Too often the person singled out for particular development attention, such as a training program or workshop, is assumed to be a social isolate. This is far from the case in the Pacific. Most people in Pacific island cultures, although strongly individualist, have not acceded to the notion of individualism, if what is meant is the Western idea of ‘bourgeois individualism’, interpreted as encouraging people to act solely in their own interests and for the promotion of their own prosperity.
Islanders see themselves as part of wider groups. Their identity derives from the sets of social relations that define them in terms of the family or wider sets of relations based on kinship and locality. These relations are the ones that they value and need. This critical difference between the assumptions made by both aid donors and local project directors and the lived-in realities of those they try to develop can be illustrated by the efforts in Tonga in the late 1980s to help village fishing activities.
Reflecting upon the problems encountered in the 1980s in the implementation of their fisheries schemes, a local fisheries expert concluded that the basic flaw lay in the initial project design that had failed to take into account the wider family situation of the men who were singled out for fisheries training and given bank loans to enable them to acquire fishing boats.
The assumption of a Western-style individualism was inherent, for example, in two major aspects of the schemes. First, the skills and training that were given to village men were those that were appropriate to people wishing to set up a small business, which the village men were not prepared to do. Second, the men were given training on the assumption that they were or would become solely commercial fishermen, which was also false. These unwarranted assumptions led in some cases to the failure of the men to repay the bank loan and the loss of the boat; or, in more extreme circumstances, to the breakdown of the men’s extended family life, and damage to other relationships in the village. The expert told me
Our mistake from the beginning was to overlook the family situation. The families that these trainees came from were really very well-balanced in the way that they get food to survive as they do, though poor. The man will spend four days or so in his garden while the wife makes handicrafts. On Saturdays, he goes fishing and sells fish and uses the little cash he gets to offset the costs of bully beef for Sunday lunch, and so on.
Fisheries comes along with a training plan. The individual gets interested and after training he spends five days at sea. He does not grow and has to buy his food, if he can, from the market or his relatives. The pandanus leaves to assist the wife are missing. If he does well, he’s OK. It eventually balances out and the family gets on.
But most of them we destroyed, because the boat upset the balance. The family cannot manage the loan repayments and the boat is repossessed and he comes home again to nothing. In a few cases, not many, it has happened that the relatives may not recognise him [that is, want nothing more to do with him] after the things that have happened.
At first I could not believe the failure. We had bright guys come in to the training. We gave them a fishing lesson, explained the boat, the engine, how to manage money, and the training works well; they understand it all. Then, afterwards, they go back out to the villages with boats bought with a loan we structured from the Tonga Development Bank.
Before they joined the scheme, the men, usually in their 30s and 40s, are considered young in Tongan terms, no matter that they are married and have children of their own. They have hardly any status in the village. They just have a small fishing boat, or are hanging about and using other people’s equipment for the occasional fishing trip. The family income is about T$45 a week, which then suddenly rises to T$1,000 a week.
We give them all the training in how to catch fish and nor is there a shortage of fish. But after about 8 months, we hear from the Bank, ‘Oh, Sione, we have a problem with some of the fishermen: they are not repaying their loans, slowing right down.’ I replied, ‘What! These guys are loading tons and tons of fish!’ After about a year, I found the reasons.
(1) The status of these guys just shot right up in the community because of the income they earned. Some had even become town officers. Their wives too: some were leaders of church groups or women’s groups. Even their kids, during the Christmas holidays, would be made president of the basketball team. All the things like that. When you are the leader of something in a village, you are expected to do the most, give the most funds to support it, food, the basketball…
(2) So, they became the greatest member of their family. Even though young, they were looked up to by others. This too unravelled their effort and training, and helped to cream off their income.
(3) In some cases, the father was still alive and still making decisions for the family. Thus, in the village situation, someone else was taking over the decision-making for the venture, not the one who has been trained. This was fatal for the program and also led sadly to bad relations with the father who is the senior. One village man told me, ‘My interest in fishing was started by my father. I got into it because he is a master fisherman. But when I got started with Fisheries, that is the last time he ever discussed fishing matters with me. Up to now, he still won’t talk to me about it. I, being younger and his son, just took it for granted that I could go ahead [with my new ideas] without him and that is probably the biggest mistake as far as the family is concerned. If it had been my uncle, I don’t think there would have been any problem, but my father is a much harder worker and a harder man. He doesn’t like anyone discussing his fishing grounds. When the subject comes up, that is the end of the story between us. We can discuss anything but not this. In Tonga, as you know, the father-son relationship is a very sensitive relationship, in any case, and this blew it. So, it is sad, but there it is.’
(4) The fishing men gave more to the church as a result of all the above changes of village status.
(5) The man still went to sea but, because so many people were asking him to lend them their kids’ school fees and so on, he was defaulting on the loan repayments. In addition, other people were going out, the father, another son, a neighbour’s boy, as crew or helpers or to earn money for themselves. So, he might go away for one week. But the family had already agreed to certain obligations to the community and church. His wife would say, ‘While you were away, the Town Officer was asking for you because you had agreed to do something but you were not here. I think you should apologise.’ So, the man would send the Town Officer a few fish to keep him happy or to help in the village meeting or whatever, which all added up. In some cases, we have ended up destroying whole families that we started out to help because the fisheries boat ended up destroying the family’s balancing act. In short, we had the training program but what we should have done is to look at who the trainee is within the family and who has the big influence over this person.
We should include the wife and the church minister (faifekau) in the training, and tell the minister that after his loan repayment, the man has this amount of income left. He has a child still in secondary school, fees, food, clothes, and that we think this is the amount he can afford to give to the church. Can we ask you [the church minister] for your help? If he gives more than this amount [that he can afford], will you tell him in church that he is doing the wrong thing?
At this point the expert laughed heartily to himself at the thought that the faifekau would ever endanger church revenue by doing this, because, increasingly, his standing and prestige in the church depends on the amount of money that he can pull in. The fisheries officer, however, repeated, ‘We should ask the faifekau and employ the whole family approach because Tongan villagers are not primarily commercial fishermen.’
The lesson to be drawn from this exercise is inescapable—the customary hierarchy of local authority should be acknowledged from the outset as part of the development situation. It can then consciously be built into the project frame as part of the social context in which development is to take place and the forces can ideally be harnessed in support of the developmental effort, rather than work against it.
As it is, local mores and patterns of authority tend to be overlooked until they emerge as major stumbling blocks to the success of the project. To say that a people’s culture blocks their development makes a nonsense of both terms: culture and development. It suggests that people who progress do so without or in spite of their culture, and that the people embedded in culture get left behind. Culture and tradition may suddenly intrude in ways that materially affect outcomes when not incorporated in the development scheme, but this is due to the initial conceptualisation of the development schemes rather than immutable flaws inherent in the nature of culture, tradition, and development.