Autonomous Development: Humanising the Landscape:An Excursion into Radical Thinking & Practice

At a time of widespread disillusion as to what development has in practice done to the lives of hundreds of millions of marginalised people over the past 40 years, this book seeks to reclaim development as a project of people‘s own autonomous agency. Born out of three decades of field experience and working with ‘Third World‘ students, it revisits the primary question of what development ought really to be about. Raff Carmen starts from the conviction that development is too important to be left to the developers. He critically examines what has gone on under its name, finding it wanting both as an epistemological category and a sound operational practice. Instead, he presents a counter-view of development as an act of creation whereby people exercise their inalienable right ‘to invent their own future‘ as authors of an ongoing process of transforming and humanising the landscapes they inhabit.

Table of Contents:
Contents 1. The end of history 2. Maldevelopment: coming to terms with terms 3. Demystifying participation 4. The ownership and creation of knowledge 5. Political autonomy 6. Cultural autonomy 7. Entrepreneural autonomy and literacy 8. Self-reliance or economics embedded in culture 9. Challenging the given 10. Humanising the landscape: An ethical imperative

About the Author :
Raff Carmen is an emeritus professor at the University of Manchester. Raff Carmen is an emeritus professor at the University of Manchester.

Review :
An incisive look at many of the new ideas around development. Critical, original and accessible. Raff Carmen is one of very few challenging and ground-breaking thinkers who can change the way in which we perceive and practise development. In this comprehensive book, he succeeds in interweaving a vast panorama of theories and methodologies with practical case studies to bring complex issues dramatically to life... He convinces us that alternative approaches have worked and can work in the future Carmen's incisive arguments are thought-provoking and refreshing in their intellectual appeal and pragmatic development prescriptions. His whole analysis is based on two pristine principles: People cannot be put first: development is people. People are not the problem: they are the solution. A readable book for the development policy and programme practitioners, social activists and Third World commentators alike. A refreshing and welcome addition to the discourse on South World development. In an era where socio-economic disparities between South and North are increasing, and the mass media give consumers the world according to McCoke, voices like Carmen's are vitally important. A comprehensive analysis of both the barriers to and hopes for development in the South. Highly recommended for people interested in people-centred economics. The methods and ideas forcefully expounded by Raff Carmen are of urgent relevance... an explosive critique of dominant top-down and ethnocentric development ideology In his lucid, original and challenging style, Raff Carmen strips away the comfortable myths of world development and replaces them with a compelling call to humanize the landscape.