Social Protection and Shelter
Ghazah Abbasi
Marginalization and social exclusion can be defined as conditions in which some individuals or groups are unable to participate fully in the social, economic and political systems of society. This can manifest itself in the form of limited participation in and access to educational institutions, property ownership, labour markets or the electoral process. Social exclusion of this sort is often systemic, which means that certain groups are persistently excluded from participating fully in society or from gaining access to resources and entitlements. In Pakistan for example, it is easy to observe systemic marginalization along the lines of gender, caste, race, ethnicity and class. These limits on the participation of some groups are not incidental, and are created through social processes in which the state as well as political and economic elites also partake.
Citizenship rights can be seen to comprise of social, political and civil rights. These rights act as a guarantee for the provision of access to public services and amenities, and also for the space and opportunity to participate in political processes. In this context, marginalization can be understood as the failure of the state to realize the rights of some citizens, whereas it does enforce fully the rights of others. This results in a condition where some citizens are ‘more equal’ than others in the eyes of the state. Marginalized citizens are those whose rights are not fully realized, who we can thus refer to as effectively unequal citizens.
Transformative Social Protection (TSP) represents a process through which effectively unequal citizens can move towards full citizenship through the fulfilment of their rights, which entails an increase in their access to citizenship based entitlements and resources, and an elevation of their social status. One manner in which TSP can be brought about is through collective action, whereby effectively unequal citizens can organize to gain access to the resources that are guaranteed to them as citizens. This requires for marginalized groups to compete and negotiate with others for access to resources and entitlements, a process in which they are frequently met with resistance by powerful interest groups such as propertied classes or government agencies. Due to the relative powerlessness of the marginalized, their chances of success depend in part on how well organized they are as a collective. However, issues of marginalization colour the practice of collective action itself, as some socially excluded citizens may not have sufficient start-up social capital required for the exercise.
The idea of the collective as opposed to the individual has some salience, as we discovered in our study on residential land security in Pakistan. Our study focused specifically on the Marla scheme in rural Punjab; the Sindh Goth Abad Scheme; and the Sindh Katchi Abadi Authority’s regularization programme in Karachi. The aim of these schemes was to provide residential land to those who previously had limited access to it, or had very little security over the residential land that they occupied. In the Marla scheme, areas of government owned land were transferred to marginalized groups. In the other two schemes in Sindh, residents of irregular settlements were given legal title or lease to the residential land that they currently occupied. In the Sindh schemes, establishing the legality of the settlement as a whole was the first step in regularization. It was a contested process, following which leases were granted with relative ease. Perhaps because the first and more important step in these schemes was the regularization of the settlement itself, they served to co-align the interests of resident communities to a great extent, and hence made collective action and social mobilization rational outcomes in those communities.
The participation of marginalized groups in residential land schemes can be said to represent an instance of TSP, for the reason that it allowed for the realization of the social, civil and political rights of those citizens. Not only were these communities able to acquire security over residential land – an important citizenship based entitlement – but they were also able to gain access to one or many of a host of other entitlements such as private schooling, electricity, durable housing, gas and water. Furthermore, the political rights of marginalized communities were realized in the process, as residents of almost all regularized settlements that we studied participated politically to increase the chances of having their settlement regularized under the scheme. This political participation took the form of networking with political parties or negotiating with propertied classes or local strongmen. Civil rights were also fulfilled and citizens’ access to justice was increased after legal title or a lease to the land was granted by the state. In one case, residents of a regularized settlement were able to have a court order issued in their favour, which protected them from harassment by propertied classes, and thus elevated their social status to an extent. Also, in most Katchi Abadis, where residents were ‘illegal’ migrants from outside of Pakistan, regularization made inroads in terms of incorporating these non-citizens into the system of government. Since access to a fixed abode comprises an almost fundamental element of citizenship, the regularization of the residences of these migrants went far to alleviate their status as such and allowed them to move towards a semblance of citizenship.
At the same time, however, residents of regularized settlements can not be said to have acquired ‘full’ citizenship status, for even though it may have increased, their access to citizenship based rights and entitlements can not be considered complete or even absolute. Even in some settlements that had been regularized, residents did not feel entirely secure over their land and were threatened with evictions. Moreover, residents of many such settlements did not gain access to a number of public services even after regularization.
In the course of our study, we discovered that acquiring security over residential land can aid in the transition of unequal citizens towards full citizenship, and also that collective action features in this process of TSP. However, in the case that collective action reproduces the social hierarchies that TSP aims to overcome, the relationship between these two variables needs to be explored more fully. Whereas our study on residential land security in Pakistan suggests that social mobilization occurs along lines of kinship and ethnicity, this leaves open several issues that merit investigation in their own right. These include the politics of access to social networks and the politics of collective action, as well as questions about whether collective action breaks down or perpetuates the hierarchies that produce social disadvantage. For instance, our research showed that women and so-called low castes bear the status of the marginalized within the marginalized – not only do they have the least control and security over the residential land that they occupy, but they also remain peripheral in the process of collective action. Thus, our examination of the relationship between the marginalized, the elites and the state, we discovered that there are more subtle hierarchies at work within these categories which need to be explored further. Lastly, further research can be done to understand how instances of collective action can be shaped by the role of external actors, such as political parties seeking a new constituency, or non-governmental organizations seeking to effect change.
1. This article refers to the research conducted by the Collective for Social Science Research on Residential Land Security as part the Social Protection in Asia programme.