Rural Bias Research Articles

Re-thinking rurality: Towards a new research approach and rural-urban spatial gradient establishment in Serbia

The research on the rural-urban gradient in Serbia has been reinvigorated following the debate on rural bias. Rural-urban classification is essential in observing spatial, demographic, socio-economic, and environmental processes. There is no consensus regarding the definition of rural and rurality and it should not be observed separately from urban issues. In Serbia, it is still a matter of dispute. Rural is most often observed through the urban–rural dichotomy and “left behind” for decades. This paper strives for a new theoretical understanding of the rurality in Serbia by introducing rural heterogeneity and ‘continuing’ rurality, considering the transformative phase they are affected by. It induces a process of rethinking what rurality in Serbia is and offers an innovative methodological approach for rural delineation and settlement classification based on three main pillars: settlement patterns, functional patterns, and local relevance. The analysis is conducted on the lowest administrative level in Central Serbia. Five types of settlements are identified: two urban, and three characterized by rural features. The combination of abstractions and the methodological opportunities introduced by rethinking rurality offers geographers and practitioners a powerful methodological tool for the understanding of rural transformations and transitional spatial forms, which underpins planning and policy-making in Serbia.

Who Is Democracy Good For? Elections, Rural Bias, and Health and Education Outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa

How do African governments respond to democratic electoral competition? Although the common perception is that African governments have sought to win elections by combining various types of elector...

Water, Sanitation, and Child Health: Evidence From Subnational Panel Data in 59 Countries

Water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) investments are widely seen as essential for improving health in early childhood. However, the experimental literature on WASH interventions identifies inconsistent impacts on child health outcomes, with relatively robust impacts on diarrhea and other symptoms of infection but weak and varying impacts on child nutrition. In contrast, observational research exploiting cross-sectional variation in water and sanitation access is much more sanguine, finding strong associations with diarrhea prevalence, mortality, and stunting. In practice, both literatures suffer from significant methodological limitations. Experimental WASH evaluations are often subject to poor compliance, rural bias, and short duration of exposure, while cross-sectional observational evidence may be highly vulnerable to omitted variables bias. To overcome some of the limitations of both literatures, we construct a panel of 442 subnational regions in 59 countries with multiple Demographic Health Surveys. Using this large subnational panel, we implement difference-in-difference regressions that allow us to examine whether longer-term changes in water and sanitation at the subnational level predict improvements in child morbidity, mortality, and nutrition. We find results that are partially consistent with both literatures. Improved water access is statistically insignificantly associated with most outcomes, although water piped into the home predicts reductions in child stunting. Improvements in sanitation predict large reductions in diarrhea prevalence and child mortality but are not associated with changes in stunting or wasting. We estimate that sanitation improvements can account for just under 10 % of the decline in child mortality from 1990 to 2015.

Water Use Behavior, Learning, and Adaptation to Future Change in Urban Gardens

Urban agriculture is undergoing a contemporary global renaissance, providing fresh food for growing urban populations and vital environmental benefits for cities. Despite urban agriculture’s social-environmental importance, a rural bias in agricultural research has left critical gaps in our understanding of how urban agroecosystem management can sustainably produce food in the future. Specifically, there is a need to study urban agriculture water management due to recent drought events, likely increases in urban water scarcity, and higher temperatures. Gardeners can play a decisive role in increasing urban agriculture’s sustainability through their water, soil and vegetation management. Here, we examined water use, vegetation, and soil management in the California Central Coast - a region facing drought - to better understand how urban agriculture management affects water use sustainability. We worked with gardeners to study their water management decisions using citizen science, where volunteer gardeners collected their own water use behavior data and participated in a survey to describe their behaviors around water use, water conservation, and plot level management. We found that water use varies by gardener, and water use is positively related to mulching and crop cover in plots. Contrary to expectations, gardeners that reported high levels of concern over current environmental conditions (drought) and water conservation in the survey tended to use high amounts of water, suggesting that environmental worldviews do not necessarily translate into everyday practices. On the other hand, gardeners in gardens with more rules and regulations around water use tended to use less water, highlighting the practicality of enforcing rules and regulations during drought periods. Gardeners reported interest in adapting gardening practices to more sustainably use water regardless of their current practices. The combination of education and rules and regulations will help improve the sustainability of garden systems in times of environmental change.

Public Policy and Urbanization in India: An Asymmetrical Approach

Urbanization can be seen as a deliberate decision-making that involves political leaders and elites playing very decisive role. As the policies cannot be decided in a vacuum; the central and state governments have taken proactive efforts to facilitate urbanization in India. In post-independence era, there are specific and detailed statements of policy for industrial development, agricultural development, population growth but rarely one finds any national urbanization policy statement. It has been observed that urban growth and management have been rarely at the centre of development planning in India (Sivaramakrishnan, 2011). The paper tries to see how Public Policy's lopsided approach has underlined the rural bias in the urban policy.

“Measurement drives diagnosis and response”: Gaps in transferring food security assessment to the urban scale

The understanding of food security has seen major shifts since the original conceptualisations of the challenge. These changes in understanding have been accompanied by different food security measurement approaches. Despite the fact that the world has become increasingly urbanised and the developing world in particular, is experiencing its own urban transition, changes in food security measurement remain predominantly informed by a rural understanding of food security. In instances where urban measurement does take place, rural-oriented measurement approaches are adopted, occluding critical urban challenges and systemic drivers. This paper begins by highlighting the urban transition and attendant food security challenges in the Global South. It then reflects on existing food security measurement methods, detailing the positive components but also highlighting the shortfalls applicable to the urban context. At the urban scale, a food system assessment is argued to be one appropriate tool to respond to urban food insecurity while at the same time providing both the “breadth and depth” to inform effective food security programming and policy interventions. Theoretically, questions of scale, context and a critique of the rural bias in food systems work are essential informants guiding the approaches applied.

A farewell to urban/rural bias: peripheral finance capitalism in Mexico

Based on a discussion of the structural transformation of the Mexican economy, this paper investigates the impact of financialization on agriculture’s role in capitalist development. It argues that the peripheral financialized economy is a rural–urban economy. On the one hand, agriculture and industry are bifurcated into a growing export sector and a stagnating local economy, and there are no functional ‘developmental’ links between capitalist agriculture and industry. On the other hand, the economic structures have resulted in the consolidation of a huge mass of rural–urban ‘classes of labour’. Capitalist agriculture and industry are linked through and dependent on cheap labour sustaining the export economy. I argue that the current economic formation is not due to ‘urban bias’, ‘rural bias’ or any misallocation of resources among economic sectors. Rather, it can be explained in relation to ‘finance bias’: the taking over of debt relations as the key driving force of economic activities. A major contradiction in peripheral finance capitalism arises from the financing of cheap labour through debt. This is likely to result in new financial crisis, when the contradictions between increasing levels of (private and public) debt, a stagnating domestic economy, and below-subsistence level wages become too large.

Breaking down rural and urban bias and interrogating spatial inequality, evidence from South Africa

AbstractThis article investigates current socioeconomic disparities within rural and urban areas. The empirical analysis is grounded in an examination of urban and rural bias theories, which have often underpinned poverty analysis. This article suggests that poverty analysis can be improved by moving beyond the rural–urban binary and investigating differences across all geographical types (when data are available). Using 2012 household survey data on South Africa, the article sheds lights on substantial differences—in household composition and access to services and assets—that are likely to make households located in particular geotypes far more vulnerable to poverty. Finally, the article discusses how development policy can better address the specific income‐generating constraints that disadvantaged areas face.

Primate cities in Latin America: a theoretical framework based upon intra-urban driving forces

ABSTRACTExcessive urban primacy in Latin American countries has been primarily analysed using country-level perspectives, while their intra-urban spatial forces have not been routinely used as explanatory elements. This paper addresses this gap by relating two country-level sources of urban primacy (the international economic dependence of Latin American countries and the rural bias of the political process), with three particularities of the Latin American spatial markets (lack of land taxes and exactions, informal mechanisms of access to land, and lobby-oriented oligopolistic formal developers). We develop graphic analytical frameworks where we can hypothesize the interactions between all these elements. In order to enhance the theoretical framework and contrast it with existing evidence, three emerging policies in the continent were added to the analysis: land taxation and exactions, tenure legalization, and global city development. By using the theoretical framework, we conclude that the combined effects of these emerging policies will determine primacy patterns similar to the ones currently prevailing.

Using Routinely Collected Administrative Data in Public Health Research: Geocoding Alcohol Outlet Data

We describe our process of geocoding alcohol outlets to create a national longitudinal exposure dataset for Wales, United Kingdom from 2006 to 2011. We investigated variation in the availability of data items and the quality of alcohol outlet addresses held within unitary authorities. We used a standard geocoding method augmented with a manual matching procedure to achieve a fully spatially referenced dataset. We found higher quality addresses are held for outlets based in urban areas, resulting in the automatic geocoding of 68 % of urban outlets, compared to 48 % in rural areas. Missing postcodes and a lack of address structure contributed to a lower geocoding proportion. An urban rural bias was removed with the development of a manual matching procedure. Only one-half of the unitary authorities provided data on on/off sales and opening times, which are important availability factors. The resulting outlet dataset is suitable for contributing to the evidence-base of alcohol availability and alcohol-related harm. Local government should be encouraged to use standardised data fields, including addresses, to enable accurate geocoding of alcohol outlets and facilitate research that aims to prevent alcohol-related harm. Standardising data collection would enable efficient secondary data reuse using record linkage techniques, allowing the retrospective creation and evaluation of population-based natural experiments to provide evidence for policy and practice.

The suburban bias of American society?

ABSTRACT Past research has characterized countries as displaying the traits of urban or rural bias. Neither concept fits the United States well. We propose, as a hypothesis for research, that it may better be understood as displaying a suburban bias vis-à-vis both urban and rural populations. Drawing on the urban and rural bias literatures, we discuss two forms that suburban bias might take, allocational and dispositional, and the ways in which they might be identified. We offer initial evidence of a prevailing suburban bias in the United States in two spheres, those of judicial interpretation and American planning history, and conclude with suggestions for further research on the hypothesis.

Rural bias in African electoral systems: Legacies of unequal representation in African democracies

Although electoral malapportionment is a recurrent theme in monitoring reports on African elections, few researchers have tackled this issue. Here we theorize the meaning and broader implications of malapportionment in eight African countries with Single Member District (SMD) electoral systems. Using a new dataset on registered voters and constituency level election results, we study malapportionment's magnitude, persistence over time, and electoral consequences. The analysis reveals that patterns of apportionment institutionalized in the pre-1990 era established a long-lasting bias in favor of rural voters. This “rural bias” has been strikingly stable in the post-1990 era, even where the ancien regime has been voted out of power. These findings underscore the importance of the urban-rural distinction in explaining electoral outcomes in Africa.

The Politics of Urban Bias: Rural Threats and the Dual Dilemma of Political Survival

Urban bias in government policy is a common phenomenon in many developing countries. Bates (1981) has famously argued that the wish to industrialize, paired with the political clout of urban residents, results in distinctly anti-rural policies. Empirically, however, the strength of urban bias varies substantially across countries and over time. This paper explains this variation by developing an argument about a countervailing force to urban bias: the threat of a rural insurgency. The direction of urban and rural bias is a function of the political threat that geographically distinct groups pose to the survival of the central government. When the rural periphery lacks collective action capacity, urban bias emerges, but if there exists a credible threat of rural violence, urban bias is diminished. I test this proposition and competing explanations using data on net taxation in the agricultural sector, covering up to 55 low- and middle-income countries from 1955 to 2007. The results show a strong relationship between past territorial conflict (which proxies for credible rural threats) and lower levels of urban bias in the developing world. The findings are robust to alternative model specifications, measures, and sensitivity analyses.

Asia-Africa development divergence: a question of intent

Preface Chapter 1 Diverging paths Chapter 2 Studying the divergence Chapter 3 Setting the stage for development Chapter 4 Agrarian roots of development success Chapter 5 Varieties of rural bias Chapter 6 Elements of the developmental mindset Chapter 7 Origins of the divergence

Rural Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage

This study explored rural perspectives on same-sex marriage with a nonprobability sample (N = 156) of adult respondents recruited in a largely rural state in the upper Midwest. A new 6-item instrument with strong internal consistency (α =.943) found that support for same-sex marriage was widespread without significant differences based on relationship status, education level, rural residence, or biological sex. Sexual orientation predicted support for traditional family values and same-sex marriage which were inversely associated. Findings suggest that the presumption of rural bias and hostility toward alternative sexualities has mitigated in the upper Midwest. Social work practitioners should infer from this study that there is more to rural culture than remoteness, isolation, poverty, stigma, and conservative religious values. The malleability of rural culture may be an unrecognized strength that may provide encouragement to rural social workers advocating for and serving lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals.

Widjojo Nitisastro, the Praxis of Development in Indonesia and Its Comparison with Allison Ayida of Nigeria

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A Study on the Deposit Mobilization Pattern of the Dindigul District Central Co-operative Bank Limited

The principle of co-operation, all sociability and mutual aid, the progress of organic life, the improvement of the organism, and the strengthening of the species becomes utterly incomprehensible. The rational for the establishment of District Central Co-operative Banks should be an intermediary agency between the primary credit society with rural bias and the provincial Co-operative Bank with urban bias. Deposits are the life blood of a banking institution, including co-operative banks, as they constitute the chief source of funds to undertake lending operations. The banks offer a number of deposit schemes to the public which include fixed deposit, saving deposit, current deposit and the like. The Dindigul District Central Co-operative Bank does not depending on its internal sources alone. This study attempts to analyse the trend and growth of various types of deposits collected by the DDCC Bank during the period 1995-96 to 2009-10.

Migration, Urbanization, and Political Power in Sub-Saharan Africa

African political geographies have been overlooked in the discussion of internal migration and urbanization. Yet institutional changes since the early 1990s altered the practices of acquiring and keeping power across Africa, and it is now possible to address how rural and urban areas have changed as a result. In this article, the focus is on how political practices interact with circular internal migration flows. “Democratic” practices depend on the manipulation of rural spatial clustering and migration, but modern political institutions effectively disenfranchise urban and migrant voters, resulting in the continued reproduction and exacerbation of spatial inequalities. Further, these are responsible for the poor conditions of urban areas, the proliferation of rural bias across states, and limited support for urban political identities and programmatic change.

Measuring disparities in sanitation access: does the measure matter?

Initiatives to monitor progress in health interventions like sanitation are increasingly focused on disparities in access. We explored three methodological challenges to monitoring changes in sanitation coverage across socio-economic and demographic determinants: (i) confounding by wealth indices including water and sanitation assets, (ii) use of individual urban and rural settings versus national wealth indices and (iii) child-level versus household-level analyses. Sanitation coverage by wealth for children and households across settings was estimated from recent Demographic and Health Surveys in six low-income countries. Household assignment to wealth quintiles was based on principal components analyses of assets. Concordance in household quintile assignment and estimated distribution of improved sanitation was assessed using two wealth indices differing by inclusion or exclusion of water and sanitation assets and independently derived for each setting. Improved sanitation was estimated using under five children and households. Wealth indices estimated with water, and sanitation assets are highly correlated with indices excluding them but can overstate disparities in sanitation access. Independently, derived setting wealth indices highly correlate with setting estimates of coverage using a single national index. Sanitation coverage and quintile disparities were consistently lower in household-level estimates. Standard asset indices provide a reasonably robust measure of disparities in improved sanitation, although overestimation is possible. Separate setting wealth quintiles reveal important disparities in urban areas, but analysis of setting quintiles using a national index is sufficient. Estimates and disparities in household-level coverage of improved sanitation can underestimate coverage for children under five.

The 2008 Food Summit: A political response to the food price crisis in Gauteng province, South Africa

In responding to food price riots and other unrest in 2008, Gauteng province in South Africa hosted a two-day Food Summit attended by 4000 delegates. Summit invitees expected to be consulted on issues of concern about food prices, but the government instead responded with the message that the poor must be self-sufficient and grow their own food (via the Ilima/Letsema campaign launch), an impractical suggestion in a crisis. The timing of the 2008 Summit in relation to major changes within the African National Congress and the looming 2009 national election in South Africa leads to a conclusion that the Summit was a political event designed to build political capital ahead of the elections, rather than a genuine stakeholder consultation event linked to food security. Findings of this study indicated that food security planning in Gauteng is exclusionary through its rural bias and excludes, for example, urban dwellers and foreign migrants. Also, at that time, Gauteng would have been underprepared for a genuine food emergency as there was no working provincial strategy to deal with urban food security or a severe food crisis.