Infrastructure development is directly and indirectly related to living conditions, welfare and other aspects of the human environment.
Poverty in mountain regions is a complex outcome of interacting processes, where rapid population growth, inequitable access to resources, social and political power struggles, ill-directed policies, lack of food production capacity and basic services and social security systems to name some critical factors, combine to create unsustainable and insufficient living conditions. The widespread lack of access to water of adequate quality is a key component of the global poverty struggle.
A large portion of the population in the Greater Asia mountain region lives in moderate or extreme poverty. All the major problems facing mountain environments and their people’s have traditionally failed to attract special attention from the international community. Poverty is one of the most pressing issues in these environments which have never had a prominent position in foreign aid and development projects. It is only recently that mountains have been recognized as particularly important for development, and as especially ecologically and socially vulnerable.
Poverty is largely associated with women and children, i.e. marginalized groups in society (UN 1989, 1992). Poverty among the powerless tends to draw limited attention in international policies. There are many examples that poverty is especially rampant in mountain regions where we also find the most important water sources to people in this region. The Chinese government estimates that the bulk of its 80 million inhabitants below the poverty line are ethnic mountain minorities (Ives 1997).
Poverty has a structure that is also related to the use of water resources. Women are generally impoverished in that they have less access to resources than men, less control over their life, less influence over decision making, but have to carry out the bulk of daily work (UNICEF 1994). Furthermore as economic pressures mount, the world debt crisis increases, and the government-subsidized social programmes are reduced, increasing numbers of men migrate from mountain and other rural regions to urban centers. Finally, the vast majority of bilateral and international aid and development agencies have historically tended to target men in their projects. All in all, this reinforces a poverty structure where social and economic differences are enhanced, resource use remains unsustainable, and local governance and local economies are hindered or undermined. Social and cultural conflicts contribute to poverty, social instability and pressure on basic resources like, water and soil.
Infrastructure development is a driving factor that can affect poverty negatively and positively. Infrastructure is often argued to be important for poverty reduction. This can be the case where development aid, road construction or water and sanitary investments have been made with poverty reduction in mind. Alas, the great majority of private investments are related to either resource exploitation or allocated to upper and middle-income developing countries. Most infrastructure development in developing countries is a product of international donor policies supporting existing power structures, institutions and elites. The majority of these policies are not effectively sensitive towards gender issues and impoverished groups, although their official goals may say otherwise. However, on the local level there are several notable exceptions like Aga Khan Rural Support Programme in Northern Pakistan.
The fact that infrastructure development often acts counter to reducing poverty is reflected on different levels from global to local arenas. The structural and global economic policies of the World Bank, the IMF and other large institutions require the same development responses across widely different contexts and cultures (Stiglitz 2000). These projects are often directed at, or containing large infrastructure components. Frequently, such development approaches disagree with the needs of the poor and instead strengthens local elites and corrupt systems. Secondly, bilateral attempts are almost always influenced by global power games. Thus bilateral, and even multilateral aid officially aimed at alleviating poverty seldom challenge dysfunctional social systems and elites, and may instead strengthen powerful local actors like local politicians and contactors. The resultant infrastructure development usually benefits only a few already powerful interests. Hydropower and road development in the Himalayas is a typical example where great benefits are extracted, and then distributed, and often exported, among a relatively small group of actors. And since infrastructure development mostly reinforces existing power structures locally and nationally, the basic social determinants of poverty, such as gender bias, excessive use of local resources, lack of local control etc. remain unchanged. Albeit there are many instances where privatized infrastructure development have proven more effective and providing better services to the public than public services (Harris /Worldbank, 2003). However, it is crucial to bear in mind that the far majority of the road construction, such as in tropical rainforests are built primarily to serve logging or mining companies, and are not built primarily to improve sanitation or local trade opportunities in rural areas.
As infrastructure development projects to a wide extent are designed to extract resources and capital is widely channeled through economic networks, impoverished rural local populations get very little in return. Many of the areas with extreme exploitation rates of timber and minerals, only the few workers directly involved benefit through employment, while many local populations often are in direct conflict with the companies, as they become exposed to environmental pressures. This said, it is also clear that infrastructure development can be important for poverty alleviation, but only when it is directed towards that purpose, such as to increase local trade opportunities for areas that have the potential for surplus production (Leinbach, 1995), increased access to basic health care provide such will be made available, and also sometimes improved sanitation and education. Once again, this is only the case where the development is an active part of a larger and well-coordinated effort that simultaneously aims to reduce or mitigate the negative impacts. As illustrated from the major larger construction projects in the Mekong, this is too often not the case. Furthermore, most of the piecemeal development takes place by the expansion of the secondary road network, which is often directed towards exploitation opportunities of minerals or timber. If the development does not have economic and welfare development of local populations as a direct objective including actual real-life implementation funds, infrastructure will generally not contribute to poverty alleviation.