Goverment & the Governed: BBC Reith Lecture 1983 Sir Douglas Wass Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984, 120 pp.
| Date | 01 April 1985 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.4230050210 |
| Author | Henry Parris |
| Published date | 01 April 1985 |
178
Book
Reviews
AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION BY TRAINING AND VISIT: THE ASIAN
EXPERIENCE
M.
M.
Cernea,
J.
K.
Coulter
and
J.
F.
A.
Russell
World Bank, Washington, 1983, 157 pp.
The report of
a
symposium held in Thailand
is
useful for both academics and practitioners in
Rural Development. It deals with the Training-and-Visit
(T
and V) approach to extension that
had its first widespread publicity in 1977 and has since been taken up, particularly
in
S.E.
Asia, on a large scale with the encouragement
of
the World Bank.
The 14 chapters are
a
mixture of country essays
on
experiences in parts of Indonesia, India,
Sri
Lanka, Thailand, the Philippines and Nepal, together with papers by Bank staff,
on
five
major aspects
of
the
T
and V approach. These aspects-Farmer Participation and the Village
Extension Worker, Technical Recommendations and Research-Extension Linkage, Training,
Management and System Maintenance, and Monitoring and Evaluation-provide
a
good
format for discussion of strengths and weaknesses of the method.
For
the reader coming new
to the subject, the introductory chapter could have spelt out the salient characteristics
of
T
and
V
more concisely.
The dominant messages of the text are the need for flexibility in the design, operation and
development of extension systems, and for much more evaluation of on-going programmes.
These are important because there has been increasing criticism on
T
and
V
in the literature:
(a)
It is
too
rigid in structuring and execution.
(b) Farmers’ initial enthusiam is often lost through lack
of
sufficient appropriate advice
to
convey.
(c) The method is excessively top-down in ignoring and failing to diffuse farmers’ own
innovations, and failing to pass on to technical researchers the current conditions and
requirements
of
farmers.
(d) Reliance on ‘contact’ farmers to pass on extension messages implies (wrongly) that the
contact farmers are themselves good communicators and that farmers in their
neighbourhood are sufficiently uniform in scale and resource access for messages
to
be
of
universal significanre.
(e) Scarce government funds might be usefully spent on investments other than extension.
It is a significant virtue of this book that, from time
to
time throughout, and particularly in
the concluding chapter, these criticisms are either directly
or
indirectly addressed.
D.
S. THORNTON
Department
of
Agricultural Economics
&
Management
University
of
Reading
GOVERNMENT
&
THE GOVERNED: BBC REITH LECTURES 1983
Sir
Douglas
Wass
Routledge
&
Kegan Paul, 1984,
120
pp.
Sir Douglas Wass delivered this prestigious series
of
lectures shortly after retiring from his
position as Permanent Secretary of the Treasury and Joint Head of the British Civil Service.
Coming from such a background, he does not give much away. For example, he ‘can recall
several important policy changes which governments have made as the result of a deliberate
reassessment’. But he does not tell
us
what they were, nor give even one example. However,
the worldly-wise reader will not expect any such revelations. What he can fairly ask for is a
concise and intelligent discussion
of
a range
of
problems
of
central importance in public
administration. And this is exactly what he gets. The issues raised include, for example,
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