Chapter 3: Equity and Social Considerations
Summary
Social considerations, and the experience of implementing structural adjustment policies, point to the need to consider and target specific groups for special consideration. Countries (such as island and other low-lying states or dryland regions) and special groups within society that are especially vulnerable to climate change (such as the poor, and sometimes women or children, or specific occupations or regions) - in other words, those on whom the costs of abatement and coping would be especially burdensome - merit special attention.
Overall, concern about equity and social impacts points to the need to strengthen institutional capacities, particularly in developing countries, to make and implement collective decisions in a legitimate and equitable manner. These institutional capacities surely include developing resources to analyze equity and social issues more thoroughly, and to integrate these perspectives better with the insights of other disciplines.
3.6 Equity Within Countries
[...]
3.6.2 Policy-oriented literature
As a result, the attention of many of the critics shifted to the protection of important areas during such contractions. These critics argue that the conventional approach is suboptimal, in that it leads to the marginalization and immiseration of vulnerable groups - women, children, the poor, the rural population, labour, and the aged population - who are forced to carry a disproportionate burden of the adjustment. As part of their argument, Cornia and Jolly (1984) and Cornia et al. (1987) documented successful cases in which government policies managed to protect vulnerable groups while bringing structural adjustment. The result of these studies has been a remarkable turnaround in the conventional wisdom on structural adjustment. From a situation of almost total neglect of the social sector and vulnerable groups in the 1980s, current policies include the protection of these sectors and groups as integral elements of structural adjustment programmes.
3.6.3 Institution-oriented literature
The same disproportionality affects the vulnerability of groups within countries, for example:
- At an individual level, the choice of protecting the rights of various people will be influenced by cultural arrangements, which favour men over women.
- In most countries, declines in food availability will fall disproportionately on the politically weaker and relatively passive groups, on the poor, the children, women, older people, the unemployed, and the rural people.
- Not only is this likely to produce conflict, but the emergence of conflict will further discriminate against the weaker and more peaceable groups (Suliman. 1992).
- Major technological or political changes in agriculture result typically in expropriation of tenants and landless poor. Attempts to offset these consequences through land reforms have had only limited impact (Moyo, 1994;Sobhan, 1993). (...)
3.8 Conclusions
Social considerations and the experience of implementing structural adjustment policies point to the need to consider and target specific groups for special consideration. Countries (such as island and other low-lying states or dryland regions) and special groups within society that are especially vulnerable to climate change (such as the poor, and sometimes women or children, or specific occupations or regions) - in other words, those on whom the costs of abatement and coping would be especially burdensome - merit special attention.
