An International Perspective on Rural Development
One of the most important progressions in rural development thinking, whether at FAO, SCARM or Rapid Rural Appraisal5 meetings sponsored by the Wellington branch of the Association for Social Assessment, is the recognition that rural development does not work if managed from the top down.
Policy makers who fail to allow communities to shape their own future all too frequently have a set of ideas or an agenda of their own. The situation is aptly described by Manuka Henare:
Development can mean quite different things to different people. if you belong to the dominant group, you will see development in a certain light. If you belong to the so-catted receiving group you will have a quite different view of development. . ..Bitter experience has taught them [the receiving group] that development means the dominant group has some idea of what they want you to do. The process of transferring funds, resources, or whatever, is to get you to do what it is that they believe is good for you.. development on someone else's terms.. is in fact an extremely sophisticated way of continuing dependency.
(Henare, 1990)
In a paper presented to the 8th world congress of rural sociology Vance (1992) made similar comments about including local people in development projects. While wellbeing is an end goal of rural development, too often the people whose well-being is supposedly being improved are excluded from the equation. Thus, while the purpose of rural development might be to improve the health status of the community or alleviate poverty, often the development programme proposed does not help solve these problems. Too frequently the programme is planned from the top and does not address cultural and structural barriers to accessing resources, constraints of time and location, and so on.
In an analysis of USA aid projects to establish success factors, Vance found that if the local people were given technology, but not the control of it, there was no way that the development project would work. Similarly if the local people were not involved in deciding what technology they need, they would not receive the appropriate technology. Vance suggests that who controls the development and the research effort behind it, is crucial. Consideration should be given to the community, its organisations and its institutions, and the problem approached from many different perspectives, with different choices being identified.
5 FAO: Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations; SCARM: Standing Committee on Agriculture and Resource Management (Australian and New Zealand Ministers and Officials alignment meetings); Rapid Rural Appraisal: a consultative technique based on 'focus' group meetings (ie. brainstorming) developed in the third world to ensure people not usually consulted in development programmes have a say in the project.
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