Thoughts from “The Critical Villager”

While you are all trapped in my head, you may notice I am very influenced by what I am reading. Many wonderful things happen at an EWB retreat, and one of those fringe benefits was cutting my hands on a copy of the Critical Villager: Beyond community participation, by Eric Dudley [a book which is intermittently in print purely because Parker Mitchell, co-CEO of EWB, orders so many copies]. So here are some quotes and thoughts from reading it…


[This is not Engineers Without Borders or even just my project… this is thoughts on development in general for the development minded person]

“It is common to find middle-class urban aid workers, children of the mobile society, lecturing to close-knit communities of villagers about the need to work together.”

It is pretty ironic how “community participation” is a recent buzz word in development. I guess all aid was conducted in a way that people saw no value in the indigenous institutions and knowledge, after all… if they knew what was good for them they wouldn’t be poor right? Wrong! There is a pretty well universal quality about people: we act in our best interest. If you put yourself in Dorothy’s shoes [does Dorothy have shoes?...], you’ll see that whatever new product or knowledge you are trying to convince her of is just one of the options she has available to her. She doesn’t fall back on traditional practices because she is stupid, but because she knows the extent they work and even if that extent is small, its safer than something new which could not work at all [and development has a history of that]. After all, Dorothy is not risking a life of luxury for a bit more luxury, she is just plain gambling life… and that is not something you take lightly.

This next one is actually a quote of Robert Chambers from within the Critical Villager:

“ “However much the rhetoric changes to ‘participation’, ‘participatory research’, ‘community involvement’ and the like, at the end of the day there is still an outsider seeking to change things. […] – who the outsider is may change but the relation is the same. A stronger person wants to change things for a person who is weaker. From this paternal trap there is no escape.” ”

This unfortunate reality really sucks. Development tries to be as grass roots as possible, but to pretend we are doing anything but trying to impose change is naïve. We have to come to grips with the fact that there is no escape from this paternal trap. We have to come to peace with it. Is it really so bad to be that outside trying to enforce change. Well enforce is too strong of a word, we are trying to coerce. We don’t want to think of it that way, but we are trying to create change.

At one point Dudley refers to what I have been calling the development sector as the “compassion industry”, which I find hugely interesting. It’s a fairly apt title. I was astonished to come here and so how enormous the compassion industry is. In many developing countries everyone wants to get a job with an NGO because those are the best paying jobs. Development started as a small, pure concept… lets help people who are in need. I find I readily available parallel with another industry: music. Same thing, a simple pure concept: lets make music. And now you have this mega industry that some would argue no longer has any soul and perhaps go so far as to say it eat souls. But we are talking about development.

“The successful field worker who is capable of stimulating and supporting well-rounded, community-based, integrated rural development has to be a kind of renaissance generalist. Over-stretched and under-resourced, the field worker must juggle the issues and strike pragmatic compromises between policies which tend to come to the field in the form of contradictory messages. Policy may decrease that community participation, self-determination, and village-level democracy are essential while at the same time holding that ecological considerations and the use of indigenous technologies are paramount. Policy may demand the emancipation of women while insisting on respect for traditional cultural mores and institutions. The field worker… is left to the task of resolving the unresolvable while keeping his or her employers happy.”.

How true that is. The field workers are the unsung heroes of the entire compassion industry. I want to expand on this… but I struggle to do so. He said it all right there. The requirements they shoulder contradict each other, they don’t have the resources they need to things properly, they may have to compromised their techniques to fit the donors requirements, etc. etc. As a development challenge, maybe you guys could offer suggestions on how things could be changed at the upper levels so that the field worker doesn’t have such an impossible job.

“In theoretical discussion, people will readily agree that failures are an important part of the learning process.”

“Meaningful evaluation and institutional learning are obstructed by a conspiracy of success. Success is rewarded while failure, however potentially informative, is not.”

“The knowledge of the nature of failures, the very information which could allow intervention policy to be improved, is lost.”

Here again is a huge disparity between the is said and what takes place. What makes development hard? IMPLEMENTATION. All the theory is great. That’s what makes the field workers job so impossible. Again… anyone want to suggest some solutions?

Dudley pairs a lot of development theory down to two core concepts:

1) The goal of aid is change.
2) Change is going on all the time!

What does that mean? Well…

“Technical aid interventions are more likely to be successful if they share characteristics with the indigenous processes of technology change.”

The book is basically all about technical aid as opposed to material aid. Dudley discusses why material aid is so unsatisfactory, but I won’t bother explaining that because most of you [those involved with EWB anyway] will already think that and I would just be preaching to the choir. But how much do you know about how a rural Zambian adopts something new [whether it be a new crop or a new tool or a new technique of farming]? How incredible a difference it would make if were offering [possible] improvements in a way that was the same as how Dorothy looks for [possible] improvements.

Anyway those are just some thoughts from the introduction. As the book tickle’s my brain more I will keep you guys involved.

In a more light-hearted development challenge: find a plastic tub 2.5 feet in diameter and 6 inches deep, fill it with water that is not necessarily cold but far from hot, and have yourself a bath… welcome to the satisfying shower many people in the world have! I’m serious: try it. If nothing else it will be good for some laughs and make you appreciate your hot shower a lot more.