000; Wood & Salway, 2000). In sub-Saharan Africa, continuing to be agrarian isonly part of the understanding since the generalconditions of insecurity through wars, faminesand AIDS challenge the very conception ofnation-state as a valid territorial entity. Bevancharacterizes these situations as ‘‘insecurityregimes,’’ with large-scale political clientelism(not just localized socioeconomic clientelism) asthe main framework of social inclusion (Bevan,2001).

The principles of being a peasant extend as asocial description into urban, industrial andinformal sector life i.e., into urban as well rurallabor markets, and into urban as well as rurallifestyles (Roberts, 1978, and later, Lough-head et al., 2000; Wood & Salway, 2000). This‘‘peasant’’ analogue thus represents a phe-nomenology of insecurity: risk aversion, dis-counting, covariance of risk, emphasis uponreproduction (physical and social), significanceof the domestic/life cycle, intergenerationalforms of transfers and provision, intrafamilydependency ratios, significance of localized so-cial resources in context of weak social capital.Pervasive clientelism takes this phenomenologya step further by emphasising loyalty over voicein the absence of exit options (Hirschman,1970), but therefore the kind of loyalty whichextends and compounds the problem of gov-ernance because it is personalized, arbitraryand nontransparent.

This analytic stance has to be placed withinan actor-oriented epistemological perspectivelocated within a political economy apprecia-tion of power and inequality which inevitablyplaces the political onus of pro-poor institu-tional change upon the poor themselves. Thisleads to four key presumptions:

––that only the poor will ultimately helpthemselves to the point of structural signifi-

cance in relation to the basic terms of con-trol over key societal resources;––second, that the poor will act according totheir perceptions of options, but that theseperceptions can be enlarged by their ownand others� actions to expand room for ma-nouevre;––third, that individual acts can be signifi-cant at the level of the ‘‘graduating’’ individ-ual, but come up against the usual socialmobility arguments in which only a fewchange status and only in steps rather thanjumps;––so that, fourth, collective action can bestructurally significant for wider units of sol-idarity with many gains on the way to fullstructural reformation (which may neverbe).

Thus the desperate search for security(Wood, 2001) takes two principal forms: indi-vidual agency and collective or social action,connected to alleviation and eradication re-spectively. Thus poverty alleviation is aboutreducing the incidence of poverty via individualprocesses of graduation and successful incorpo-ration into existing social arrangements andpatterns of distribution. Whereas poverty erad-ication relies upon the principle of structuralchange, and is about cohorts of the poor con-fronting power and inequality.

Mindful, therefore, of context andactor-oriented epistemology, a phenome-nological position is adopted by consider-ing the insecurity/security axis as the centrallink between livelihoods aspirations and theprecarious social conditions through whichthey have to be realized. It links conditions,perceptions and family/domestic life cyclesvery closely together. If, when consideringlivelihood strategies, we focus upon key deci-sion-making levels, then the primary pointsare: individual; nuclear family; and extendedfamily (sometimes joint, but increasingly lessso). We must always recognize that individu-als and families see themselves as dynamic notstatic. They intrinsically and inherently oper-ate within a strong sense of life-cycle, thedomestic cycle of the family with its notionsof stewardship, with shifting dependency ra-tios over time. And they are perpetuallythreatened by events, requiring continuoustradeoffs between present consumption (themore poor, the higher the immediate neces-sity) and future investment (the more poor,the less certain the conditions for any invest-ment).


7. CONTINUING RELEVANCE OF THEPEASANT ANALOGUE

Despite rapid economic change in manyparts of the poor world entailing polariza-tion and depeasantization in the context ofexpanding labor markets, the peasant analogycontinues to inform our basic understandingof these decision-making levels. This remainstrue even when we acknowledge structuralchange in the direction of: marketization andcommodification; wage employment; indus-trialization and the new service economy;urbanization; rising incomes; and the nucle-ation of families (see Kearney, 1996 on recon-ceptualizing the Mexican campesino). In poorcountries, we cannot assume that these changeswill inexorably lead us toward commodi-fied modernization. Contemporary survivaloptions include seeking to reproduce ‘‘peas-ant’’ behavior and client status under condi-tions of urbanizing labor markets (Khan,2000), characterized by segmentation and in-formal sector attributes (Opel, 2000) as well asincreasingly unstable families (Jesmin & Sal-way, 2000).

This peasant mentality, perforce, has tofocus more upon reproduction than productionas the central motivation for managing thedomestic cycle whether annual or intergenera-tional. The peasant, with low technologicalcontrol over the environmental conditions forproduction and always a price-taker ratherthan a price-maker, is pervaded by a sense ofmarket insecurity. But since the peasant israrely, if ever, self-sufficient, then any ex-change, as a prerequisite for survival, is fraughtwith danger. In addition, with the state his-torically functioning more as a predator–pro-tector than as a market compensator andenabler, the state represents part of the prob-lem of insecurity rather than a moderator of it.Thus the peasant has to rely for survival moreupon those institutions where membership ismore complete, acknowledged and legitimate:i.e., community and kin. This, arguably, iswhere the peasant has more chance of con-trolling events and reducing insecurity. Thisonly works up to a point. Where the commu-nity level is itself characterized by severe in-equality, then class or other exclusionsundermine the value of these institutions to theexcluded as a basis for dealing with uncertaintyand insecurity. Certainly, under such condi-tions, any notion of reciprocity has to give wayto hierarchical, adverse incorporation: i.e., the

embracing of client status and a consequentreinforcement of clientelism as the pervasivepolitical settlement.

8. DIMENSIONS OF INSECURITY

Although the analogue of the peasant hasbeen deployed above, it is also important toreflect upon wider conditions of insecurity de-rived loosely from a country�s poverty status aswell as the family level, life-cycle conditions.The wider conditions also contribute to theuncertainty at the local, community and familylevel and undermine the viability of institutionsat that level to perform secure reproductionfunctions. These points are made more withreference to contemporary Africa, than SouthAsia or elsewhere. But, when considering them,let us not forget Afghanistan, Kashmir, Burma(and the border areas with its neighbors), EastTimor, other parts of Indonesia and the Phil-ippines, parts of Colombia (despite its overallparadoxical progress on economic and socialindicators) (Barrientos, 2001), and the Balkanregion. Recent history would add a few moreexamples outside Africa too. Thus consider thefollowing list:

––the socially embedded state producingdiscretionary, even arbitrary outcomes withlegitimacy based upon authority rather thanaccountability, and sometimes straightfor-ward coercion as a substitute for legitimacy;––such states, and the challenges to them, asa cause of war, with large clan and ethnicfactions capturing the state and excludingothers;––intense, all or nothing, competition overscarce and valuable natural resources (i.e.,minerals and watersheds);––war as pervasive civilian dislocation nega-tively impacting upon different points of thelife-cycle over short-term periods (crop sea-sons), medium-term periods (theft of live-stock) and longer periods (undermining apredictable basis for human, natural andproductive investment);––such dislocation undermining the incen-tives for large-scale, long-term, public in-vestment which might, for example,manage water more securely and thereforecrops;––colonial re-structuring of agrarian andpastoral economies undermining flexibilityof response to climatic conditions (e.g., the


starving pastoralists in the Karamoja famineof 1982);––thus, for some countries especially in Af-rica, periodic threats to food security andcollapse of markets;––under such conditions, a shrinking moral-ity which emphasises the significance of everdecreasing circles of more immediate kin asthe corollary of the breakdown of publictrust;––enforced mobility of populations as refu-gees from war zones and disasters, some-times the outcome of arbitrary colonialborders;––long-term oppressed minorities undersiege (e.g., Southern Sudan, parts of Af-ghanistan);––legacies of indentured labor (especially inSouthern Africa) with migrant, male cul-tures and machismo gender outcomes inter-acting with trade routes to socially underpinpandemics like AIDS, now a major sourceof insecurity at all institutional levels.

Under these conditions, it is hardly surpris-ing that the poor in poor countries have a highdiscount rate. The demands on the present aretoo extreme to warrant sacrificial investment ina highly uncertain future. This can be exacer-bated by global economic conditions as well asthoughtless domestic macroeconomic policywhich removes certainty from skill-based labormarkets, and thereby removes the propensityfor private or public human capital investmentin them. (See Kanbur, 2001 for the all impor-tant distinction between growth, which isalways positive for poverty reduction; andparticular growth-oriented economic policies,which maintain poverty where it might other-wise have been reduced.) Better, therefore, forthe poor to operate in the spheres of theknown, familiar and controllable. The survivalalgorithm is stronger than the optimizing one(Lipton, 1968).

9. SEARCH FOR DEPENDENTSECURITY: STYLIZED

ETHNOGRAPHIES

(a) The supplicant beggar

The most obvious and perhaps extreme ex-ample of the process is the beggar, seekingpreferential client status from a single or rangeof loyal patrons. They may also seek stable sitesand pay rents for the privilege to the police or

other informal brokers in the expectation ofbuilding up stable support from regular pass-ers-by. In order to introduce an element ofcertainty into their precarious hand-to-mouthexistence, the tactic has to be to draw the po-tential patron into the inner place of the con-centric circles of moral proximity. To move apatron from the instrumentality of a singlestranded transaction (which can easily be bro-ken at any time) to multistranded ones, therebygaining wider moral attention. To gain a com-mitment not just to a ‘‘case’’ (labeled as abeggar like any other) but beyond to a ‘‘story,’’where the relationship becomes more person-alized and individual, thus cementing a morecertain moral bond. Such commitments mightbe achieved by introducing wider features ofthe story for example, referring to illness andmedical expenses, or to support for children�seducation. Thus the beggar is clearly exercisingagency in the attempt to create more certainsurrounding social and cultural conditionsthrough which entitlements might become morepredictable. Clearly this beggar analogy is ametaphor for a more generic process of draw-ing transacting parties (which can include for-mal institutions like the state) further into amoral basis for the relationship, making itharder for rights and services to be subse-quently withdrawn. But this kind of agencyentails a particular performance as a worthyand deserving client. Need has to be continu-ously demonstrated, thus foreclosing otherforms of agency such as autonomy, indepen-dence and self-reliance.

(b) The urban mastaan

A key story of the next two decades is therapid urbanization of the large poor countries,especially in South and East Asia. As indicatedabove, the livelihoods dimension of that ur-banization can still be understood through ap-plying the peasant analogue. Roberts (1978)pioneered this anti-modernity argument forSouth America, but it remains with equal force.Embodied within the notion of ‘‘peasant’’ isweakness and vulnerability in the social andcultural conditions through which needs haveto be met. Poor urbanites are thus like peasantsin being weakly positioned in relation either tothe state or different markets (commodities,labor and services). They require networks andpatron-brokers to link them more successfullyto essential opportunities in these state andmarket domains. In urban Bangladesh, such


patron-brokers are referred to as mastaan(Khan, 2000). They operate mafia-like throughan emphasis upon loyalty. They function asintermediaries between vulnerable families/individuals and more formal institutions. Withinthe slums, they manage shelter and services(electricity, water etc.), charging ‘‘rents’’ forprovision and protection even on government-owned sites. They control access to employ-ment, charging laborers for the links andcharging employers for delivering and main-taining quiescent labor. Poor urbanites, andespecially new migrants, have no option but togain membership of such networks and pa-tronage. The price for such loyalty is not tochallenge the structural conditions, whichin turn deny them long term autonomy andrights.

(c) Traditional patrons: lineages and feudallegacies

Within societies dominated by kinship andclan structures in various forms, the networksof loyalty and patronage are partially coter-minous with blood ties of varying intensity.Extended, joint families or wider lineage for-mations may generate patron figures fromamong themselves either through a deliberate‘‘Beckerian’’ (Becker, 1981) strategy of invest-ing in particular individuals with natural talentor as a result of serendipity. Traditionally suchfigures have then taken on responsibility for thesocial protection, safety nets or human capitalinvestment of lineage and clan relatives. Thedefinition of ‘‘relative’’ in some societies canextend widely, becoming almost indistinguish-able from feudal paternalism. Thus nephewsand nieces and even the children of cousins andin-laws may benefit from the patronage ofsuccessful family leaders in the large families ofBihar, India where the reliance upon the stateor markets is precarious due to high levels ofpreferentialism and rent-seeking. Thus we ob-serve family structures comprising poorer,client members obliged to accept the authorityof family patrons in exchange for livelihoodssupport. As a result their prospects of personalgraduation are remote, and likely to be repro-duced for the following generation as well. Theliterature and drama of the region (includingBengal) is full of such references to oppressedpoorer family members, essentially alienatedwithin these combined but unequal relation-ships. Broader, perhaps more subtle, versionsof these dependent relationships can be seen in

the mountains of Northern Pakistan (and alsoelsewhere in Pakistan, especially NWFP andthe Sindh), with traditional elite families con-tinuing to offer direct and indirect patronage(i.e., from employment to introductions) toever widening circles of kin on an agnatic-affi-nal continuum. Indeed honor is gained andmaintained by deploying one�s superior socialand cultural resources in the service of othersmore weakly positioned. Such agency functionsto recreate the structures of dependency andsubservience to the point where the tradeoffbetween autonomy and poverty is complete––inother words, the worst condition for a poorperson is not to be a client. Thus these ‘‘feudal’’brokers provide employment or the links to it;they put in a good word (the institution of sa-farish); they enable the poor eventually to get tothe front of the queue; they get files shifted(e.g., on a land case); they give or guaranteeloans; they can procure legal services; they canget the rent-seeking police to withdraw an en-quiry; they can mediate conflict, perhaps bypaying off the aggrieved party; and so on. Inreturn? Unswerving loyalty, even re-affirmedthrough kissing the back of the hand. There isnot much room for resistance under such con-ditions. The risk of challenge is too great.

(d) From diagonal to vertical: reconfiguring themoral political economy

Such extremes of personalized patronagemay amount to a moral political economy, butcan it be relied upon indefinitely? The emphasisimmediately above was upon traditionalelites––but perhaps this is a fading aristocracywith only some successfully moving into acommercial–political nexus which enables acontinuation of such style via newly meaningfulservices. Alongside, the poor are also increas-ingly threatened with a loss of opportunity tobe a client, to be included even on adverseterms. As traditionally strong families (or sub-branches) shift the basis of their livelihoodstoward commercial and professional activities,so is the moral political economy reconfigured.The threat to poorer branches of the family orpoorer parts of broader lineage and clan iden-tities is that the successful among them willincreasingly concentrate their resources uponimmediate descendants. In effect the pattern ofmoral responsibility shifts from vertical anddiagonal to vertical only. In other wordsindirect ‘‘diagonal’’ obligations (e.g., toward


nephews) recede in favor of only direct verticalones to sons and perhaps daughters. Infor-mants in Bihar have complained of this trendtoward their declientelization, and emergingprofessional groups in North Pakistan havealso complained about the difficulty for themof disengaging from these wider obligationsin order to focus upon their nuclear familymembers.

(e) Interlocked client status: credit dependency

The poor can also be victims of interlockedclient status. This can be most clearly observedin the context of credit relations. The risingmicrofinance industry worldwide represents anattempt to break into the interlocked rela-tionships of informal moneylending. It is axi-omatic that the poor need money; that theirearnings and production are not adequate totheir needs; that they need to borrow; thatthey have declining assets to deploy as collat-eral; and that therefore they have increasinglyto commit labor and loyalty as a substitute forasset collateral. It is also invariably true thatthe basis of their income is highly seasonal,thus generating short-term liquidity crises.Their vulnerability is also reflected in theirexposure to life cycle crises––especially illnessand death of key earners, and the medicalexpenses entailed in trying postpone suchevents. But they also have problems in main-taining minimal community membershipstandards through rites de passage. Thus theyhave many welfare and apparently unproduc-tive demands for funds (even though they areessential for the maintenance of social andcultural resources) which do not attract formalinstitutional lenders, including the so-calledflexible microfinance institutions. If the poorcannot provide these needs through their ownreciprocal arrangements (i.e., the chronic poorare rarely able to create or participate inROSCAs and ASCAs, for example) then de-pendency upon patron moneylenders is inevi-table. Remaining land assets, as collateral,become exhausted often via mortgage/highinterest conditions which prevent any realisticprospect of reclaiming mortgaged out land.Then the price of such borrowing shifts towardcommitting in advance labor services at lowwages even during high-wage seasons, or com-mitting the unpaid labor of family membersin forms of bonded labor (often this may bethe domestic labor of females or children).Indeed in the Indian subcontinent, children

may find themselves obligated to remit thedebt of their deceased parents through ongo-ing bonded labor services. Other ‘‘prices’’ are:highly exploitative tenancy arrangements; cli-ent loyalty in times of dispute and conflict; lossof rights to common property resources; lossof the ability to protect the honor of familyfemales; loss of claim to ancestral residentialsites as expanding patron lineage membersseek to settle on prime sites. In short, anoverall loss of autonomy and a deepening ofalienation through the re-affirmation of de-pendency.

(f) Migration: the degraded exit option

When considering ‘‘induced loyalty’’ in thisway, it is logical to consider exit options (on theassumption that ‘‘voice’’ is ruled out for manyunless a strong NGO or other organized socialmovement has intervened locally in a sustainedway). These usually take the form of migration,but which can also easily lead to degradedoutcomes. The dependency of migrants uponmastaans in Bangladesh or their equivalents inother societies has been noted above. Migrantsextracting themselves from adverse incorpora-tion are also leaving behind an architecture ofsocial and cultural resources essential for thepursuit of their livelihoods. How do they re-construct these without re-entering the depen-dencies from which they have been escaping?Furthermore, migration is rarely the move intoto of the entire moral unit. Those left behindhave to be cared for, and thus continue to relyupon the extant moral political economy. In-deed the prospective migrant in North Biharvillages has to borrow and commit the labor offamily members to the moneylender as thecondition for gaining the resources to migrate inthe first place. Their destination in the agricul-tural labor markets of Punjab, a 1,000 milesaway, may deliver relatively higher wages but atthe price of high social and cultural vulnerabil-ity as their new employers can abuse them atlittle long-term cost to themselves (long workinghours, beatings for low productivity and in-subordination, entrapment into contractor-ledlabor gangs, high interest on wage advanceswhich can thereby never be paid off). In addi-tion, the business of sending remittances back tofamily members is precarious: formal ‘‘PostOffice’’ methods are subject to rent-seeking of-ficials; informal transfers also carry a ‘‘protec-tion’’ tax against robbery. The migrant might


then need to return to the home village. Thishappens frequently as destination opportunitiesfail to work out for various reasons. The pros-pect of needing to return reduces the value ofthe exit option as a counterweight to alienatingloyalty.

(g) Marriage, membership and access

Since Hirschman, we are attuned to think interms of exit, voice and loyalty. Schaffer andLamb (1974) however substituted access forloyalty. Both terms, access and loyalty, can beunderstood as precursors of inclusion strategiesas responses to social exclusion. It has beeninteresting to track family marriage strategieswith reference to the search for security viainclusion. The rise in value of dowries in ruralNorth Bihar relative to other prices in the localeconomy provides us with some insight. Poorpeasant fathers, or elder brothers, are preparedto mortgage substantial proportions of theirremaining landholding in order to finance ef-fective levels of dowry. Of course, many factorsaffect the level of a dowry settlement, not leastthe gender composition of the bride�s sib-lings and expectations of ‘‘return’’ on sons asbridegrooms. But leaving such complexityaside, I have come to understand that this ap-parently nonproductive, short-sighted, anti-modernist tradeoff between dowry value andloss of cultivable land has indeed a clever ra-tionale. Poorer families suffer from lack of ac-cess to scarce but essential agricultural inputsto increase the productivity of their land. Theproblem of access is not just an ability to meetprice demands but an inability to operate inhighly imperfect markets where price is not theonly or even the most significant variable ofaccess. This is reinforced where the local state isinvolved in rationing and licensing dealers.Social networks and connections are everythingin this context. Poor peasant fathers do nothave these networks and have to connectthemselves to others who do. Thus they have toinflate their dowry offers in order to get theirdaughters married into stronger families,thereby establishing the affinal claims for thebride�s natal family upon the networking of thebridegroom�s family. They consider that in-creasing the productivity of their remainingland is more important than running the risk ofnever reclaiming the land mortgaged out tofund the dowry in the first place. In this way,they are in a position of paying for the patron-age necessary for essential access to livelihood

resources. They have deliberately incorporatedthemselves, at a price. It is secondary to thisargument that I have learned that such land israrely reclaimed as the mortgage debt is in-variably divided among brothers on the deathof the father/grandfather, and these brothershave similar strategies to follow with their owndaughters.

(h) Security before graduation: Afghancommanders

Finally, let us return to the extreme circum-stances of sustained disruption and conflictwhich alas applies increasingly to many parts ofthe world. Although these conditions applystrongly to countries in sub-Saharan Africa, myillustration comes from a recent visit to Af-ghanistan. It is common in both Africa andAfghanistan to refer to ‘‘warlords.’’ Locally inAfghanistan, the more common term is ‘‘com-mander.’’ Badakhshan Province in the NorthEast of Afghanistan was a minor invasion routefor the Soviet forces in 1979, a significant areaof mujadhin mobilization against the Soviet oc-cupation, a key player in the post-Soviet conflictending in a retreat of its Northern Allianceforces from Kabul in the early 1990s, and finallyan area of ‘‘siege’’ as the Taliban forces triedand failed to enter and subordinate the provinceto its control. During all this time, and espe-cially during the period of ‘‘siege’’ in the secondhalf of the 1990s, the Northern border withTajikistan was largely closed except for incom-ing food aid wheat convoys, and the border withPakistan to the East was virtually impassable.These conditions produced tremendous stresson the local moral political economy. As part ofa much larger story, a network of commandersemerged in the absence of a formal state, acollapse of stable currency, increasing scarcityof essential supplies, and deepening poverty.They managed a localized and arbitrary systemof law and order, dispensed rough justice, dis-tributed supplies and loans to distressed familiesin return for mortgaged land, cheap labor andyoung male recruits to the Northern Alliancemilitia. Under these conditions, the local peas-ants and pastoralists had no exit or voice op-tions. Loyalty at any price was the only survivalstrategy. They had to accept the patronage ofthese commanders and their absolute author-ity. The prevailing conditions of insecurity overtwo decades effectively clientelized the society,where more local democratic, tribal condi-tions had obtained before. Even though the


surrounding conditions are now changing(maybe), the future remains highly discountedwith local people having little faith (thoughmuch hope) in the return of a responsible state,stable currency, contract compliance, widernontainted market options and security at per-sonal and community levels. The commandersystem will therefore be slow to unravel eventhough many clients, in private conversation,would like to see it disappear. But by now, manyof these clients are deeply in debt, have lostsubstantial amounts of cultivable land, arecommitted to debt–labor bondage, have sur-rendered community autonomy and even some-times personal autonomy (women, especiallyyoung women, remain heavily veiled less forIslamic-cultural reasons than to avoid droit deseigneur). For them, the dangers of not being aclient, of not being protected, of losing ‘‘mem-bership’’ of the local commander led commu-nity are immense. Better to be with the devil youknow––the Faustian bargain. Security at theprice of graduation––individual or collective.Striking out on your own is just too risky.

10. CONCLUSION: SECURITY AS THEFAUSTIAN BARGAIN

The determining condition for poor peopleanywhere in the world is uncertainty. Somesocieties perform better than others in miti-gating this uncertainty for individuals andfamilies under conditions where most peopleare enjoying a functional security, and areprepared to endorse rights and resources to thevulnerable poor among them. In so doing theyare prepared to accept taxation and regulationas the collective compensator of individual ve-nality, and the state is more or less trusted as anhonest broker between selfishness and collectivesecurity. Thus, in such societies we observewelfare regimes which reduce in various waysthe uncertainties of the market to provide forall citizens minimum conditions for reproduc-tion. Such societies are a minority, however andare even themselves threatened by variousforces of globalization which can leave theirrespective governments powerless to act as acompensator of last resort.

Elsewhere in the world, destructive uncer-tainty is more pervasive. Such uncertainty de-rives from an overall instability and volatility inpolitical, economic, social, and moral environ-ments. Among the factors are: governments

that do not function, with a correspondingweak sense of citizenship; economies that ex-perience price fluctuation in key commodities,including exports, which affect employmentlevels; hostile political economies, characterizedby inequality, privilege and exploitation ratherthan abstract laws of supply and demand, re-inforced rather than mitigated by forces ofglobalization; rapidly changing identities andloyalties comprising continuous fission and fu-sion. All these combine to destabilize the moraluniverse in terms of trust, loyalty and respon-sibility, entailing a world of cheats, free-ridersand predators. Living in such conditions isrisky, and the risk is compounded by uncer-tainty about the future.

For those of us who are relatively secure inadvanced economies, risk management partlyinvolves preparing for the future because wethink it secure enough to warrant such prepa-ration, despite persistent threats of fluctuatingfinancial markets and terrorism. So we savethrough pension plans, and take out variouspersonal equity policies. We are also prepared tocommit to long mortgages, as well as to shorterterm borrowing for consumption items such ascars. In the present, we might acquire diversityof risk through dual income families; and wemight continuously update our skills to connectto increasingly flexible labor markets. In thisway, among others such as driving carefully orconforming to law in the expectation that otherswill do likewise, we gain our security.

None of these strategies are so easy, or in-deed rational, under conditions of high uncer-tainty. The poor, almost by definition, facemore uncertainty than others. They have lesscontrol over relationships and events aroundthem. They are obliged to live more in thepresent, and to discount the future. The valueto them of the known present exceeds that ofthe unknown future. In other words, their time-preference behavior is for the present, whichleaves them more vulnerable for the future.Moreover, risk management in the present in-volves loyalty to institutions and organizationsthat presently work and deliver livelihoods,whatever the longer term cost. Thus multipe-riod games are established on the basis of pa-tron-client dependencies, comprising a multipleweb of transactions which limit the client�sroom for maneuver since all ties could bethreatened if one of them is allowed to collapse.Preparation for the future is continuously post-poned for survival in the present-the Faustianbargain.


NOTES

1. Most recently (as I write) in the northeast corner of

Afghanistan.

2. The first self-proclaimed socialist in Russian history,

though a free thinking critic of Marx, see Isaiah Berlin�sessays in Hardy & Kelly, 1978.

3. Alleviation is a different, lesser, albeit worthy

agenda.

4. That is, people with weak social and cultural

resources in their agency profile. We can, of course,

note that some ethnic minorities and migrants are far

from excluded and poor: e.g., South African whites

remain highly privileged; Indian IT and health profes-

sionals are doing very well in the United States. This

qualification reminds us that structural circumstances

will determine whether distinctive groups of migrants,

minorities or disabled are actually precluded from social

action. The argument here is that the overall structural

conditions of poor country political economies will in

most cases link such ascribed characteristics to impaired

capacity for social action.

5. Even in Latin America, where as a generalization

only about 50% of the labor force is commodified (see

Barrientos, 2001).

6. This expression refers to an institutional landscape

comprising, at the domestic level, state, market, com-

munity and household; with corresponding international

domains to offer an eight-box matrix. Each institutional

domain is problematic for social agency, especially

under conditions where political legitimacy and the

social capital associated with widespread generalized

commodity production are fragile (see Wood, 2001,

2003).

7. In the sense of structurally persistent.

8. Especially for the idiosyncratically, chronic poor.

9. Of course, we are all vulnerable to something:

sudden loss of employment, for example. But secure

people either have the skills to re-enter the labor market

at reasonably similar levels, or they have been incorpo-

rated into other protective financial arrangements

(redundancy entitlements, pensions, insurance and so

on).

10. Given that Chambers (1982) discussed ‘‘downward

ratchets.’’

11. Though incidentally for the present argument, how

social policy might assist in the improvement of that

negotiation––i.e., not just ‘‘individual graduation’’ pass-

ports but ‘‘institutional reform’’ passports for whole

societies, with different contents and meanings for

different people and situations.

12. I am grateful to Sarah White at Bath for pointing

this out.

13. In these approaches, eradication is understood as a

more distant, less realizable goal.

14. Of course there are many different forms

of ‘‘household,’’ characterized by the classic terminol-

ogy of anthropology: patrilineal, patriarchal, patrifocal,

virilocal, matrilineal, matrifocal, monogamy, polygamy,

polyandry, and so on. There are some clear stylized

differences between a South Asian patrifocal polyga-

mous household sharing the same hearth and a sub-

Saharan African patrilineal, polygamous, matrifocal

extended family with scattered matrifocal hearths.

15. See Wood (1994) for descriptions of this process in

villages in Bangladesh.

16. I have recently written a report (as yet unpub-

lished) for the Aga Khan Rural Support program on

informal social protection in the Northern Areas and

Chitral district of Northern Pakistan: ‘‘AKRSP Poverty

Policy For 2003-8 Phase: Issues, Strategies And Dilem-

mas’’ Mimeo 9.3.02. See also the thesis by Lawson-

McDowall (2000) in which Chitral compares favorably

with the more stratified rural Nepal in this respect.

17. A large, social mobilization NGO, currently orga-

nizing in excess of 80,000 landless groups (both men�sand women�s), with a federated structure increasingly

significant at district level.

18. i.e., the presumption that actors� perceptions

explain behavior, which give us knowledge about

outcomes.

19. i.e., gaining insight through empathizing with the

way choices and options appear to the subjects of our

analysis (Wood, 2002).


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staying secure, staying poor: the “faustian bargain”

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