Development as Enclosure
The creation of empires and states, business conglomerates and civic dictatorships — whether in pre-colonial times or in the modern era — has only been possible through dismantling the commons and harnessing the fragments, deprived of their old significance, to build up new economic and social patterns that are responsive to the interests of a dominant minority. The modern nation state has been built only by stripping power and control from commons regimes and creating structures of governance from which the great mass of humanity (particularly women) are excluded. Likewise, the market economy has expanded primarily by enabling state and commercial interests to gain control of territory that has traditionally been used and cherished by others, and by transforming that territory – together with the people themselves – into expendable “resources” for exploitation. By enclosing forests, the state and private enterprise have torn them out of fabrics of peasant subsistence; by providing local leaders with an outside power base, unaccountable to local people, they have undermined village checks and balances; by stimulating demand for cash goods, they have impelled villagers to seek an ever wider range of things to sell. Such a policy was as determinedly pursued by the courts of Aztec Mexico, the feudal lords of West Africa, and the factory owners of Lancashire and the British Rail as it is today by the International Monetary Fund or Coca-Cola Inc.
Only in this way has it been possible to convert peasants into labour for a global economy, replace traditional with modern agriculture, and free up the commons for the industrial economy. Similarly, only by atomizing tasks and separating workers from the moral authority, crafts and natural surroundings created by their communities has it been possible to transform them into modern, universal individuals susceptible to “management”. In short, only by deliberately taking apart local cultures and reassembling them in new forms has it been possible to open them up to global trade.[FN L. Lohmann, ‘Resisting Green Globalism’ in W. Sachs (ed), Global Ecology: Conflicts and Contradictions, Zed Books, London and New Jersey, 1993.]
To achieve that “condition of economic progress”, millions have been marginalized as a calculated act of policy, their commons dismantled and degraded, their cultures denigrated and devalued and their own worth reduced to their value as labour. Seen from this perspective, many of the processes that now go under the rubric of “nation-building”, “economic growth”, and “progress” are first ad foremost processes of expropriation, exclusion, denial and dispossession. In a word, of “enclosure”.
Because history’s best-known examples of enclosure involved the fencing in of common pasture, enclosure is often reduced to a synonym for “expropriation”. But enclosure involves more than land and fences, and implies more than simply privatization or takeover by the state. It is a compound process which affects nature and culture, home and market, production and consumption, germination and harvest, birth, sickness and death. It is a process to which no aspect of life or culture is immune.
The Oxford English Dictionary offers a general definition of enclosure — to “insert within a frame”. Enclosure tears people and their lands, forests, crafts, technologies and cosmologies out of the cultural framework in which they are embedded and tries to force them into a new framework which reflects and reinforces the values and interests of newly-dominant groups. Any pieces which will not fit into the new framework are devalued and discarded. In the modern age, the architecture of this new framework is determined by market forces, science, state and corporate bureaucracies, patriarchal forms of social organization, and ideologies of environmental and social management.
Land, for example, once it is integrated into a framework of fences, roads and property laws, is “disembedded” from local fabrics of self-reliance and redefined as “property” or “real estate”. Forests are divided into rigidly defined precincts – mining concessions, logging concessions, wildlife corridors and national parks – and transformed from providers of water, game, wood and vegetables into scarce exploitable economic resources. Today they are on the point of being enclosed still further as the dominant industrial culture seeks to convert them into yet another set of components of the industrial system, redefining them as “sinks” to absorb industrial carbon dioxide and as pools of “biodiversity”. Air is being enclosed as economists seek to transform it into a marketable “waste sink”; and genetic material by subjecting it to laws which convert it into the “intellectual property” of private interests.
People too are enclosed as they are fitted into a new society where they must sell their labour, learn clock-time and accustom themselves to a life of production and consumption; groups of people are redefined as “populations’, quantifiable entities whose size must be adjusted to take pressure off resources required for the global economy. Women are enclosed by consigning them to the “unproductive” periphery of a framework of industrial work, which they can only enter by adopting “masculine” values and ways of being, thinking and operating. Skills, too, are enclosed, as are systems of knowledge associated with local stewardship of nature.
New Values
Enclosure inaugurates what Ivan Illich has called “a new ecological order.”[FN I Illich, ‘Silence is a Commons’, The Coevolution Quarterly, Winter, 1983.] It upsets the local power balance which ensured that survival was “the supreme rule of common behaviour, not the isolated right of the individual.”[FN I. Illich, Gender, Pantheon, New York, 1982, p.111] It scoffs at the notion that there can be “specific forms of community respect” for parts of the environment which are “neither the home nor wilderness”, but lie “beyond a person’s threshold and outside his possession”[FN I. Illich, Gender, Pantheon, New York, 1982, p.18] — the woods or fields, for example, that secure a community’s subsistence, protect it from flood and drought, and provide spiritual and aesthetic meaning.
Instead, enclosure transforms the environment into a “resource” for national or global production – into so many chips that can be cashed in as commodities, handed out as political favours and otherwise used to accrue power. The sanctions on exploitation imposed by commons regimes in order to ensure a reliable local subsistence from local nature are now viewed “simply as constraints to be removed.”[FN V. Shiva, ‘Resources’ in W. Sachs (ed), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, Zed Books, London and New Jersey, 1992, p.206.]
Control over those resources is assigned to actors outside the community. Most obviously, land — and in particular, the best-quality land — is concentrated in proportionately fewer and fewer hands. Enclosure of water and other resources has also generated scarcity and conflict. Large-scale irrigated plantations, for example, deny water to local farmers who work outside the plantation system.[FN V. Shiva, Ecology and the Politics of Survival: Conflicts over Natural Resources in India, Sage/United Nations University, New Delhi, 1991.] In central India “whilst staple crops in the drought stricken areas … are denied water, the sugar-cane fields and grape vines are irrigated with scarce groundwater. a soil water drought has been created not by an absolute scarcity of water but by the preferential diversion of a limited water supply.”[FN J. Bandyopadhyay, ‘The Ecology of Drought and Water Scarcity’, The Ecologist, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1988.] In cities, meanwhile, people without motor-cars are progressively shut out from access to the street.
Enclosure thus cordons off those aspects of the environment that are deemed “useful” to the encloser — whether grass for sheep in 16th century England or stands of timber for logging in modern-say Sarawak — and defines them, and them alone, as valuable. A street becomes a conduit for vehicles; a wetland, a field to be drained; flowing water, a wasted asset to be harnessed for energy or agriculture. Instead of being a source of multiple benefits, the environment becomes a one-dimensional asset to be exploited for a single purpose – that purpose reflecting the interests of the encloser, and the priorities of the wider political economy in which the encloser operates.
New Forms of Exchange
Enclosure reorganizes society to meet the overriding demands of the market. It demands that production and exchange conform to rules that reflect the exigencies of supply and demand, of competition and maximization of output, of accumulation and economic efficiency.
In commons regimes, activities we now call “economic” are embedded in other activities. The planting of fields or the harvesting of crops cannot be reduced to acts of production: they are also religious events, occasions for celebration, for fulfilling communal obligations and for strengthening networks of mutual support. Farming, for example, is carried out not to maximize production — though a healthy crop is always welcome — but to feed the gods, enable cultural practices to continue with dignity, or minimize risk to the community as a whole, not least by strengthening networks of mutual support. Thus, when enclosure begins, people feel threatened not only by material expropriation but by the cultural and personal humiliations that inevitably accompany it. Unsurprisingly, much of their resistance against enclosure is also developed and codified in non-economic forms; gossip, songs, jokes, rumours, drama and festivals.[FN J. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1990.]
Because economic relations need not be crucial to survival in commons regimes, they generally take a back seat to other social relationships. Homo economicus — the obsessively rent-maximizing archetype around whose supposed universality modern economic theory has been constructed — might in fact be unable to scratch together a living in many commons regimes. Unwilling to share with neighbours in times of dearth or to “waste time” in “unprofitable” labour-sharing, rituals of reciprocity, craft acquisition, gossip and the like, he or she could well be cut off from the community support needed to make ends meet.
As production and exchange are enclosed by the market, economic activity is cordoned off from other spheres of social life, bounded by rules that actively undermine previous networks of mutual aid. As Gerald Berthoud observes: “The market tends to become the only mode of social communications, even between those who are intimately connected. Within this universe of generalized commodities, it becomes logical that individuals increasingly become strangers to one another. Even for those who are culturally and socially close, the market mentality maintains a distance between them, almost as if close and distant relationships had become indistinguishable.”[FN G. Berthoud, ‘Market’ in W. Sachs (ed), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, Zed Books, London and New Jersey, 1992, p.83.]
In an undiluted market economy, access to food, for example, is no longer dependent on being part of — and contributing to — a non-monetary social network; instead, food goes to those who have the money to buy it. Only those who, in the economists’ jargon, have the income to translate their biological needs into “effective demand” get to eat. In the global supermarket, people earning perhaps 100 dollars a year — if they are lucky — must compete for the same food with people earning 100 dollars a week, 100 dollars an hour, or even 100 dollars a minute.
New Roles
Enclosure redefines community. It shifts the reference points by which people are valued. Individuals become “units” whose “value” to society is defined by their relationship to the new political entity that emerges from enclosure. Increasing numbers of people do not have access to the environment, the political process, the market or the knowledge they need.
Enclosure also ushers in a new political order. When the environment is turned over to new uses, a new set of rules and new forms of organization are required. Enclosure redefines how the environment is managed, by whom and for whose benefit. Old forms of environmental management are forced into redundancy or vilified, derided or outlawed.
Enclosure not only redefines the forum in which decisions are made but also redefines whose voice counts in that forum. In order to place management in the hands of “others”, whose allegiances and sources of power lie outside the community, it cuts knowledge off from local ethics. As Tariq Banuri and Frederique Apffel-Marglin note: “Local knowledge is bound by time and space, by contextual and moral factors. More importantly, it cannot be separated from larger moral or normative ends … Once knowledge is meant to be universally applicable, it begins to gravitate into the hands of experts or professionals, those ‘conspiracies against the laity’, as George Bernard Shaw once called them, whose interests in acquiring, creating, promoting, or acting upon the basis of such knowledge begins more and more to be motivated by internal professional considerations, rather than by normative social implications. In fact under these circumstances, the activity can often become an end in itself and become unmoored from its narrow technical objectives.”[FN T Banuri & F. Apffel-Marglin (eds), Who Will Save the Forests? Political Resistance, Systems of Knowledge and the Environmental Crisis, Zed Books, London and New Jersey, 1993.]
Enclosure opens the way for the bureaucratization and enclosure of knowledge itself. It accords power to those who master the language of the new professionals and who are versed in its etiquette and its social nuances, which are inaccessible to those who have not been to school or to university, who do not have professional qualifications, who cannot operate computers, who cannot fathom the apparent mysteries of a cost-benefit analysis, or who refuse to adopt the forceful tones of an increasingly “masculine” world.
In that respect, as Illich notes, “enclosure is as much in the interest of professionals and of state bureaucrats as it is in the interests of capitalists.” For as local ways of knowing and doing are devalued or appropriated, and as vernacular forms of governance are eroded, so state and professional bodies are able to insert themselves within the commons, taking over areas of life that were previously under the control of individuals, households and the community. Enclosure “allows the bureaucrat to define the local community as impotent to provide for its own survival.”[FN I Illich, ‘Silence is a Commons’, The Coevolution Quarterly, Winter 1983.] It invites the professional to come to the “rescue” of those whose own knowledge is deemed inferior to that of the encloser.
Enclosure as Control
Enclosure is thus a change in the networks of power which enmesh the environment, production, distribution, the political process, knowledge, research and the law. It reduces the control of local people over community affairs. Whether female or male, a person’s influence and ability to make a living depends increasingly on becoming absorbed into the new policy created by enclosure, on accepting — willingly or unwillingly — a new role as a consumer, a worker, a client or an administrator, on playing the game according to new rules. The way is thus cleared for cajoling people into the mainstream, be it through programmes to bring women “into development”, to entice smallholders “into the market” or to foster paid employment.[FN P. Simmons, ‘Women in Development’, The Ecologist, Vol. 22, No.1, 1992, pp.16-21.]
Those who remain on the margins of the new mainstream, either by choice or because that is where society has pushed them, are not only deemed to have little value: they are perceived as a threat. Thus it is the landless, the poor, the dispossessed who are blamed for forest destruction; their poverty which is held responsible for “overpopulation”; their protests which are classed as subversive and a threat to political stability. And because they are perceived as a threat, they become objects to be controlled, the legitimate subjects of yet further enclosure. Witness the measures taken by the Tanzanian authorities to curb street-traders. After the Human Resources Deployment Act in 1983, “Those who could not produce proper identification were to be resettled in the countryside. In the Dar es Salaam region, all unlicensed, self-employed people, including fish sellers, shoe repairmen, tailors, etc., were to be considered ‘idle and disorderly’ and treated as ‘loiterers’. President Nyerere ordered the Prime Minister to be ‘bold’ in implementing the Act, saying: ‘If we don’t disturb loiterers, they will disturb us.’ The loiterers were compared with economic saboteurs and racketeers ‘whom the nation has declared war on.'”[FN A.M. Tripp, Defending the Right to Subsist: The State vs the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania, Wider Working Papers, World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University, 1989, pp.26-27.]
From the dispossessed beggars of 16th century England to illegal settlers in Sao Paolo, people have been defined as too poor, too dependent, too inarticulate, too marginal to be of “use” to mainstream society. They are shunted from one place to another as further areas are enclosed or, as in the case of the street children of Brazil, they are simply murdered. Enclosure creates, as one New Guinea villager has put it, “rubbish people” — in the North no less than in the South.
Conceptual Trapping: the Enclosure of Language and Culture
Enclosure involves more than the taking over of public office, natural resources or markets by one group at the expense of another. By “taking something out of one social frame and forcing it into a new one”, by redefining meanings, enclosure involves something akin to translation.
When a concept is enclosed in the context of a radically alien language, something is inevitably “lost in translation”. When what is lost is essential to the identity and livelihoods of a group, yet they are unable to use their native language to regain or defend it, their defences are weakened. For women who have to use a language such as contemporary English with patriarchal elements and assumptions, there is often “nowhere to go in the language”, no words or ways to express what is essential for them to express.[FN D. Spender, Man Made Language, Pandora, London, 1980.]
Nor is it easy for people to develop and articulate resistance to enclosure unless they are able to maintain a cultural and linguistic space in which to do so. For example, in the “villagization” campaign in Tanzania in the mid-1970s, in which people were encouraged to build Western style houses in new villages, the men were addressed as “you and your families”. But, as P. Caplan observes: “In Swahili, the term ‘family’ in the sense of a bounded domestic group does not exist. Indeed it has been found necessary to take the English term and turn it into a Swahili form familia. Such a linguistic usage contains a number of premises — that the unit in society is ‘a man and his family’, and that this unit requires a house and a unit of land. In other words, concepts foreign to this society … are being introduced.”[FN P. Caplan, ‘Development Policies in Tanzania: Some Implications for Women’ in R. Dauber & M. Cain (eds), Women and Technological Change in Developing Countries, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C., 1981, p.107. Cited in P. Stamp, Technology, Gender and Power in Africa, International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, 1989, p.56.]
People who would oppose dams, logging, the redevelopment of their neighbourhoods or the pollution of their rivers are often left few means of expressing or arguing their case unless they are prepared to engage in a debate framed by the languages of cost-benefit analysis, reductionist science, utilitarianism, male domination — and, increasingly, English. Not only are these languages in which many local objection — such as that which holds ancestral community rights to a particular place to have precedence over the imperatives of “national development” — appear disreputable. They are also languages whose use allows enclosers to eavesdrop on, “correct” and dominate the conversations of the enclosed.
This process of conceptual trapping has gathered pace through the eras of state formation, colonialism, economic development and, now, environmental management. None of these dominant systems can afford a “live and let live” attitude towards the thousands of other, more or less independent languages which make up the social universe. They must expand to global scale; other systems with their messy multitude of goals and ways of settling conflicts just get in the way. When they do, they become targets for enclosure — for being squeezed into the new, overarching system, and reconstructed in the process. All conflict is viewed as settlable by criteria determined by the enclosers.
This conceptual trapping is justified morally by persuading people that they no right to refuse to abide by an alien translation of their words, practices and ways of life. Enclosure claims that its own social frame, its language, is a universal norm, an all-embracing matrix which can assimilate all others. Whatever may be “lost in translation” is supposedly insignificant, undeveloped or inferior to what is gained. As Stephen Marglin points out: “What it cannot comprehend and appropriate, it not only cannot appreciate, it cannot tolerate … In the encounter of modern knowledge with [vernacular knowledge], the real danger is not that modern knowledge will appropriate [vernacular knowledge] but that it will do so only partially and will return this partial knowledge … as the solid core of truth extracted from a web of superstition and false belief. What lies outside the intersection of modern knowledge and [vernacular knowledge] risks being lost altogether.”[FN S. Marglin, Farmers, Seedsmen and Scientists: Systems of Agriculture and Systems of Knowledge, Harvard University, unpublished ms., March 1992, p.32.]
Because they hold themselves to be speaking a universal language, the modern enclosers who work for development agencies and governments feel no qualms in presuming to speak for the enclosed. They assume reflexively that they understand their predicament as well as or better than the enclosed do themselves. It is this tacit assumption that legitimizes enclosure in the encloser’s mind – and it is an assumption that cannot be countered simply by transferring what are conventionbally assumed to be the trappings of power from one group to another.
The Commons Resurgent
Enclosure has never gone unchallenged, however. Throughout history, commons regimes have resisted the enclosure of the forests, rangelands, fields, fishing grounds, lakes, streams, plants and animals that they rely upon to maintain their ways of life and ensure their well-being. Such resistance has taken many forms, and its focus has been as various as the commons being defended. Machinery has been sabotaged, hay ricks burned, landlords and officials satirised and threatened, experts lampooned, loyalties shifted and bureaucratic defences tested in an endless flow of effort to stall or reverse enclosure. Whether overt or subterranean, thwarted or beaten down, channelled into ideology or action, this resistance has been opportunistic, pragmatic and resourceful. Frequently using local traditions as an arsenal, constantly faced with reversals, it always finds fresh ground to fight from, some of it created by the very system in opposition to which it must constantly transform and renew itself. Willing to adapt new developments to its own purposes, it is nonetheless uncompromising when the bounds it has set are overstepped.
It is partly through such resistance that the ideology of economic growth as the only concrete solution to poverty, inequality and hardship is slowly being dismantled. Millions of people in both the South and the North who know first-hand of its false promise need no convincing. Whilst most participants in the UN and similar forums have been interested only in “solutions” that will permit industrial growth to continue, movements that have been spawned through resistance to enclosure are carving out a very different path. Their demands centre not on refining market mechanisms, nor incorporating text-book ecology into economics, nor on formulating non-legally binding treaties, but on reclaiming the commons; on reappropriating the land, forests, streams and fishing grounds that have been taken from them; on reestablishing control over decision-making; and on limiting the scope of the market. In saying “no” to a waste dump, a dam, a logging scheme or a new road, they are saying “yes” to a different way of life: “yes” to the community’s being able to decide its own fate; “yes” to the community’s being able to define itself.
For some groups and communities, the focus of the struggle is the defense of existing commons regimes against enclosure: for others, the reclaiming of those commons that have been enclosed; and in still others, the building of new commons. In the North, for example, moves to reclaim the commons are often closely linked to attempts to disengage from the wider market, by networks of exchange over which a community or group has control. One example is to be found in the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, now taking root in Europe, the US and Japan.[FN For detailed examples of attempts to defend, reclaim or build commons regimes, see Nicholas Hildyard, Larry Lohmann, Sarah Sexton and Simon Fairlie, Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons, Earthscan, London, 1993]
What begins as a fight against one form of enclosure — a proposed incinerator, perhaps, or a plantation scheme — often becomes part of a wide struggle to allow the community to define its own values and priorities. As Triana Silton notes of the movement to oppose toxic wastes in the United States, “Many community groups have moved from simply fighting off an incinerator to looking around at themselves, at the community they are part of, identifying what they don’t like and attempting to solve those problems. The empowerment that accompanies a success, whether that success is having your voice heard or actually stopping the facility, allows people to have some control over the things that happen to them”[FN T. Silton, Environmental Justice: Ideas for the Future, unpublished ms., 1992, pp.13-14.]
Often making use of what James Scott calls the “weapons of the weak”,[FN J.C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, in collaboration with the Department of Publications, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpa, 1985.] groups, communities and individuals the world over are successfully resisting the web of enclosure and reclaiming a political and cultural space for the commons. The search is generally not for “alternatives” in the sense that Western environmentalists might use the term: rather it is to rejuvenate what works, to combine traditional and new approaches and to develop strategies that meet local needs. In that respect, the debate is not over such technocratic issues as how to conserve soil or what species of tree to plant – for those who rely on the commons, the starting point for addressing such questions is usually “Let’s see what has worked in the past and build on that” — but rather over how to create or defend open, democratic community institutions that ensure people’s control over their own lives.
The Balance of Power
If there is a common denominator to the initiatives that have evolved from such struggles, it is not that they share a uniform “vision” of the future, or adhere to a single “blueprint” for change, but rather that they are all, in their many and various ways, attempts by local people to reclaim the political process and to re-root it within the local community. The central demand made by group after group is for authority to be vested in the community — not in the state, local government, the market or the local landlord, but in those who rely on the local commons for their livelihood. As such, the struggle is for more than the mere recognition of rights over the physical commons: critically, it is also a struggle to restore or to defend the checks and balances that limit power within the local community.
Across the world, grassroots movements are working to open up more space for the commons by denying that any single social whole — whether culture, language, livelihood, art, theory, science, gender, race or class — has a right to assert privileged status over, and thus to enclose, all others of its type. They are creating space where, on the contrary, the local community has the right to decide its own future; the right to refuse to have to abide by an alien translation of its own words and practices; the right to its own culture.
Key to the struggle is increasing the bargaining power of those who are currently excluded or marginalized from the political process and eroding the power of those who are currently able to impose their will on others. Only in this way — when all those who will have to live with a decision have a voice in making that decision — can the checks and balances on power that are so critical to the workings of the commons be ensured.
Achieving that political order requires promoting the virtues of receptivity, flexibility, patience, open-mindedness, non-defensiveness, humour, curiosity and respect for the opinions of others as a counterweight to the formulas, principles, translations or “limits” which trap people in single languages. It involves legitimizing a type of rational decision-making and self-correction which emphasizes not the application of predetermined methods, technical vocabularies, “objective” data and yardsticks -the machinery of enclosure – but the indispensability of open-ended conversation, a willingness to listen and learn, to change one’s view and to work at achieving a consensus.
For those who are used to imposing their will and languages on others, or who see the threats facing humanity as so overwhelming that only centralized decision-making by cliques of experts can meet the task in hand, the call for community control is at best a threat to their power, at worst a recipe for indecision and muddling through to disaster. But the evidence is overwhelming that local-level institutions in which power is limited and the common right to survival is the preoccupation of all, are the best means of repairing the damage done through enclosure. Equally overwhelming is the evidence that “non-local, state-management systems are both costly and often ineffective.”[FN M. Freman, ‘Graphs and Gaffs: A Cautionary Tale in the Common Property Resources Debate’ in F. Berkes (ed), Common Property Resources: Ecology and Community-based Sustainable Development, Belhaven Press, London, 1989, pp.92-109.]
