John Durston
Social Affairs Officer,
Social Development Division
U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean
Santiago, Chile
Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to discuss four broad processes whose implications for the situation of rural youth in developing countries and whose challenges to rural youth programmes are still not fully understood but are of fundamental and varied significance. The first of these processes is in fact a double, long term structural cycle: the demographic and occupational transitions which last for decades. Three are medium term processes, lasting for several years but usually less than a decade, that include the transition toward international economic integration and the globalization of communications and, finally, the fundamental policy reforms of economic restructuring, with the changes it brings in the role of the state.
It is important to take these macro-processes into account in any international comparative analysis of rural youth programs, because the great diversity of national and local contexts in the developing world is so large that there is a real danger both of limiting our discourse to broad generalities that are true for all situations but useful to none, or of engaging in a "dialogue of the near-sighted" in which an attempt is made to replicate internationally experiences with rural youth programmes whose success is in fact linked and limited to the specific local context and historical conjuncture in which they took place.
Moreover, as we all know, not only international but even national averages are misleading: in most countries there are some relatively prosperous as well as some food-deficit micro-regions, communities and households, and the more we can disagregate our analysis the closer we will be to reality and to understanding the vicious circles that perpetuate low income and poor nutrition.
How can we possibly deal with such diversity, reach anything better than superficial generalizations, and still maintain a global, comparative analysis of rural youth policies and programmes?
Firstly, if we narrow the focus of our analysis to low-income rural areas or communities rather than countries, we will probably find that the farming family growing food staple crops on insufficient, unproductive land and supplementing on-farm income with wage labour by some of its members, may have more in common with a similar family on another continent than with some of their own, more fortunate, countrymen. Thus, the problems of the millions of rural youth in Latin America who are growing up in poor households may reveal surprising parallels with their peers in other regions.
Secondly, the biological and social processes typical of the youth period in the human life cycle provide important basic commonalities that make it possible to limit the variations in local realities that must be dealt with in different situations, at least in the type of programme with which this article is concerned.
It is worth reviewing at this point some basic characteristics shared by poor rural youth everywhere. The meaning of the term "youth" in rural society, the possibilities and limitations of developing and following a life strategy, and the relation between young people's objectives and those of the parental household heads are among these commonalities. The exact forms that these commonalities take are also strongly influenced, in different ways and to different degrees, by broad, long-term and medium-term processes of social structural transformation that occur everywhere.
Rural young people are at the stage of life in which strategic thinking is most marked and during which they will take many of the decisions and actions that will exert the greatest influence over the type of adult life career they will follow (Durston 1996). The strategies developed by rural youth are oriented essentially toward individual goals, although they may be pursued in partnership with other people and although the young people concerned almost always contribute to the maintenance of the paternal household. However, the ways in which socio-economic, structural transitions affect this situation of rural youth also pose challenges, both in the sense of difficulties and in the sense of opportunities, to rural youth policies and programmes.
The life strategies of poor rural youth and their interaction with the household development cycle are slightly different in different climates, and with different resource bases; they are also heavily limited by special problems like war, disease, and famine. Still, rural young people develop strategies that combine the same basic elements, to cope with risk and to help assure the survival of the household, even in the most extreme of these negative situations.
Thirdly, the broad processes mentioned above are in large part the same in all developing countries. Therefore, as we shall see, we can organize the diversity of national, micro-regional and community situations in terms of stages in these processes or transitions, and thus make their discussion more manageable.
It is the premise of this article that a typology of contexts can be constructed on the basis of the stages in the processes of structural change listed above, and that broad guidelines for rural youth programmes can be drawn up that are specific to the challenges of each local combination of conditions identified in such a typology.
This article does not attempt to deal with the diversity of climate or of the natural and social landscape, though these aspects are also important. Rather, it attempts to combine the ordering of diversity in socioeconomic structure with the ordering of change, thus generating a rough general typology of situations of rural youth in developing countries in terms of different phases of major, ongoing transformations. The social structural transition phase in which a given young person finds himself constitutes a contextual framework that strongly determines his alternatives for today and for tomorrow, and therefore must be taken into account in adapting youth programme design to that specific situation.
Thus, in the following pages, a review is undertaken of some of the major processes underway in the rural developing world, processes whose stages help us structure the analysis of diversity by types of countries or areas. Some well-known and a few less obvious impacts of these processes on the life strategies of rural youth and their families are discussed; and the implications of these impacts for youth-oriented rural extension programmes are addressed in relation to the stages of each broad transformation. The intent is to bring to light the similarities and differences between the various realities of rural youth in the wide variety of national and subnational contexts, to enhance the international discussion of best practices in rural youth programmes by making this discussion more "context specific" and yet comparative.
The double long-term transition: Demographic and occupational
One such typology of national and local contexts is in terms of stages reached in the most basic and long-term of dynamics: the demographic transition and the occupational transition, which, together, all developing countries have been going through for many decades.
Relevant characteristics of the demographic and occupational transitions
As we all know, the demographic transition involves the passage of national societies from a context of high birth rates and high death rates to a situation in which both birth and death rates are low and relatively stable. As this transition progresses, and population growth slows, more people reach old age, live in cities and enjoy better health. Accompanying these basic changes, there are also changes in the relationship between migration, forming families, and life strategies followed by youth in rural areas.
Thus, in practically all Latin American countries, for example, rural population growth rates have been dropping over recent decades and have even become negative because of out-migration, mostly by the young, and by the lower fertility of younger women. There has therefore been a pronounced aging of rural communities because of migration, fertility and mortality trends.
But in most countries of the region, that rhythm of decline has begun to slow down or will reach an inflection toward stabilization in the next decade. Thus, on average, the numbers of rural inhabitants continues to remain fairly stable, neither growing nor shrinking steadily, but fluctuating very slightly around 123 million persons over the whole period from 1985 to 2025. By contrast, the urban population will double over the same 40-year period, from 265 million to 563 million (CELADE, 1995). One consequence is that in the 1990s the majority of the poor now live in cities, with the exception of the poorest, most rural countries, with greater visibility and more possibility of demanding governmental attention than the rural poor (CEPAL, 1995).
The occupational transition is less well known: that is, the passage from societies in which most workers are employed in low-productivity agriculture, to one in which most jobs are in the urban-industrial complex and increasingly in white-collar services (CEPAL, 1989). The expansion of literacy and public education is a key condition of the occupational transition. There is a close feed-back between the occupational transition and the demographic transition, partly because both women's education and the more attractive work opportunities that require an investment in children's education lead to lower fertility rates.
Why are these abstract issues relevant to our discussion of rural youth? First of all, because this "double transition" has proved useful to our work in ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean; "CEPAL" in its Spanish acronym) by permitting a typology of countries separated into three major groups: (1) those poorest countries still in an incipient phase of the double transition; (2) those in an intermediate, accelerated phase of rapid change; and (3) those in an advanced phase of this "structural modernization". I propose that we assume for the moment that individual communities also go through the same structural and behavioral changes, and that we should therefore try to visualize into which of these three phases the specific, real rural communities we know, fall.
In fact, not only the demographic/occupational transition but all broad processes of social structural change can be divided into the same three stages, because they are all transitions between an previous state in a complex system and a new, relatively stable state (Cowan, et al., 1994). As a result, all such transformations have an initial stage of slow, incipient change, a middle stage of rapid, dynamic, self-reinforcing change, and a final slowing stage in which the transition approaches its end. This typical sequence of slow, fast and slow rhythms of change make the graphic representation of such transitions take the form of an S-shaped curve. With the passage of time represented on the horizontal axis, the vertical axis could correspond to, for example, life expectancy at birth; percent of labour force employed in non-agricultural jobs; or percent of households with television.
In our preoccupation with so many unmet rural needs and with the extreme deprivation and neglect of rural youth in the poorest of communities, it is also important to remember that in many rural areas of the developing world economic growth and the demographic/occupational transition has meant that things have improved at least somewhat over the last generation or so. Rural youth programmes must not always be thought of as one more kind of disaster relief or charity. In most rural areas, the quality of life and material incomes have risen with greater integration into national economies. This more positive view is supported by what we know of the double demographic-occupational transition: once the positive spiral is begun, supporting it with training and other resources is much more likely to find success. This is evident in on-the-ground rural youth work: not all of the communities are the poorest of the poor, and where new educational and employment opportunities are emerging, where families are starting to have fewer children, extension work with rural youth is less discouraging and more rewarding, as the youth themselves show they have the capacities to make real contributions to development.
In Table I, some of the countries of Latin America are ordered according to their current position in these stages of the demographic/occupational transition, as well as of the other transitions discussed in later sections of this article.
Table 1. Four major socio-economic transitions: phases in Latin America
|
TRANSITION |
INCIPIENT PHASE |
RAPID CHANGE PHASE |
ADVANCED PHASE |
|
DEMOGRAPHIC/OCCUPATIONAL |
Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras |
Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic |
Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela |
|
EXTERNAL ECONOMIC INTEGRATION |
All other countries |
Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, |
Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay |
|
GLOBALIZATION OF MEDIA |
Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru, Paraguay |
Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Panama, Uruguay, Venezuela |
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Puerto Rico |
|
FINANCE/GOVERNMENT REFORMS |
Uruguay; all other countries |
Brazil, Venezuela |
Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico |
Sources: CEPAL 1989 y 1996; UNESCO 1995.
Impacts of the demographic and occupational transitions on the contexts and situations of rural youth
It seems obvious that in rural youth programmes the highest priority must go to youth in those "poorest of the poor" communities that are still in the incipient phase of reducing fertility and increasing productivity. In fact, however, it is proving overly optimistic to refer to an "incipient" phase in many of the poorest rural communities, in the sense of a process that will soon register progress, since in many cases the race to increase income opportunities more rapidly than the growth of the economically active population has already been lost, at least temporarily. In such extreme cases, the deprivations of rural youth are so broad and their own resources and capabilities so meager that the most basic of needs remain unmet.
But in the majority of poor rural communities, the double transition is already well under way: most rural youth have fewer brothers and sisters than their parents or grandparents did; their own parents have longer life expectancies than formerly; and many have educations and job possibilities far broader than in preceding generations.
Thus, the stage reached in this fundamental transition in a given rural area is a strong determinant of the real opportunities and choices open to rural youth today. The various parts of the transition form, in fact, a kind of indivisible syndrome, in which change is systemic and occupational diversification, greater educational coverage and demographic changes feed back and reinforce each other.
As these changes advance together, the ever-present tensions between rural youth's own ideas of their future and their parents' ideas of what they should do, become stronger and stronger. Fewer siblings and more adolescent children in school mean that parents have less access to the labour of youth than in the past. Older youth have less prospects of inheriting land from parents who live longer than their parents did. On the other hand, because of the occupational transition, rural youth have more and more opportunities for off-farm employment and thus for escaping parental authority either partially or completely. For young girls, the changes in relation to their parents are even more dramatic: a whole new world opens up for them, with growing alternatives to the role of housewife and mother.
Young women's and young men's migration have radically different meanings at different stages of the demographic and occupational transition; these different meanings must also be taken into greater account in rural youth programme design. In some communities or areas, it is more common for young men to find off-farm paid employment or to emigrate, in others it is young women. One working hypothesis is that in an early stage of the demographic/occupational transition, unskilled young men emigrate, usually temporarily, to supplement the sparse family income, especially in the initial stage of forming their own households, when they have little capital, inherited land or family labour to permit on-farm survival.
At a later stage of the double transition, young women are more exposed to new alternatives to a life in a traditional "machista" culture, and seek more years of formal education that can serve as a passport to skilled, often non-manual jobs in a different environment. In fact, there tends to be an association between low education and predominantly male youth migration in poor, isolated, high fecundity rural communities, and greater female youth migration associated with education in more modernized communities. In the latter case, in Latin America at least, rural young women, as a result, have now caught up with young men and surpassed them in terms of the number of school grades passed (CEPAL 1995).
Challenges presented by the demographic and occupational transitions for rural youth policy design
What do these different stages and their consequences imply for rural youth policy formation and programme design? In the first place, rural youth programmes must obviously be highly flexible and offer different alternatives to youth in rural communities at different stages of the demographic and occupational transitions described above. In the incipient stage, reproductive health education may be a valid priority for youth extension work, as well as training in basic literary skills combined with simple agro-industrial processing. In more modernized areas, even in relatively poor communities, the greater, viable aspirations of rural youth may lend greater priority to new, specific work skills already in demand in the local, regional or national job market.
Overcoming the "campesinista" bias.
The broad socio-economic transformations taking place everywhere as a result of the double transition also require us to face explicitly a deep-seated bias. Many of us have a bias, partly emotional and partly rational, that in Latin America is called "campesinista": that is, "pro-peasant". We have valid reasons for idealizing the small family farm as a model for the future of the rural youth about whom we are concerned. We don't idealize poverty, but rather the self-contained, cooperative farm family, with sufficient land, machinery and operating capital, embedded in an egalitarian small community.
Even though this model is a valid one for planning, particularly from the point of view of culturally sustainable development, the fact remains that a very large proportion of rural youth who work do so in off-farm salaried employment, in large degree outside the agricultural sector, and that another large part leave home to work in urban areas. Extension activity with rural youth ignores this reality at its own peril. In the agricultural sphere, it is not an either/or decision: rural youth must be given the possibility of learning to be productive farmer-entrepreneurs and of learning specific modern agricultural, agro-industrial or non-agricultural specialties that are in demand by agro-businesses.
Migration: when is it bad, when is it good?
Another part of the bias in favour of the family farm is that rural-urban migration of youth is often lamented as an unavoidable evil or as a kind of seduction that weakens the rural family, community and culture. We have to put this question in a more realistic, varied context to determine what position rural youth extension programmes should take with relation to youth emigration in different contexts.
If we are primarily concerned with the welfare of rural young people themselves, we must admit that emigration in many cases is the best thing for them, particularly in two extreme cases. First, in the poorest communities, caught in the incipient stage of the demographic/occupational transition, and where unproductive land has been exhausted and fragmented among many children, physical survival for all requires that some of the sons and daughters leave and some stay. In more modernized communities, where parents have made the investment in complete primary or secondary education, educated rural youth cannot simply be prohibited from migrating to seek better job opportunities or further formal education not available locally. In both extreme cases, it seems only fair that youth extension programmes provide training that helps make possible the real option of finding a better life elsewhere. The related issue of linking productive projects to rural youth training programmes will be dealt with a little later in this paper.
We usually think of rural-urban youth emigration as a permanent choice, with the image in our minds of young men and women that end up living permanently in urban areas and only occasionally coming back to visit. However, a large part of the young people who migrate for work do so for a season or a few years. Secondly, youth emigration from poor communities can fluctuate strongly from year to year, according, for example, to the severity of drought or to the possibilities of local paid employment by a rural development project building infrastructure or fomenting an associative agro-industry. These variations on the emigration theme change as the demographic/occupational transition advances, and also have to be taken into account in rural youth extension programmes in poor communities.
The various contextual differences associated with the stages of the demographic and occupational transition discussed in the preceding section, such as the progressive reduction of rural young women's disadvantage in education, number of children per household and changes in life expectancy, must obviously shape the design of extension programmes for rural youth in different types of communities at different stages of that transition. In particular, in order to design more effective programmes for rural youth, and in addition to taking into account the strategic thinking that rural youth carry out, we also need to develop less simplified models of household cycle dynamics.
Not all households are equally poor, even in extremely poor rural communities; there are important differences over the life cycle, and young household heads tend to be the poorest of all. Similarly, we must remember that not all rural young people automatically prefer migration, that the decision to migrate or not results from a complex weighing of push and pull factors. These factors change radically over the structural change cycle discussed above: for example, the more members of a generation go to the city, the more staying becomes more attractive to others who have greater chances of inheriting or buying land.
International economic integration
In contrast to the long-term trends analysed above, there are also important, current medium-term trends that impact on the situations of rural youth and offer challenges to the adaptability of rural youth policy: principally, international economic integration, the globalization of communications, and structural adjustment as part of the changing role of the state. The last two processes will be analyzed later in this paper under the headings "The Globalization of Communications" and "Current Transformations in Economic Policy and in the Role of the State: Structural Adjustment and Beyond."
Relevant characteristics of trade liberalization in the emerging development strategy
Virtually all national governments in developing countries are eager to participate in the growing integration of national economic systems with the world market, since the possibility of exporting to this vast market in formation is at the core of most new development strategies. The ways of implementing this participation in the world market involves a series of changes at the national level to improve competitivity, such as trade liberalization, that vary from country to country. All of these changes have in common the reduction of protective tariffs and other barriers, and presumably lead to both greater investment in developing countries, greater productivity and in consequence to greater exports and thus faster export-led GNP growth (CEPAL 1994).
The implications for agriculture and rural development are complex, and very different at different stages: in the first stage of trade liberalization the reduction of protective tariffs mean that many traditional crops are no longer profitable. But the net impacts on employment are also affected by the change from staple food crops to export crops, and internal food prices are also affected positively by the elimination of consumer price controls on basic foods, also associated with current reform packages.
At more advanced stages of the process of integrating national and micro-regional economies with the world market, the effects on the rural poor are highly variable from area to area, and there are even possibilities for developing small-scale, export-oriented agro-industries owned collectively by poor rural communities. One thing, though is clear: the main challenge is for producers to respond correctly to profound, rapid change in market conditions. In fact, international economic integration also means greater volatility and greater vulnerability to diverse fluctuations in the world system, and thus will demand a rapid response capacity and risk management strategies from producers large and small, old and young.
Impacts of trade liberalization and international economic integration on the situation of rural youth
Clearly, today's rural youth, including many of the poorest, are better equipped for responding to such demands for flexibility and change than are their elders. But international economic integration doesn't seem to automatically promote greater equity, though it may reduce some forms of poverty in its more advanced phases as a result of economic growth and creation of more productive jobs. However, it tends to leave peasants behind if strong compensating policies are not applied: commercial export agriculture and agro-industry require resources and information that is difficult for them to acquire.
There are, however, opportunities for associations of small farmers to produce quality-controlled fresh produce and small agro-industrial products for both export and the growing national urban markets, opportunities which require specialized skills and also professionalized management. For rural youth with such education-based capabilities, valid job alternatives may begin to appear in their communities of origin, communities which until recently had no way of attracting these human resources, so necessary for breaking the vicious circle of rural poverty.
For rural youth with more modest educational achievements, international economic integration, and the improved communications and "rurbanization" of the countryside it requires, means in its middle and advanced phases, there are more modern sector salaried jobs, both in commercial agriculture, construction, commerce and other services. In other words, international economic integration accelerates and re-directs the implications for rural youth of the long-term occupational transition discussed above.
Challenges presented by international economic integration for rural youth policy design
As in the previous section, the most basic challenge of international economic integration for rural youth programmes, particularly in the field of training, is to develop alternative strategies for countries and communities in different phases of the trade liberalization process. In the early, tariff-reduction phase, considerable rural unemployment and small-farmer bankruptcy may occur, requiring emergency employment programmes in which youth may play a large part. In more advanced phases, both short-term specific skill training and longer-term development of management skills, both for salaried work and associative community enterprise, will tend to be increasingly relevant in rural youth extension programmes.
There is a common paradox in the rural development dilemma at advanced stages of international integration that can be taken as a golden opportunity for rural youth programmes. On the one hand, educated rural youth face a high opportunity cost if they want to stay in their local community where there are few opportunities for using their educational skills; most migrate in consequence. At the same time, ironically, managers of programmes designed to enhance peasant productivity frequently lament that the farming family heads they deal with lack the educational skills to absorb the technology transfers such programmes offer.
The opportunity, then, lies in linking youth training programmes with the services offered by productive programmes, overcoming the tradition of dealing exclusively with household heads who tend to be older and less educated. This opportunity requires, however, breaking down the bureaucratic compartments that separate youth programmes from other, productive programmes.
The globalization of communications
Relevant characteristics of globalization, mass media and cultural messages
The globalization of communications and of its cultural messages, particularly through mass media such as radio, TV, films and videos, has been having a highly visible impact on rural youth for several decades. Its negative impacts, in terms of promoting values of consumerism and of the negative messages it transmits about rural life and culture, have been more than sufficiently discussed and denounced. However, particularly in the last decade, the expansion of global mass media has been accompanied by a much greater diversity of messages transmitted.
Like the other structural transitions between states in complex social systems discussed in this article, the penetration of globalized communications in rural areas follows a typical series of phases: slow and incipient; rapid and self-sustaining; and finally the deceleration as the innovation approaches the completion of its potential. The number of television sets per thousand inhabitants is the most readily available proxy statistic of this process (UNESCO 1995).
However, for our purposes, two additional characteristics are relevant: the presence of television in poor rural communities, with its prerequisite of electricity; and the legalization of satellite TV signals in the country. The data on average number of television sets must therefore be combined with information on rural electrification and on current legislative and regulatory aspects. This is the classificatory approach followed here in defining the typology of countries by the three stages of globalization of mass media used in this article, and is reflected in Table 1.
Impacts of globalization of communications on the situation of rural youth
Not all of the messages transmitted by globalized mass media are damaging or disorienting for rural youth. They include increased exposure to ideas and principals of democracy, human rights, and social justice. Seeing images of women in freer, more active roles, for example, is disruptive for almost all traditional cultures, but disruptive in a fundamentally positive sense. The increasingly fashionable celebration of indigenous and tribal life styles and knowledge in the media is often a valuable message of self-esteem and ethnic identity and pride to indigenous rural youth confused by local schools with their "civilizing" message and by the expressions of racism by dominant social sectors (Durston, 1993).
Even more concretely, exposure to global mass media has played a role in generating the diametrically different attitudes that older and younger rural inhabitants tend to have toward key topics that we must deal with here today. The greater exposure of rural youth to mass media, especially TV and its implicit, value-laden messages has frequently been deplored in terms of its promotion of consumerism, anti-rural attitudes, and so forth. But this exposure has also had positive impacts in the context of the issues we are concerned with here. At least two examples come readily to mind.
One is the very concept of sustainable development and the value placed on the natural ecosystem and awareness of the impact of contamination on the human environment. Although there is an ongoing debate concerning the religious value of the earth and concern for future generations in traditional rural cultures, it is also true that many older people see the wild natural world partly as an obstacle or enemy and partly as a resource to be exploited in unlimited form. Young people have been more exposed to and influenced by the ecological consciousness that is one of the positive aspects of modernity.
The other example of generational differences associated with greater exposure of youth to outside information is the area of technology and especially informatics. It is difficult to get poor rural inhabitants over thirty to interact with computers, whereas young people, the younger the better, tend to be much more uninhibited and even highly enthusiastic about putting their hands on a computer, a tool that will be extremely important for overcoming rural poverty in the coming generation.
Challenges presented by communications globalization for rural youth policy design
Governments are often tempted to follow the conceptually simple solution of "filtering" the information and value-laden messages flooding into developing countries, but this is easier said than done. Censorship also has human rights implications and in its full-blown form is basically unfeasible in a modern, democratic society
From the point of rural youth capability formation, it seems more appropriate to evaluate the media offerings actually available in specific communities, and to ensure that "good" messages and information of the sort mentioned above are also available, even if they are commercially less attractive, in mass media or through special outreach or education-at-a-distance programmes.
Here, as in other processes that can be typified according to stages, rural youth extension must develop different strategies for different contexts. Many poor rural youth in incipient contexts of globalization live in isolated communities without electricity and may never have seen television: but they probably will soon, and will also feel its cultural hybridization indirectly. Training programmes can help to prepare them for the coming onslaught of diverse messages and information opportunities. For rural youth in contexts of more advanced phases of this transition, who are already intensely exposed to globalized media, extension services can reformulate both the form and content of training to take advantage of rural youth's familiarity with these novel forms of communication. Extension programmes that fail to do so will probably find that they are losing the attention of their intended beneficiaries to the more entertaining media competition.
Current transformations in economic policy and in the role of the state: structural adjustment and beyond
Relevant characteristics of structural adjustment
The whole topic of the predominant economic policy reforms sweeping the developing world has been the subject of long discussion everywhere, and in general has lead to pessimistic conclusions concerning its significance for the rural poor. However, the challenges posed by these reforms include not only dangers but also opportunities, if we make a distinction between the short-, medium- and long-term stages in this widespread transformation (CEPAL, 1996).
Almost all developing countries have gone or are now going through severe economic "adjustments" that mean heavy social costs in the short and medium terms. Some Latin American countries, however, have also already undergone drastic processes of structural change, for which the term "reform" is more appropriate than that of "adjustment" (the latter more logically associated with short-term measures to recover financial equilibrium quickly). The social significance of the new style of economic growth is just beginning to become visible in these countries in the advanced stage of structural, economic and governmental reforms. Others are still in the initial, financial crisis stage that commonly precedes both financial adjustments as well as these profound reforms, since it makes them both inevitable even in the face of severe, unpopular social costs.
As for the short run efforts to restore macro-economic equilibrium (a pre-condition for healthy development with which it would be difficult to argue), the social cost has usually been paid by those least able to defend themselves: the poor. It is important to keep in mind, however, that this is not an inevitable injustice, that in a few cases the burden has been distributed more equitably on the basis of negotiation and consensus among social actors.
An important part of both short-term financial adjustment and long-term structural reform has been the reduction of fiscal deficits, and, in the latter case, of the vicious circles that tend to perpetuate such deficits. Again, a worthy goal; but that has sometimes taken the form of almost complete privatization of state-owned productive enterprises and the severe reduction of supposedly non-essential parts of the welfare state. Unfortunately, and for obvious reasons of low priority and lack of political clout, programmes for rural youth have been among the first to go in the draconian measures to cut government spending deficits in the financial adjustment stage and the last to be re-formulated in the structural reforms supporting growth.
Here, however, the point worth making is that in the new style of development emerging from structural adjustment, there is no valid, inevitable reason for applying the more extreme pro-business, anti-state formulas of neo-liberal ideology, even though such ideologues still hold the upper hand in many governments. On the contrary, in Latin America some governments committed to giving a larger role to market forces are also beginning to espouse the ECLAC argument that the new style still requires a strong, active state (CEPAL, 1990). In the new context, however, the state has to assume new roles and achieve greater efficiency. In practice, in this advanced phase, social spending often actually increases after structural adjustment has been achieved, with emphasis on two objectives: first, on improving labour force productivity through education and training; and secondly, on combatting poverty that cannot be solved by the play of market forces, whether free or regulated.
One of the most common ways in which central governments restructure their services in order to stop generating fiscal deficits year after year is to decentralize many basic social services. This is generally promoted as fomenting grass-roots democracy, making bureaucracy more responsive to the user and harnessing the potential energy and resources of civil society. All these benefits can be very real, but if the predominant objective is just to reduce central government spending, the vicious circle of inequality in resource bases affecting the poorest areas and communities can also be aggravated by decentralization.
Impacts of structural reform on the situation of rural youth
Many of the measures of structural reform and redefining the role of the state have little apparent direct impact on the situation of rural youth, who are usually excluded from the circuits of state production, welfare systems of health and retirement, and other areas. In numerous other ways, however, the budget cuts to achieve fiscal balance in the first phase of reform affect drastically rural education, extension programmes of all sorts, and set off recessionary cycles that limit the possibilities of rural youth to find employment and to receive other types of support while getting started in adult life in the countryside.
At more advanced stages of consolidated reform, the reduced intervention by governments in fixing prices for agricultural goods, and the weaken position of farm workers' trade unions, means greater vulnerability for rural youth on the economic front. The transformation of social policy associated with these reforms, however, has more complex implications for the situation of rural youth, that will be dealt with in the next section.
Challenges presented by structural reform for rural youth policy formulation
In the initial, fiscal crisis stage of governmental and economic structural reform, rural youth programmes are reduced to insignificance or disappear altogether in the slashing of budgets. To resuscitate them, the initial questions are: who is going to pay? and who is going to execute these programmes now? The predominant mood of the times is that private enterprise and non-governmental organizations should be the key actors in almost all former areas of governmental activity.
Roles for private enterprise?
In fact, there are some apparently favourable experiences along these lines, in two different directions. On the one hand, donations and sponsorship by large private firms has saved many rural youth programmes from extinction. There is little experience in this approach in Latin America, however, and it tends to stimulate negative reactions among rural youth experts with experience in other systems. It remains a topic for further study and debate.
The second form of private enterprise participation in rural youth programmes is that of subcontracting programme execution in public bidding competitions. There has been considerable experience in this approach in Latin America, particularly in training related directly to production and in supervised credit for young rural entrepreneurial groups. It appears to have been generally successful, although this success is limited by the availability of a sufficient number of consultancy service enterprises, with the professional excellence required for adequate execution of the programmes.
NGO's: different kinds, different roles.
It is often mentioned, with reason, that with the withdrawal of the state there is an increasingly important space for NGO action in the field of rural youth extension programmes. In order to evaluate this issue, it is first necessary that we advance from talking about NGO's in general and make distinctions between very different types of NGO's, to avoid the confused debate caused by using the same term while envisioning different realities.
Thus, instead of using the umbrella term "NGO" we should refer explicitly to donor NGO's; foreign development NGO's; national development NGO's; and NGO grass roots participatory movements. The differences for analysis of new roles in rural youth policy for these four different entities are significant. Donor NGO's concentrate on the financing of rural youth programmes, though they often intermediate for government aid programmes of wealthier countries, and help to answer the question of who pays now. Foreign development NGO's operate in developing countries with their own nationals and also hire local personnel; their work with rural youth is among the most innovative and effective, but they may also end such programmes in given countries on short notice. National development NGO's are more in tune with local realities, more willing to do more for less money, but are usually dependent on foreign donor NGO's for their survival. Grass roots participatory movements are usually lumped together with these other development types of NGO's, but control fewer resources, both financial and knowledge-based, and really deserve to be discussed under another heading, such as that of participatory democracy
One topic that requires more debate is whether NGO's and private enterprise can or should entirely supplant government in providing all the programmes for rural youth extension. One aspect of this issue is that both governments and other organizations should develop the capacity to be flexible and adapt to working together. One example has already been mentioned: the "farming out" of training and production programmes for rural youth to private consultant firms and development NGO's.
Redefining the role of government: project approach and market approach.
The two generally accepted areas for state action in the social field mentioned above (productivity enhancement through training and focussed poverty reduction), which are not only legitimatized under the new rules of the game, but in democratic societies are of the highest priority for the new style of development, have obvious, favourable implications for the possible resurgence of extension programmes for rural youth in national government strategies.
The demise of the bureaucratic, wasteful, inefficient aspects of the welfare state does not necessarily mean a reduced role for the state in carrying out social expenditures and social investment, but most countries are going through a period in which just that is happening. As social policy re-emerges, there is a great demand for efficiency in spending and in trying more flexible means of "targeting" resources where they are most needed and/or where they will produce the most beneficial results. According to the predominant thinking of the day, this has tended to mean that a "project focus" has largely given way to a "market regulatory focus" as a paradigm for social planning.
The latter means establishing simple mechanisms that allow individual actors to make the most effective choices for social programmes to achieve their goals. The delivery of different social services and the importance of different providers are thus defined by "demand subsidies" rather than "supply subsidies"; they are not targeted by planners on the basis of their analysis of the intended beneficiaries' needs, but are "self-targeted" by the beneficiaries themselves through the choices they make between the alternative services (often private enterprises) being offered. These market-oriented regulations to encourage users to make choices and to stimulate competition and efficiency among service providers generally require national legislation to set up these rules of the game.
In contrast, a project focus involves an analysis of cause and effect in understanding the social problem that is to be solved, and the use of a whole battery of economic and social science knowledge in different fields, as a basis for a sophisticated design of interrelated project components that contribute to an overall goal.
This is relevant to the current debate on rural youth policy because the two approaches are not contradictory but tend to reinforce each other in synergetic fashion. Thus, for example, the project approach may diagnose a need and design a coherent combination of complementary activities to support young people in microenterprises for producing and transforming certain new crops for export markets. But if these projects encounter obstacles in the lack of land accessible to rural youth, a market regulatory reform may be required in the legal framework. Two alternative examples of the latter are: (1) eliminate the requirement of land ownership as collateral for small loans for young people; or (2) introduce legislation reducing inheritance taxes if parents transfer title to land to their children, before their death.
Rural development programmes for youth, and youth for rural development programmes.
Programmes designed specifically to meet the needs of rural youth and programmes designed for overall rural development in which youth participate are not necessarily different or incompatible. But that they are almost always divorced is a reality, and a serious one for two reasons: first, because rural youth programmes that do not contribute to ongoing major rural development programmes will not attract the resources they need; and secondly because virtually all rural development schemes continue to suffer from an unfulfilled need for age-focussed rural development planning.
It is not enough to "coordinate"; experience tells us that in-field coordination between different agencies is superficial at best. What is needed in youth-oriented policy is to integrate the age focus in the same way that as the gender focus in recent years. This can either be done de jure ex ante; writing the youth component into the terms of a broad rural development project, like the gender or "women in development" components of, for example, IFAD-type projects, or in rural Social Investment Funds; or, alternatively, de facto and ex-post, in which existing youth agencies sign contracts locally with pre-existing general rural development projects that are aware of their need for such a component.
The awareness of such a need is most likely to arise in projects designed to increase the incomes of poor rural households when the emphasis on urgent, immediate needs in tempered by the realization that medium and long term planning is also required for improving income and quality of life. Since the long term involves a generational change in the beneficiary population, a need arises for improving the "fit" between rural development policy and youth life strategies.
Unfortunately, rural development policies, particularly in the actual implementation phase, still tend to treat the intended beneficiaries, youth and adults, as "objects" of policy, even though they are all active agents, whose interactions produce the social relations that policies hope to change. Even worse, most policies incorporate simplified, vague assumptions about motivation among rural inhabitants. In order for policies to have any sort of positive impact, we must look at what these actors have as their own objectives, and what kinds of strategies are used to achieve these ends. Rural development policies, particularly those that explicitly or implicitly hope to change the practices of rural youth, will be likely to fail if they go against these personal strategies, and in any case have a much greater chance of success if they support or enhance the life strategies of rural youth.
Rural youth extension and rural school reform.
If youth programmes are to contribute to long-term strategies for reducing rural poverty, then clearly training is a key element, not least as a supplement to poor schools. In fact, the most successful efforts to reform rural education are to develop "New Schools" that, instead of extracting children from their environment, extend information and knowledge from the schools to the communities. Coordination with reform-minded education ministries is thus a natural vein to pursue in updating agricultural ministry programmes for rural youth.
Training shouldn't be just extension or transfer of knowledge from the wise to the ignorant. Rural youth are also the actors most directly involved in the transformation of production systems. They already have their own knowledge system learned informally, which youth extension agents must respect and understand thoroughly. Moreover, if the complex system reproducing rural poverty is really to be changed, youth must learn by doing and really implement the skills acquired in ways that make an immediate difference.
Decentralization, problems of local democracy and rural youth leadership training
Rural youth programmes also have a key role to play in the universal process of administrative decentralization. Though decentralization is usually described as a process that enhances popular participation, there is also a clear danger in poor rural areas of merely enhancing the domination of traditional provincial elites. For decentralization to be democratic, then, there is an urgent need for the mobilization of popularly based social movements.
The extension process must therefore incorporate a strong component of training of youth leaders. The potential for supporting greater social equity in such areas is great, not least because the sense of local identity is a cause strongly felt by most youth, who have become aware through travel and mass media of the differences with urban or more developed rural zones, and the neglect which has kept their areas poor.
Thus, training of youth leaders takes on a new and deeper meaning with decentralization. Skills such as speaking in public, directing teams and managing debate in meetings are relevant now not only for the youth movement itself, but because young, able rural leaders now often find themselves rapidly catapulted into the world of "real" politics, as candidates for local public office. Rural youth extension programmes thus have an important challenge in redefining leadership training in this broader context, since they can make a significant contribution to making administrative decentralization a real process of local democratization.
Rural youth here and now.
There is a danger, however, of becoming obsessed with the future and with preparing rural youth to play a role in development when they become adults. There are at least four solid reasons for rural youth programmes to give equal importance to the here and now of rural youth needs, desires and contributions:
1. Older youth, particularly in poor rural households, have the sufficient maturity to make major contributions to development right away. They are already more educated that their elders, have more willingness and enthusiasm to try innovations, and can be key actors in productive enterprise. This is perhaps the key area for extension work, linked with supervised credit and institution-building, that has proven successful in many programmes supporting small, associative enterprise that generate immediate income for youth, their dependents and their parental households.2. Rural youth also show a considerable vocation for community service; as suggested in the preceding section, they have the idealism and the awareness of possibilities of a better quality of life at the local level, if their elders allow it.
3. All youth have serious problems associated with the physical and psychological changes that they are going through (Krauskopf, 1996). The truism that youth is the healthiest stage of life masks the fact of these often traumatic experiences, as well as the reality of specific diseases and unhealthy life styles that menace rural youth. Lack of access to knowledge about these processes and dangers are extreme among poor rural youth. Extension and training programmes, even those exclusively concerned with productive skills and activities, cannot ignore this important part of the reality of rural youth, particularly at the early stages of the demographic/occupational transition mentioned at the beginning of this article.
4. Finally, for the non-poor, the life period of youth is a kind of "moratorium" in which the overwhelming burdens of adult life are postponed and learning and enjoyment come to the fore. For poor rural youth, most of the responsibilities of adult life have already been assumed, but this is also a time of courtship, sports and exploring ways of enjoying life. Time and space for being young must be part of youth-oriented programmes, particularly in more advanced stages of economic growth and international competitivity, all the more so from a forward-looking perspective of forming habits in future rural adults with a better quality of life in the broad sense.
Conclusions
Most of these reflexions are still only working hypotheses not thoroughly tested by the facts. Many "practically oriented" people in development work have little patience with such theoretical discussions, and want to get down to work and to solving "real problems". But everyone has a model in his or her head of the system he or she wants to change, and operates according to it. In some cases this mental model is quite accurate, but it has little to do with how much field experience the individual has. On the contrary, the surer he or she is of his "reality" the fuzzier the model is likely to be. We all need to develop more humility about what we know for sure, since we are bound to encounter surprises when we try to implement actions based on partial information.
This means that we need to know more about all of the processes summarized here. So, despite the valuable knowledge already available, more research is needed on the implications they have for rural youth in each of the phases of these diverse transformations, and the challenges they present to rural youth programmes. The basic constant that should guide this research is that the contextual and temporal framework outlined above can make international comparative analysis of rural youth programmes less trivial and more realistic.
The analysis developed above suggests that in general terms rural youth extension must develop greater flexibility in order to adapt preconceived designs to the surprises encountered in specific local situations. At the international agency level, there is a need for combining diagnosis through international comparisons with proposals for reforms at the national level, and even incorporating aspects at the microregional level and at the community level, concerning different stages in the transitions discussed here.
Moreover, the challenge of flexibility is not only among contexts but also over time. Diversity in socio-economic and cultural structures, as we have seen, is also a reflexion of dynamic processes of change. All rural youth programmes that are intended to function for several years should therefore anticipate that in the medium term these contextual variables will change considerably, and the programmes themselves must be able to change in response to changing needs and opportunities, in the same country and community.
Thus, the basic theme of this article has been the way in which a limited number of different, profound processes (the long cycle of demographic/occupational transition, the shorter cycles of economic and communicational globalization, and the redefinition of the role of the state through structural reforms) have important impacts on the contexts in which rural youth live. These broad processes share an elemental, formal division into three phases that facilitates their analysis. They also interact and combine with each other to make any specific national or local context and temporal conjuncture unique, though still comparable with other such contexts, if the different types of contexts are taken into account in designing and recommending rural youth programmes internationally.
Although these challenges presented by the diversity and change resulting from structural transformations may seem overwhelming, the fact that it is possible to understand and predict them makes the task considerably easier. The overcoming of rural isolation is already under way to a greater or lesser extent in all developing countries, and the availability of information technology also gives hope for designing and implementing rural youth programmes that take better account of diversity and change, largely as a result of international comparative analysis.
The point that most bears repeating is that this international exchange of views must advance the understanding of diversity and change by being more case-specific while also being comparative. It is hoped that the framework of structural transformations presented in these pages may facilitate this discussion. Above all, the ordered analysis of contextual diversity should be carried out not only in terms of problems and obstacles but especially in terms of detecting opportunities for rural youth programmes to help realize the potential contribution that rural youth have to make, both to improving their own welfare and to strengthening the rural development process.
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