About the Book
This text questions the dominant approaches of professions, disciplines and bureaucracies concerned with rural development. The theme is that "we" - the professionals - are much of the problem. New frontiers can be opened up by breaking out of, and reversing, many of the ideas, values, methods and behaviour normally dominant in disciplines and departments by offsetting biases, decentralizing, encouraging diversity, and putting people before things, and poor people first of all. These themes are explored and illuminated through analysis of different topics and contexts: normal professionalism and new paradigms; modes of thought and procedures; poverty-focused projects and the project process; tropical seasonality; agricultural research and extension; NGOs' comparative competence with new participatory approaches and methods; and an ideology of reversals with practical pluralism, to dismantle the disabling state and empower the poor. Throughout, and drawing on 30 years' experience, the author analyzes past errors and achievements, in order to identify practical action for the future.
This text has been written and compiled for all those who are professionally concerned with rural poverty and development, whether in government service, NGOs, universities, training and research institutes, or aid agencies in the South and the North, in the peripheries and the cores. In addressing the themes, the eight chapters are self-contained and convenient for reading and teaching. The book should have practical implications for practitioners, academics, policy-makers and researchers of all departments and disciplines.
Table of Contents:
Part 1 Normal professionalism, new paradigms and development: the setting; development professions and paradigms; normal professionalism; conservatism; defences; weaknesses; polar paradigms - first and last; the new development paradigm. Part 2 Managing rural development - procedure, principles and choices: principles, modes of thought - empirical not perfectionist, systems thinking, administrative capacity as a scarce resource, optimizing, not maximizing, optimal ignorance, opportunity-versus problem-orientation, sophistication in simplicity; precepts in procedural design - introduce joint programming and joint target-setting, make meetings few and functional, make reports short and functional, subsume or abolish old procedures, start with a pilot experimental approach, involve participating staff in discussion procedures; choices. Part 3 Project selection for poverty-focused rural development - simple is optimal: rural poverty - problems and opportunities; problems in project selection - the needs of donors, the big project trap, project appraisal in practice, complexity, dependence and delay, the neglect of administrative capacity; solutions - simple is optimal - decentralization, simple procedures - decision matrices, poverty group ranking, checklists, listing costs and benefits, unit costs and cost-effectiveness; life-styles, learning and judgement. Part 4 Health, agriculture, and rural poverty - why seasons matters: the argument - professional and personal biases, biases of access and contact, dry season bias, statistical biases; practical implications - research, health services, rural planning and action; postscript. Part 5 Farmer-first - a practical paradigm for the Third Agriculture: the great challenge of the 1990s; normal professionalism, transfer-of-technology and the third agriculture; farmer first - the complementary paradigm - analysis, search, choice, experimentation, evaluation and extension; challenges for the future - inventiveness, parsimony, spread, embedding. Part 6 Normal professionalism and the early project process - problems and solutions: definitions and scope; normal professionalism; professions and the early project process; bureaucratic and political pressures; project process pathology - irreversibility of commitment, the anti-poor bias in methodology, the "home economics" of cost-benefit analysis, additive procedures; large projects - prevention often better than cure; the new paradigm and the new professionalism; practical implications - calibre, commitment and continuity of field staff, restraint in funding, rapid appraisal; learning projects. (Part contents)
About the Author :
Robert Chambers is Research Associate and Emeritus Professor, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex and the author of Participatory Workshops (2002) and Ideas for Development (2005).
