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Rural development: Putting the last first
Book reviews
and that they generally legislate in ignorance of it’. Cox suggests that the power of constraint in ‘advanced capitalist societies’ can be effective only if ‘middle-way’ approach is a more taken, which would recognize the ‘relatively autonomous centres of social and economic power outside the purely political decision-making process.’ Cox gives thorough accounts of the history of land and property policy (184%1945), the land and property market, and the post-war policies of Labour and the Conservatives. There is a teasing chapter on ‘the enigma of the Thatcher government’. It is odd to see the Civic Trust and the National Trust described as
‘socialist/social democratic’, though one may well agree with these terms for the Town and Country Planning Association and the Council for the Protection of Rural England (p 53). The great weakness of the book is that it lacks case studies and international comparisons. That the adversarial procedure is common in the western world would seem to be clear. But the rigidities and ineptitudes of the British system may not be exactly the same elsewhere. That is, at least, a pious hope. A radical proposal would be to require conservationist or Georgist views to be normative in these matters. M. 17. Brett-Crowther
A spare, clear and direct message RURAL DEVELOPMENT THE LAST FIRST by Robert
Chambers
Longman, f2.00
London,
: PUTTING
1983,
246
pp,
Here is one book that will surely be spared when most of ‘development literature’ sinks into deserved oblivion, for Robert Chambers has written a masterpiece of impassioned analysis, worthy of the gravity of its subject - and in spite of the title, he addresses the true problem, that of poverty, not the false problem of ‘development’, whatever is meant by that confusing word. Chambers is a fellow of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, but this is not an academic book, though it is written with admirable clarity and respect for evidence. In accordance with the practice of his Institute, he has spent much of his career in poorer countries, but this is not a collection of anecdotes from the field, though it abounds with concrete examples. Instead, spanning the two cultures - that of the academics and that of the practitioners - he is able to rise above them to a viewpoint that he has made all his own. His book falls into two parts. The
LAND USE POLICY July 1985
first five chapters describe and anaiyse the problem; the last three offer positive ideas about solving it. He starts by accounting for the fact that rural poverty is largely unperceived by outsiders, except when it erupts into famine or strife. Academics, bureaucrats, foreigners and journalists tend to glimpse the problem in the course of brief episodes of ‘rural development tourism’. This usually takes the form of a visit to a project, conveniently close to a road and probably in the least difficult season of the year. The visitors are mostly urban, and their hosts are local notables, but in any case contact is likely to be limited by politeness and reticence as well as by the many problems of language and culture. Even those ‘experts’ who manage to get beyond tourism are mostly the prisoners of their academic or administrative status. Academics, accustomed to the silence of the library and the critical spirit of the seminar, tend to produce negative and narrowly focused studies. Administrators, in a hurry to get results and to impress superiors, are too often satisfied with hasty and superficial accounts. Both rely too much on questionnaires, which are often ill conceived, badly administered and poorly analysed. Only the social anthropologist routinely plunges deeply into the cul-
ture of the rural poor. Techniques for rapid assessment do exist, but they may need the gifts of a Ladejinsky to be fully effective.
Mental framework Whoever the outsiders, there is a systematic tendency for them to seek the kind of knowledge that fits their own mental framework, instead of listening humbly to what the rural poor have to say. The urban observer is interested in what is modern, commechanical and marketable plex, rather than in what is traditional, simple, biological and unmarketed. Cows are the subject of enquiry rather than goats, fertilizer rather than dung, fossil fuels rather than firewood, and men’s jobs rather than the life of women and children, the old and the sick. The first part of the book culminates in a powerful description of ‘integrated rural poverty’. Chambers traces the web of links that make rural poverty into an all-too-stable phenomenon. Deprivation, physical weakness, isolation, vulnerability to disaster and lack of political power reinforce each other in a ghastly cycle. Only with help from outside will people be able to break out of the vicious circle. But ‘help’ of the wrong kind can actually make things worse. How to give the right help is the subject of the last three chapters. Most of the development literature is depressingly negative. As Chambers says ‘if economics is dismal, development studies are morbid’. One of his strengths is that, after an outstandingly clear-sighted presentation, he is invigoratingly positive in his search for solutions. These should respond to the needs and priorities of the poor. To discover them, outsiders need to effect reversals in their own ways of perceiving and thinking. Already there is a body of ‘new professionals’ who have effected such reversals, who have changed their way of life and who are dedicated to putting the last first. Even for those who do not become professionals, there are a great many opportunities for practical action, if only perceptions can be changed. This then is Robert Chambers’ mes-
257
Book reviews
sage, and he delivers it brilliantly. His style of writing is spare, clear and direct. No words are wasted, and there is no waffle or false sentiment. Often the sentences follow each other with pitiless brevity, like stones falling on the flimsy shelter of our illusions. At times the author uses language with the freedom of a poet-indeed, at one point he does break into very quotable verse. At other times he achieves a biting satire reminiscent of Northcote Parkinson. The larger structure of the book is clearly articulated, and the reader is helped by the use of two levels of headed subsections and by the presence of a good index and a copious bibliography. Chambers has devastating things to say about academics in general, though he quotes with gratitude the work of some. It is therefore with diffidence that the reviewer, an academic, voices any critical remarks. I felt though, that there were too many blanket statements about the rural poor; I would like to have seen some discrimination between different categories and particularly between the major cultures to which so many of
them belong; it is artificial also, to distinguish so persistently between the rural and the urban poor, who are often the same people at different stages in their lives. And after the justified protest against the Galbraithian call for the integrated everything, I would like to have seen recognition for the value of local integration, as exemplified in the Algerian rural renovation programme. Such criticisms do not detract from the value of this book. It deserves to be translated into many languages and to reach millions of readers. More than anything else written on modern poverty, it could have a real impact on events. At less than a penny a page it is also astonishingly good value for money. As a reviewer I cannot offer you any excuse for failing to get a copy at the earliest opportunity. And if you do not keep hold of it, the only good reason will be that someone else needs it even more. Philip J. Stewart Commonwealth Forestry Institute University of Oxford Oxford, UK
On the nature of green THE ROOTS OF VIRONMENTALISM
MODERN
EN-
by David Pepper, with John Perkins and Martyn Young Croom Helm, London, UK, 1984, 242 pp, f17.95 ‘Greeness’ is very much on the political agenda these days. Despite the British government’s intransigence over sulphur dioxide scrubbing from coal generating plants, the Conservative party seems to be taking on a green tinge. Its agricultural policies are steadily being enmeshed in environmental realities (and, not unconnected, financial restraint), it has become the champion of the green belt, and it is taking a renewed interest in energy conservation. But no one would call the UK Conservative government environmentalist. David Pepper would be
258
appalled if anyone tried to. He sets out to examine what is meant by environmentalism, how the polyglot of ideas that now make it up have become incorporated, and how environmentalism has taken on parts of the well established ideologies, such as Marxism and logical positivism. This treatment is very much a synthesis of ideas: there is little that is either profound or original in the analysis. But there is still much of merit.
Problems This reviewer had problems in evaluating Pepper’s approach, because Pepper leans heavily on my dissection of environmentalism. The major division between technocentrism and ecocentrism forms a fundamental part of Pepper’s approach. Technocentrism is defined as ‘an apparently undiluted. rational scientific approach, which particularly translates itself into an
economic rationality founded on the neo-classical school. There is, too, a belief in the ability and efficiency of management in solving problems by the use of ‘objective analysis’ and recourse to the laws of physical science . .’ (p 29). The ecocentrism. clearly more preferred by Pepper, is based on ‘non rational and even emotional beliefs’ about the rights of nature and of people to live in peace and harmony within arrangements encouraging self reliance, small-scale production and low-impact technology (pp 27-28).
Dialectical
opposites
Pepper tends to portray these as dialectical opposites rather than creatively convergent parts of a unifying belief in survival, justice and obligation to the rights of others. The differences between the two are those of approach rather than objective. Neither mode has the answer to the future of the world: the real battle zone is not between the extremes but between dissimilar approaches which, ideologically speaking, are not that far apart. Pepper had a marvellous opportunity to present this argument. His analysis of the scientific revolution with its striving for objective truth as revealed in laws and predictions is admirable. He quite correctly shows how ‘high science’ is mechanical, reductionist, abstract from social meaning, and inherently destructive towards natural processes. He proceeds, also admirably, to chart the development of romantic thought - in art, religion, and planning. He points out that romantics idealized nature, regarding it as benign and harmoniously in balance, the perfect antidote to the city and effite snobbery. What he should have perhaps stressed more is that the romantics. past and present. idealize too much. They see in natural processes symbols and guides that do not exist. Nature is not self-regulating in a just or harmonious way: it is brutal, competitive and, arguably, unjust to all kinds of species and populations. Pepper is at his best in his analysis and especially neoof Marxism
LAND USE POLICY July 1985
and that they generally legislate in ignorance of it’. Cox suggests that the power of constraint in ‘advanced capitalist societies’ can be effective only if ‘middle-way’ approach is a more taken, which would recognize the ‘relatively autonomous centres of social and economic power outside the purely political decision-making process.’ Cox gives thorough accounts of the history of land and property policy (184%1945), the land and property market, and the post-war policies of Labour and the Conservatives. There is a teasing chapter on ‘the enigma of the Thatcher government’. It is odd to see the Civic Trust and the National Trust described as
‘socialist/social democratic’, though one may well agree with these terms for the Town and Country Planning Association and the Council for the Protection of Rural England (p 53). The great weakness of the book is that it lacks case studies and international comparisons. That the adversarial procedure is common in the western world would seem to be clear. But the rigidities and ineptitudes of the British system may not be exactly the same elsewhere. That is, at least, a pious hope. A radical proposal would be to require conservationist or Georgist views to be normative in these matters. M. 17. Brett-Crowther
A spare, clear and direct message RURAL DEVELOPMENT THE LAST FIRST by Robert
Chambers
Longman, f2.00
London,
: PUTTING
1983,
246
pp,
Here is one book that will surely be spared when most of ‘development literature’ sinks into deserved oblivion, for Robert Chambers has written a masterpiece of impassioned analysis, worthy of the gravity of its subject - and in spite of the title, he addresses the true problem, that of poverty, not the false problem of ‘development’, whatever is meant by that confusing word. Chambers is a fellow of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, but this is not an academic book, though it is written with admirable clarity and respect for evidence. In accordance with the practice of his Institute, he has spent much of his career in poorer countries, but this is not a collection of anecdotes from the field, though it abounds with concrete examples. Instead, spanning the two cultures - that of the academics and that of the practitioners - he is able to rise above them to a viewpoint that he has made all his own. His book falls into two parts. The
LAND USE POLICY July 1985
first five chapters describe and anaiyse the problem; the last three offer positive ideas about solving it. He starts by accounting for the fact that rural poverty is largely unperceived by outsiders, except when it erupts into famine or strife. Academics, bureaucrats, foreigners and journalists tend to glimpse the problem in the course of brief episodes of ‘rural development tourism’. This usually takes the form of a visit to a project, conveniently close to a road and probably in the least difficult season of the year. The visitors are mostly urban, and their hosts are local notables, but in any case contact is likely to be limited by politeness and reticence as well as by the many problems of language and culture. Even those ‘experts’ who manage to get beyond tourism are mostly the prisoners of their academic or administrative status. Academics, accustomed to the silence of the library and the critical spirit of the seminar, tend to produce negative and narrowly focused studies. Administrators, in a hurry to get results and to impress superiors, are too often satisfied with hasty and superficial accounts. Both rely too much on questionnaires, which are often ill conceived, badly administered and poorly analysed. Only the social anthropologist routinely plunges deeply into the cul-
ture of the rural poor. Techniques for rapid assessment do exist, but they may need the gifts of a Ladejinsky to be fully effective.
Mental framework Whoever the outsiders, there is a systematic tendency for them to seek the kind of knowledge that fits their own mental framework, instead of listening humbly to what the rural poor have to say. The urban observer is interested in what is modern, commechanical and marketable plex, rather than in what is traditional, simple, biological and unmarketed. Cows are the subject of enquiry rather than goats, fertilizer rather than dung, fossil fuels rather than firewood, and men’s jobs rather than the life of women and children, the old and the sick. The first part of the book culminates in a powerful description of ‘integrated rural poverty’. Chambers traces the web of links that make rural poverty into an all-too-stable phenomenon. Deprivation, physical weakness, isolation, vulnerability to disaster and lack of political power reinforce each other in a ghastly cycle. Only with help from outside will people be able to break out of the vicious circle. But ‘help’ of the wrong kind can actually make things worse. How to give the right help is the subject of the last three chapters. Most of the development literature is depressingly negative. As Chambers says ‘if economics is dismal, development studies are morbid’. One of his strengths is that, after an outstandingly clear-sighted presentation, he is invigoratingly positive in his search for solutions. These should respond to the needs and priorities of the poor. To discover them, outsiders need to effect reversals in their own ways of perceiving and thinking. Already there is a body of ‘new professionals’ who have effected such reversals, who have changed their way of life and who are dedicated to putting the last first. Even for those who do not become professionals, there are a great many opportunities for practical action, if only perceptions can be changed. This then is Robert Chambers’ mes-
257
Book reviews
sage, and he delivers it brilliantly. His style of writing is spare, clear and direct. No words are wasted, and there is no waffle or false sentiment. Often the sentences follow each other with pitiless brevity, like stones falling on the flimsy shelter of our illusions. At times the author uses language with the freedom of a poet-indeed, at one point he does break into very quotable verse. At other times he achieves a biting satire reminiscent of Northcote Parkinson. The larger structure of the book is clearly articulated, and the reader is helped by the use of two levels of headed subsections and by the presence of a good index and a copious bibliography. Chambers has devastating things to say about academics in general, though he quotes with gratitude the work of some. It is therefore with diffidence that the reviewer, an academic, voices any critical remarks. I felt though, that there were too many blanket statements about the rural poor; I would like to have seen some discrimination between different categories and particularly between the major cultures to which so many of
them belong; it is artificial also, to distinguish so persistently between the rural and the urban poor, who are often the same people at different stages in their lives. And after the justified protest against the Galbraithian call for the integrated everything, I would like to have seen recognition for the value of local integration, as exemplified in the Algerian rural renovation programme. Such criticisms do not detract from the value of this book. It deserves to be translated into many languages and to reach millions of readers. More than anything else written on modern poverty, it could have a real impact on events. At less than a penny a page it is also astonishingly good value for money. As a reviewer I cannot offer you any excuse for failing to get a copy at the earliest opportunity. And if you do not keep hold of it, the only good reason will be that someone else needs it even more. Philip J. Stewart Commonwealth Forestry Institute University of Oxford Oxford, UK
On the nature of green THE ROOTS OF VIRONMENTALISM
MODERN
EN-
by David Pepper, with John Perkins and Martyn Young Croom Helm, London, UK, 1984, 242 pp, f17.95 ‘Greeness’ is very much on the political agenda these days. Despite the British government’s intransigence over sulphur dioxide scrubbing from coal generating plants, the Conservative party seems to be taking on a green tinge. Its agricultural policies are steadily being enmeshed in environmental realities (and, not unconnected, financial restraint), it has become the champion of the green belt, and it is taking a renewed interest in energy conservation. But no one would call the UK Conservative government environmentalist. David Pepper would be
258
appalled if anyone tried to. He sets out to examine what is meant by environmentalism, how the polyglot of ideas that now make it up have become incorporated, and how environmentalism has taken on parts of the well established ideologies, such as Marxism and logical positivism. This treatment is very much a synthesis of ideas: there is little that is either profound or original in the analysis. But there is still much of merit.
Problems This reviewer had problems in evaluating Pepper’s approach, because Pepper leans heavily on my dissection of environmentalism. The major division between technocentrism and ecocentrism forms a fundamental part of Pepper’s approach. Technocentrism is defined as ‘an apparently undiluted. rational scientific approach, which particularly translates itself into an
economic rationality founded on the neo-classical school. There is, too, a belief in the ability and efficiency of management in solving problems by the use of ‘objective analysis’ and recourse to the laws of physical science . .’ (p 29). The ecocentrism. clearly more preferred by Pepper, is based on ‘non rational and even emotional beliefs’ about the rights of nature and of people to live in peace and harmony within arrangements encouraging self reliance, small-scale production and low-impact technology (pp 27-28).
Dialectical
opposites
Pepper tends to portray these as dialectical opposites rather than creatively convergent parts of a unifying belief in survival, justice and obligation to the rights of others. The differences between the two are those of approach rather than objective. Neither mode has the answer to the future of the world: the real battle zone is not between the extremes but between dissimilar approaches which, ideologically speaking, are not that far apart. Pepper had a marvellous opportunity to present this argument. His analysis of the scientific revolution with its striving for objective truth as revealed in laws and predictions is admirable. He quite correctly shows how ‘high science’ is mechanical, reductionist, abstract from social meaning, and inherently destructive towards natural processes. He proceeds, also admirably, to chart the development of romantic thought - in art, religion, and planning. He points out that romantics idealized nature, regarding it as benign and harmoniously in balance, the perfect antidote to the city and effite snobbery. What he should have perhaps stressed more is that the romantics. past and present. idealize too much. They see in natural processes symbols and guides that do not exist. Nature is not self-regulating in a just or harmonious way: it is brutal, competitive and, arguably, unjust to all kinds of species and populations. Pepper is at his best in his analysis and especially neoof Marxism
LAND USE POLICY July 1985