Roads, marketization and social exclusion in Southeast Asia. What do roads do to people?

Abstract

What do roads do to people? Roads in national development planning For governments in Southeast Asia, the integration of marginal areas and populations is seen as a central, and in some cases even guiding, develop ment objective. This is driven by two imperatives. First is the need to integrate marginal populations into the political main stream as part of a nation-building and security-enhancing exercise. From the forests of Irian Jaya to the hills of northern Thailand and the Lao People's Democratic Republic, roads have traditionally been viewed as the principal means of securing remote and marginal areas and quelling the forces of insurrection. Roads have become, in this context, emblematic of a state's ability to infiltrate and dominate geographical space and impose itself on the people inhabiting that space (see Scott 1998). For insurgency movements and oppo nents of the state, roads have come, conversely, to symbolize oppression. But there is a second imperative that has received rather less attention but which has become, in recent years, the primary rationale for building roads: market integration. This is founded on the belief that poverty has a strong spatial component and that it is concentrated in those areas where the market has a weak presence. Not only do roads allow the market to infiltrate periph eral areas, but roads also permit the inhabitants of those areas to access the jobs, services, and higher standards of living in the core (or semi-periphery). Thus road building becomes the primary means of bringing development to people living at the margins of the state, drawing them into the 'mainstream' of politics, economy, and society.1 This distinction may be clear enough as recounted here, but in practice the two rationales -security enhancement and market integration -merge. 1 Using 'mainstream' here is an intentional link with the literature on social exclusion.