The recently failed of international trade negotiations and the refusal of developed nations to eliminate market-distorting farm subsidies highlight the tenuous position of rural agrarian societies in many developing countries. While neoliberal development policy urges developing nations to open their markets and adopt trade-based growth strategies, regions and local communities often encounter new sources of risk through the process of economic liberalization. The changes associated with market liberalization can generate new landscapes of inequality by transforming or contributing to the breakdown of traditional social support networks. For women in particular, the loss of traditional networks can lead to increased hardship, because they are often primary caregivers as well as economic actors. This Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement project will examine the changing distribution of income and resources in rural Mozambique, where radical economic reforms are underway. The project will address the following questions: (1) What is the impact of contemporary market involvement on the distribution of resources and income across regions? (2) How do patterns of inequality vary across scales, and what do these spatial variations imply about differential vulnerability to negative market externalities? (3) How is social and economic inequality affected by gender and the structural changes within communities and households that accompany economic reforms? This study will use a multi-scalar approach to investigate market-inequality linkages. Geographic and multivariate statistical analyses will be used to examine regional patterns. Field observation, household surveys, and interviews will be used to explore local perspectives on inequalities as well as community-wide and gendered impacts associated with market involvement. The project is expected to demonstrate that market exposure and integration interact with multiple factors across geographic scales (such as global commodity prices, national politics, and local class and gender relationships) with different effects within and across regions, communities, and households. Furthermore, regional patterns of inequality, as measured by static income and infrastructure data, are not expected to correspond to local experiences.
This project will incorporate an understanding of regional and local geographies into the investigation of how distributional inequities are produced and performed across space. It is expected to contribute to understanding of rural economies in the developing world by examining how market exposure and global-local economic linkages impact rural agrarian populations. It will explicitly investigate how experiences of economic change are influenced by gender, and it will integrate qualitative and quantitative research methods to explore the impacts of economic liberalization at the regional and local scale. The study will also contribute to contemporary geographical debates on the household as a scale of analysis. Findings from this study should help increase the success of targeted poverty alleviation programs by identifying those regions and households most likely to be marginalized by new forms of economic liberalization. The Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award also will provide support to a promising student to strengthen research skills and establish a strong independent research career.
