Abstract
In this chapter James stresses the particularities of local social organisations and authority structures and the dangers inherent in assuming that those people particularly qualified in the development area have any greater understanding of the structure than the average foreign development project consultant.
The author focuses attention on an often-overlooked aspect of development plans: the customary patterns of authority that are upheld within families, households and communities. She looks at participatory development, ‘people in proximity’, opaque communities and oblique communications and the total social situation, with an example drawn from a Tongan village.
In closing, the author reflects that what is needed is a model of development that includes the realities of village life in which the development is intended to take place.
Table of Contents
This chapter focuses attention on an aspect of culture that is frequently overlooked in development plans. Among the most enduring of a people’s cultural traits are the customary patterns of authority that are upheld within families, households, and communities. The relations of authority in these basic social units are still adhered to by most village people and entail mutual responsibilities and obligations of respect, gifts and service.
The patterns of authority at the local level may be subtle and not easily discernible to an outsider. They may alter rapidly according to material circumstances and social contexts, but this does not mean that they cannot be understood. Given sufficient time, tact, and careful investigation, it is possible to identify the most influential and authoritative people in a community or in a particular situation.
Local knowledge is not immediately available to casual observers, however, and may entirely elude developmentalists and other outsiders who most need it but visit a country only briefly. Instead of eliciting local reactions to a proposed program, the overseas consultant or development expert is more likely to spend most of a limited official visit meeting top-level bureaucrats in the nation’s capital.
If local-level developmental goals are to be pursued successfully, it is essential to identify the people of influence and authority, who can get things done or stifle efforts in the particular locality singled out for attention. This is especially true of programs which require a strong element of participatory development. A popular trend in recent years, participatory development is sometimes referred to as ‘grass-roots’ development or, somewhat more inelegantly, as ‘bottom-up’ development.
Politically, ideologically, and practically, such programs seem a good idea because they focus on the development of human resources and small amounts of working and fixed capital such as planting materials or livestock, fish nurseries, storage depots, boats, engines, refrigerators, or whatever is needed for the particular ventures with ‘the poorest of the poor’. All too frequently, however, the loftiness of the original aim equals the depth of the subsequent disillusion when the schemes are found to have gone badly wrong: when they have failed to produce the desired results or, even worse, have produced pronounced negative social and economic effects that have left the poor people markedly less well-off than they were before.
At this point, recriminations are likely to occur and, in their disappointment, people look for likely causes to blame. In retrospect, everyone is wise. All too often, culture and tradition are the easiest and most convenient whipping boys that come to hand to explain a particular failure. At the very least, these concepts are so general and so abstract that no-one in charge need feel guilty of mismanagement. Most development literature, for example, alludes to the obligations of highly traditional people to others. These obligations are generally seen to be numerous, to compete for workers’ time and effort and, in the end, undermine the goals of modern development.
For all the seriousness of the charges, there is disappointingly little analysis and few case studies recording the effect of such obligations on development projects. The ‘family obligations’ of people living in highly traditional societies remains a diffuse and general notion, of little analytic value. As remarked above, however, the very general nature of ‘culture’ and the assumptions derived from it can conveniently explain the failure of development projects.
Clearly, a prerequisite of the successful implementation of ‘grass-roots’ programs is first to find out local reactions. Instead of speaking generally about ‘communities’, it is possible to be specific and to identify precisely which people in the local community have the authority or informal influence to materially affect the progress and outcome of the developmental project, but these courses are rarely attempted.