Challenging The Professions

This text questions the dominant approaches of professions, disciplines and bureaucracies concerned with rural development. The theme is that we - the professionals - are much of the problem. New frontiers can be opened up by breaking out of, and reversing, many of the ideas, values, methods and behaviour normally dominant in disciplines and departments by offsetting biases, decentralizing, encouraging diversity, and putting people before things, and poor people first of all. These themes are explored and illuminated through analysis of different topics and contexts: normal professionalism and new paradigms; modes of thought and procedures; poverty-focused projects and the project process; tropical seasonality; agricultural research and extension; NGOs' comparative competence with new participatory approaches and methods; and an ideology of reversals with practical pluralism, to dismantle the disabling state and empower the poor. Throughout, and drawing on 30 years' experience, the author analyzes past errors and achievements, in order to identify practical action for the future. This text has been written and compiled for all those who are professionally concerned with rural poverty and development, whether in government service, NGOs, universities, training and research institutes, or aid agencies in the South and the North, in the peripheries and the cores. In addressing the themes, the eight chapters are self-contained and convenient for reading and teaching. The book should have practical implications for practitioners, academics, policy-makers and researchers of all departments and disciplines.