Taking part in a program or market on terms that harm or subordinate the participant, such as low-paid temporary labor or contracts the participant had no hand in shaping.
Extended definition
Development studies use the term, and its sibling adverse incorporation (Hickey and du Toit 2007), for the observation that poor people are often harmed less by being left out of markets and programs than by the terms on which they are let in. Inclusion can lock people into low returns, dependence or obligations they cannot renegotiate.
On the wiki the term covers two patterns in catchment finance. The first is inclusion as labor only: community members are paid to clear land or plant trees while ownership, payments and decisions sit elsewhere, as with the short-term contracts of South Africa’s Working for Water program. The second is contract terms set by the facility, as in the first FONAG contract with an Ecuadorian community, which framed community labor in terms the community contested and later had changed (Joslin 2023). See Exclusion from Water Finance.
Contrast with adjacent terms
- Finance exclusion. Being kept out. Adverse inclusion is being let in on harmful terms; a facility can show both.
- Elite capture. Benefits taken by the better-off within or around a community. Adverse inclusion concerns the terms offered to those who do take part.
Related terms
- Finance Exclusion
- Structural Violence
- Payment for ecosystem services (PES)
- Exclusion from Water Finance
Sources
- Hickey, S. and du Toit, A. (2007). Adverse incorporation, social exclusion and chronic poverty
Provenance
Created 25 October 2026 from the evidence brief behind Exclusion from Water Finance. The definition follows the cited author’s published wording; the paragraph on the wiki’s use is the wiki’s own reading.