Tasteless behaviour by the news media is in vogue these days of course, if the News of the World phone-tapping scandal is anything to go by. It turns out that journalists have been tapping the phones of murder victims and the families of soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. It also transpires that sometimes considerable sums of money are routinely paid by journalists to police officers in exchange for inside information. There will be inquiries, of course. Perhaps the police will get the same treatment as parliamentarians have over their abuse of the expenses system. That would be no bad thing, all part of the healthy working of the checks and balances side of good governance. I think it was Max Weber who said that it is not so much the severity of the punishment that matters in such cases but the certainty of it.
But I digress. To my mind an important aspect of the tragic case of Michael Gilbert is that nobody loved him. He really did have nowhere - no-one else - to go to other than the family of thugs who abused him so horrifically and eventually killed him. In the end we all need to belong to some human grouping whose numbers total more than one. It is similar in a way to the twisted psychology that leads a prostitute to develop an emotional dependency on the pimp who abuses and exploits her. It is, after, all part of our mammalian heritage.
Another way of looking at this is in terms of social capital. This is something that has been on my mind quite a lot during the last week. I will be leaving the Philippines at the end of the month. Last week I made my final trip to the field here. I went to see how things were going with a fairly large and multi-faceted project we fund in the province of Occidental Mindoro. The project aims to do many things for the Mangyan people who are the original inhabitants of the island and who have been the victims of a process of dispossession, marginalisation and impoverishment which follows the same miserable pattern that can be found in respect of indigenous peoples all over the world. The project is probably too ambitious. They often are, but its intentions are good and I am pleased that we are doing it.
I first visited Mindoro back in 2008 in connection with our comparatively far larger support to the reform of the health system in the Philippines and was struck then by the poverty I saw in Mangyan communities and the lack of understanding that was apparent in the approach of local government in whatever relations it had with them. I was so discouraged by what I saw that I followed my official visit up with a very different kind of trip accompanying a sprightly septuagenarian Father Ewald Dintner, who has worked for getting on for half a century with the Mangyan communities of Mindoro, for a couple of days hiking into the mountains to stay overnight in small, isolated Mangyan communities. The three lasting memories I have of that hike are of the incredible beauty of the mountains and the views out over the ocean far below, of the real meaning of poverty and hunger when all there is to eat are boiled bananas and of the ridiculous presence of two porcelain toilet bowls that some moronic politician must have had dragged all the way up to a tiny hamlet in the mountains just so he could say he had done something about 'sanitation'. The toilet bowls had been placed on a raised platform in the small communal house of the village where we slept. In the night they seemed to loom over me like the gods of some long forgotten cult. Needless to say no human posterior ever treated them in the way for which they had been intended. So much for 'sanitation' and so much, by analogy, for so much development assistance. The intended beneficiaries don't even want to crap on it.
But back to the trip I just made, which was to the northwest tip of the island of Mindoro, reached from Manila by taking the ferry from Batangas to Abra de Ilog. I have to admit that my inner child with all its enthusiasms and ability to revel in the beauty of nature and the wonder of what is new and bright and fresh around me always comes to life the moment I get going on a trip to the field. For most of my life, as far back as I can remember, I have slept so much better in a sleeping bag in a tent or, in this case, on top of four benches put together in the village school-room. If I wake up in the night I get up and watch the fireflies in the trees or trace the constellations in a sky that is free from city smog and light pollution. And yes, the village where we stayed was beautifully situated next to a fast flowing mountain river in which I had a wonderful bathe when I woke with the rising sun. Inner child or inner Rousseau? It doesn't matter really. At moments like that it simply feels that things are right and well-balanced. There is a sense of harmony that cannot be quantified or subjected to analysis.
But actually what really makes a field trip or breaks it are people - the people you travel with and, far more importantly, the people you come to visit. That should be axiomatic of course. It is why I think it matters to stay the night and to sit around the campfire in the dark listening to poetry and songs recited by members of the community in the now scarcely remembered Iraya language. And it was good to stay on for an extra day beyond the parsimonious time frame of the official trip in order to walk with local community members to another village situated amount hills and mountains still partially clad in virgin or semi-virgin forest, where a group of children scrambled nimbly up into the big bignay tree in the school yard to gather some of its delicious fruit for us.
The other aspect of this, though, is the professional one. There has to be an understanding of what is going on inside a community before you can presume to design some sort of intervention that is meant to 'help' people to do something that will improve their well-being in some way. Looking back on my four years in the Philippines, I think the penny finally dropped in my mind that not only do paradigms of rural development or even the more trendy 'community driven development' fail to base themselves on a thorough analysis of the communities they are directed at, but that the failure to sub-analyse communities down to the household level (in particular, disaggregating by wealth) is compounded by a failure to take the various aspects of the sustainable livelihoods paradigm properly into account, especially elements like social capital.
The latter is of course something we are aware of at an anecdotal level at all times in relation to access to health services. We know that a huge chunk of the cost of healthcare, in particular the cost of medicines, is paid for 'out of pocket', but we do not really understand the mechanisms by which poor people find the resources they need or how they prioritise. And of course this kind of understanding is vital if we are to understand why a project that sets out to persuade very poor farmers in an upland community to switch from the slash and burn practice known in the Philippines as 'kaingin' to a much more sophisticated type of farming such as the 'sloping land agriculture' of the project I was in Mindoro to see.
Just a few hours of conversation with local people was enough to reveal that for them the advantage of kaingin lies in the fact that it is not labour intensive, does not require community cooperation or sophisticated water management and, in particular, leaves time for other coping strategies which are so important during the hunger months that take up a sizeable chunk of the year. It is a rule, after all, that the poorer you are the more risk averse you are likely to be. And the people in some of the remoter villages really are poor by any standards. It is worrying to find that the monitoring report by an outside consultant that I had with me failed to pick up on this, commenting only on the need for better water management. Over and over again it seems to me we so-called development professionals fail to get it. I ought to shout: 'It's the ...., stupid!' , but I am not quite sure what goes in space. Social capital is definitely part of it, though. The individual needs the household, which needs its own wider network within the various structures of family and community, all too often in the face of an unsympathetic or hostile government and outside world.
Actually, what the communities made clear over and over again during the visit was that for them the most important aspect of the project is its support for their claims to the certificate of ancestral domain tenure, which under the Philippines' Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act provides a degree of protection against the further expropriation of the lands which remain available to indigenous peoples in the absence of individual deeds of property. This last point, of course, has been the most blatant point at which the outside world clashes with and usually destroys indigenous communities and cultures. The modern state works on a basis of legal ownership of property based on individual rights supported by legal documentation. Time and time again throughout the world this has been used as a basis for usurping indigenous peoples' lands, usually turning thriving communities into dislocated groups of homeless beggars scraping a living on the margins of modern society.
With his usual talent for boldly pointing out the obvious which others prefer to conceal, Adam Smith wrote:
'As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.' As an economist he was always human enough to relate his conclusions to human nature and society, however ugly. It is more common for economists engaged in development to do the opposite, turning the poor into numbers and then manipulating data to show how activities and interventions that blatantly destroy their society are, through some perverse logic, actually good for them.
The Philippines should be praised for having legislation that permits indigenous peoples to legalise their rights in respect of some at least of the lands they inhabit. The absence of such legislation was a major cloud that hung over the programme of support for the peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, where I was working before I came to the Philippines. But the process of obtaining the certificate of tenure is time-consuming, complicated, bureaucratic and expensive. So it is a good thing there are organisations working to support indigenous communities in processing their claims and I am glad to have played my part in buildoing a programme to support them.
But now I'm leaving. I don't think I'll miss Manila too much, although I'll have the usual fond memories of good people and good times. It is a great big, congested, polluted megalopolis, after all, like most of the places where I get to live and work.
But I will miss this:
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