Population, territory and sustainable development

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In view of lower internal migration intensity (which is due to a lower mobility rate because the
absolute numbers are fairly stable), the principal policy message to take away from the report is the
persistent relevance of population mobility. The pillars of relevance differ from the past, when evidence
and the reasons for massive and steadily growing internal migration, the obvious redistributive impact on
the area triggering migration, and the need to relocate the population in keeping with a country’s
development needs were enough to put internal migration high on government and academic agendas.
The report highlights the emerging pillars that support the relevance of internal migration: (i) its growing
diversity and new trends; (ii) its persistent qualitative impacts for sending and receiving areas; (iii) its
enduring nature as a strategy for communities, families and individuals; and (iv) its reinforcement as an
individual right.
The increasingly diverse kinds of movement pose conceptual and operational challenges because
of the need to understand each kind and then devise targeted lines of intervention for each one. One of the
policy conclusions and key research findings set out in the report is that constant revision of the
conceptual approaches and methodological tools used for understanding population mobility and its
impacts on sustainable development at both the country and the subnational level is a must.
Another key suggestion that emerges from this finding and is supported by further observations
set out in other chapters of the report is that the market (whose forces strongly affect location and
mobility choices made by the population and by the agents of production in general) usually breaks its
promises of greater territorial balance and convergence. And it tends to leave to the mercy of
circumstance the national spaces that have historically lagged farthest behind economically and socially.
The market encourages the location of resources (including the population) that is best suited to the
requirements of investors and aggregate economic growth and can thus benefit those who live in or
migrate to the most flourishing or economically efficient subnational spaces. But the market also has
insuperable limitations that make it impossible to predict the economic, social and environmental
sustainability of such locations and the associated migrant flows. And the market excludes and, indirectly,
punishes those who cannot, fail to or do not want to move according to market “signals” that, as
explained, can be wrong. Moreover, the market is relatively blind to push factors (mostly economic,
although there are political ones, too, especially in countries with armed internal conflicts) that drive
displacement because of the lack of choices in the sending area and the resulting overvaluation of
conditions in the receiving area. Movement because of push factors has a high tolerance threshold to
“market signals” of congestion or collapse in these areas, leading people to move to and stay in the new
location, at least for a while, even in times of stagnation and crisis.
Neither the market nor big government population relocation programmes have taken account of
ethnic identity, cultural specificities or historical collective coexistence practices. All of these factors
(taken out of the political picture for the sake of modernization or sidetracked in practice for the sake of
profits) are increasingly the focus of public discourse and are now inescapable when designing
interventions related to population location and mobility.
It comes as no surprise, then, that legislation and public policy are paying more attention to
matters such as territorial equity, the rights of individuals regardless of where they live, stewardship of
diversity and territorial biodiversity and respect for ancestral ties between indigenous peoples and their
territories as defined by the concept of “good living”. Recent research documents constitutional
provisions for these ideas (Cuervo, 2011). As an illustration, box XI.1 shows how some of these issues
have been written into Ecuador’s new constitution.