Risk in rural development: challenges for managers and policy makers

Most poor people presently reside in rural areas. The rural poor are exposed to many risks while often lacking instruments to manage them adequately, and so are highly vulnerable. Providing appropriate risk-management instruments and supporting the critically vulnerable is thus one key pillar in an effective and sustainable rural poverty-reduction strategy. Such provision better allows the able-bodied to engage in high risk/higher return activities and thus with good fortune to move out of poverty. A framework must, to be adequate, involve multiple strategies (prevention, mitigation, coping) and arrangements (informal, market-based, public) for dealing with risk, and instruments that take account of the sources and characteristics of rural risk. These themes are reviewed from the perspectives of rural people as managers, and of policy makers who should be setting the conditions to make the lives of the poor easier and to help them escape from poverty. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.