Professional developments
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.4230070307 |
| Date | 01 July 1987 |
| Published date | 01 July 1987 |
PUBLIC
ADMINISTRATION AND DEVELOPMENT,
Vol.
7,
325-330
(1987)
Professional Developments
This new section of the journal
will
carry summaries
of
recent
research findings and innovations
in
training and manage-
ment. The intention is to put readers
in
touch with new
developments which they can follow up by referring
to
a
contact person, and to fuller accounts published elsewhere.
The hope is that this will become a self-sustaining market-
place
of
new ideas in the general field
of
development admin-
istration. Please send your news to the Assistant Editor
(Professional Developments).
In this issue we carry reports on training approaches from
the Universities of Sussex, Manchester and Adelaide,
on
information management from CEPAM
in
SBo
Paulo,
on
findings from research on rural water supplies by the Univer-
sity of Birmingham and
on
a seminar on development plan-
ning and management run by UNITAR.
AUTO-TRAINING FOR SENIOR ADMINISTRATORS; EXPERIENCE WITH THE
INDIAN ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICE
The task was to design a 3-month study of ‘International approaches to rural development
and poverty alleviation’ for Indian Administrative Service Officers with at least
10
years
of field experience. Previous encounters that these highly educated, stringently selected
personnel suggested that they would take best advantage of their opportunity
if
they could
hold the initiative
in
shaping their own learning. On the other hand, given
only
3 months,
to have expected them to design a course
of
their own and to sift through and assemble
their own material would have been wasteful. A programme, fully drawn but
in
the main
subject to mod$cation by them,
seemed an acceptable compromise.
To enable them to steer their own learning, the format of a
structured interview
was
adopted. First, a researcher in rural development was identified as a resource person and
asked to specify up to
100
pages
of
her or his
own recent publications
for the officers to
study. Second, after their study, the officers compiled a set
of
questions and comments
on
the
100
pages and ordered these into a logical progression. Finally, the resource person
met the group and responded to their observations. In these responses he or she was free
to raise points which the interview may have omitted. Preparing the interview normally
required about
1
hour,
while
the interchange itself consumed about
24
hours. The two
groups who have used this approach seemed happy with it, despite complaints about the
heavy load
of
study-half of every day was allocated to getting the
100
pages read.
To help them focus their studies, the members undertook to produce either a
joint
book
or
a set
of
papers on various aspects of rural development and poverty alleviation from
the general administrator’s point of view.
To
aid them with organizing their reflections and
further investigations, the members were each allocated a correspondent familiar with their
fields
of
interest. Three weeks
of
part-time guided reading and planning were followed by
2
weeks
of
full-time writing.
These main approaches were supplemented by field studies of rural work
in
Kenya,
Sussex and Wales. To the extent possible, agencies and projects were visited only by two
participants. The aims were to permit a concentrated and thorough pursuit of information
and issues and to increase the number of projects which could be studied.
A
bye-benefit
was that the members were able to practise both reporting back to their colleagues and
0
1987
by John Wiley
&
Sons, Ltd.
0271-2075/87/030325$05.00
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