Environmental Management: Principles and practice

Marginalization
People who are marginalized—forced or attracted onto poor-quality, perhaps easily
degraded land, or in some other way live close to the edge—become progressively
more disadvantaged and vulnerable (a vicious spiral). The reasons for marginalization
are diverse and include: loss of common resources; efforts to escape unrest; the hope
of employment or access to farmland; eviction from conservation areas or from the
estates of large land users; altered trade opportunities; economic impacts of structural
adjustment and national debt; changes in labour costs and availability; widowhood;
and reservoir flooding. Environmental or socioeconomic change or technological
innovation can cause people to become marginalized (or demarginalized) in situ; for
example, drought; disease or pests; pollution; decline in demand for produce due to
change in fashion, economic slump, or substitution; warfare; rising labour costs;
changes in communications; altered land-user attitudes; introduction of new crops;
labour migration.
There is considerable support for the view that there are growing environmental
problems in developing countries, often caused by the disempowerment of local
people, i.e. locals can no longer participate in resource management and are losing
access to resources (Ghai and Vivian, 1992:72; The Ecologist, 1993; Harrison, 1992:
126; Bromley, 1994). A widespread cause of loss of access to common resources is
the penetration of capitalism (Tornell and Velasco, 1992). In India, Thailand or Brazil
it may be companies seeking land to grow eucalyptus, or large landowners seeking
land to grow soya for export, that acquire common land; elsewhere it may be ranchers
looking for more grazing land for export-orientated beef production.
What tends to happen through marginalization is that the marginalized
overstress the resources they still have access to, and with nowhere to move to, or no
means of moving, they become unwilling agents of damage and their own ultimate
demise. Marginal land is likely to demand inputs and be less forgiving to users but is
least likely to get such investment.
People forced to move often end up in difficult environments, and are also
likely to be disorientated. Together with many of those who have willingly relocated,
they probably lack the necessary local experience and resources to establish
sustainable livelihoods. Many of those who practise degenerate shifting cultivation
are thus ‘shifted cultivators’, people who have relocated.
Sustained resource exploitation strategies may be disrupted, those disturbed
may adapt their activities, cause environmental problems and suffer hardship.
Disruption can be caused by quite minor changes, for example in attitudes, trade,
weather, and so on, particularly if the resource or land use was poised on a knife-
edge. The terms of trade can be a root cause of poverty which may drive people to
damage the environment and which also starves governments of funds to counter
problems.
Studies of poverty and environmental degradation suggest that three factors
often combine to cause marginalization: (1) rapid population growth; (2) land
consolidation and agricultural modernization in fertile agricultural areas; (3) prevailing
inequalities in land tenure (Leonard et al., 1989:5).

---

CHAPTER TEN
192