Challenging the professions: Frontiers of rural development robert chambers Intermediate Technology Publications, London, 1993, 143 pp
| Date | 02 November 2006 |
| Author | Donald Curtis |
| Published date | 02 November 2006 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.4230140409 |
414
Book
Reviews
The book gives a comprehensive introduction to current thinking on the management of
the water resource. It will be most useful to those involved in the various fragments of the
sector who need to view their resource more holistically. They, and those who have recognized
the importance of altering consumptive behaviour, have to look further into the application
of the various instruments, and the necessary institutional and legal reforms. The book is
a useful primer for those concerned with water.
JAMIE
MORRISON
Department
of
Agricultural Economics,
Wye College, University
of
London
CHALLENGING THE PROFESSIONS: FRONTIERS
OF
RURAL DEVELOPMENT
Robert
Chambers
Intermediate Technology Publications, London,
1993, 143
pp.
Robert Chambers is well enough known in the rural development world for it to be unnecessary
for this review to expound in detail on content. In this volume he brings together a number
of papers that he has published over the years around a central theme, expressed in the
title,
Challenging the Professions.
‘The theme is that “we”, who call ourselves professionals,
are much of the problem, and to do better requires reversals of much of what we regard
as normal.’
The theme has indeed been central. In his early material-a part of
Managing Rural Develop-
ment,
first published in 1974-he sought to reverse the biases of the rural development planning
cadres of which he was a part, promoting ‘optimizing and not maximizing’, opportunity-based
intervention rather than problem orientation, and empirical as against theoretical commitment.
The middle chapters, written in the
1980s
from a research base, reflect the ‘putting people
first’ theme which he made his own, with two well-known papers on health and on farming.
These concern seasonal differences, poverty, cooking practices, kinds of environment (hilly
or flat) and other ‘obvious’ features of rural peoples lives of which professionals did not
then take much account, but surely now do.
The later chapters spring out of Chambers’ NGO phase, displaying the excitement that
he has experienced in being associated with the growth, and expanding influences of NGOs
in
South Asia. This context suits him.
It
also suits the ‘new professionalism’ he now advocates
and contrasts with the ‘normal professionalism’ that he associates with big projects, major
donors and routine government. NGOs can allow for diversity, for smallness, activity at
the periphery
of
society, organic processes, subsistence links and other aspects of ‘low’ techno-
logy. NGOs are also showing that they can network and learn rapidly. Whether this means
that professionals who are brought up in this environment will be able to make the ‘new’
into a new ‘normal’ and whether these new norms will make a difference in rural development
we will have to wait and see. In Chapter
8
he suggests that it will.
Although it has been published twice before
I
confess that
I
had not previously read his
last chapter, about the changing role of the state in rural development. He does not usually
write at this level of generality and is apologetic. ‘Given the centralization
of
power and
communications with which we live, we have to generalize; not to do
so
is
to
generalize
by default (p. 107)’. Then he neatly labels and contrasts the aims, philosophies and practices
of
the neo-Fabians of the 1970s and the neo-liberals
of
the
1980s
before asserting for the
future a counter ideology of reversals ‘of location, learning, location, values, control, authority
and power, to put first the poor and the periphery’
(p.
110).
It is a piece that my students
will certainly read.
To be a moral enthusiast for good practice in rural development and yet a constant and
intelligent commentator upon it, is an art that Chambers achieved early and has sustained
over the years. It is useful
to
see these key pieces of his work brought together in a volume
whose size and price
is
acceptable for the practitioner.
DONALD CURTIS
The University
of
Birmingham
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