Envelopment or development? The role of roads as conductors of change in upland areas of Sarawak, Malaysia

Abstract

In most developing countries, rural development remains a high priority because the majority of the population, and of the poor, lives in rural areas. Nevertheless, progress in rural development has been hampered by structur al and institutional biases against the rural poor. Lipton (1977), echoing the dependency theorists' notion of core-periphery relationships, has identified the problem of 'urban bias'. He argues that there is a systematic tendency for a country's resources to be unfairly and inefficiently distributed in favour of urban areas, to the detriment of people living in rural areas. Sarawak has a population density of only 13 people per square kilometre (Sarawak Branch 1994) and the rural population is widely scattered through out the remote areas of the state. To overcome these problems of isolation, one rural development strategy has been to concentrate resources in large scale land development schemes and then to bring people to these centres. It is expected that this would assist government in providing education and health services, and agricultural production would increase through efficiencies associated with economies of scale - an agro-industrial mode of rural development (Marsden et al. 2001). However, these land schemes have encountered many problems (King 1986; Cramb 1992; Hewgill 1999), and in any case can only cater for a fraction of the rural population. An alternative development strategy, which would address the needs of the majority of peo ple living in rural areas, is to provide road access and encourage the rural population to develop in situ. Rural roads represent the link between the urban 'core' and the rural 'periphery'. They have the potential to counter some of the disadvantages of remoteness and provide benefits to all groups within a community. Roads do not inherently favour the rural elite (although such people may be in a better position to take advantage of new opportunities), thus satisfying Chambers' (1983) requirement for rural development strategies that benefit women, the most remote, and the most poor. In addition, a focus on an in situ