Rural Development: Putting the Last First

Author Robert Chambers writes about two opposing approaches to rural development: either academic - taking a critical, pessimistic view, or practitioner - actively engaged and optimistic. To replace and improve these views which he considers 'top-down’ outsider views, Chambers argues for learning the values of the economically poor, rural people and proposes a range of actions, approaches, and methods for 'outsiders' to change the ways they learn about rural people and their conditions - methods such as Rapid Rural Appraisal, which are participatory and cost-effective ways of learning about what is valuable to the economically poor.

He proposes a new approach to development as a profession, which starts from the realities, knowledge, resources, technologies and places of economically poor, rural people and works with rural knowledge, farming practices, abilities and experiments. It recognises deprivation as a trap with five linked clusters of disadvantage: not only poverty, but also physical weakness, isolation, vulnerability, and powerlessness.

Chambers suggests a focus on sitting with and asking questions of local people as a basis for learning indigenous knowledge and local ways of communicating. Further, he suggests carrying out joint research and development with local people; learning by working with economically poor people in their daily routines, especially in agriculture; empowering people to make decisions about control of their resources; and changing development project management and communication practices and reducing the turnover of staff.

Chambers concludes that ‘[b]y changing what they do, people move societies in new directions and they themselves change. Big simple solutions are tempting but full of risks. For most outsiders, the soundest and best way forward is through innumerable small steps and tiny pushes, putting the last first not once but again and again and again. Many small reversals then support each other and together build up towards a greater movement.’

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