First, clearly, developmentalists must find out more about the people they have designated to be key figures in the development situation. By their nature, actual social relations are not as static as ideal statements of cultural norms make them out to be, nor can they be extrapolated from these statements in any simple way. By its very nature, power is labile, ductile, fluid, and runs through the interstices of formal structures. It varies according to the material and human resources that are available at any one time, for a project to succeed. These resources may change very quickly over a relatively short period if a key figure decides to migrate, falls ill, or decides to concentrate on another activity. And the obligations of the trainee to his dependents should also be taken into account.

How might that be done? One idea is to build a database on all fisheries trainees. This approach may seem inimical to Western liberal ideas. Its intention, however, is far from sinister, and involves no more than the systematic recording, for the purpose of rapid review, of what is generally known about the household circumstances of the man who has applied for assistance. In this way, the fisheries officer can quickly get some idea of the numbers of able-bodied and skilled people who are in the household or work group, and are able to help with the project, and the number of dependents such as school children and aged parents, who cannot.

In 1987–90, Tongan Fisheries made an effort along these lines to collect relevant information from every village family involved in the training scheme: whether parents were alive and dependent on the family, if children were still at school or capable of and interested in working on the fishing project, the family’s equity in house, land, or boats; its current expenditure and labour needs, whether it had other funds it could call upon, whether the wife worked, the other economic activities that the family members engaged in, how many days were spent on each type of occupation, and so on. It is possible to use the picture of the household which was built up in this way to judge whether a proposal for future assistance put forward is feasible in the light of the total family situation, and not judge it solely on the abilities of the one who has been singled out for training.

The aim is to reach mutual agreement with the applicant on what he needs to achieve his goals, which might be different from what he originally asked for. In this context, it must be remembered that the better-educated people from the village have usually left to enter government or private sector employment. The village sector is left with the least educated, who are then expected to carry out development projects, which are perhaps only effective in about 60 per cent of cases, or 60 per cent effective in any one case, because of the limitations imposed by education and experience, and by the family and community commitments and dynamics already discussed. In any event, someone other than the applicant for a bank loan or training with some insider knowledge should assess the situation. Ideally, of course, there would be an experienced anthropologist available to answer every question!

Aid donors, however, usually hold discussions only with their in-country representatives or with local bureaucrats. The assumption appears to be that any local person will know all that is required by virtue of his/her membership in the society at large, but this is far from the case. Bureaucrats from families who have worked for two or three generations in the nation’s capital may claim origin and allegiance with far-away villages of which they have very little up-to-date knowledge because they rarely, if ever, visit them. Accordingly, they may give a very misleading picture of a local social situation or a sectoral activity within it. They may simply accept the aid donors’ assumptions that people who fish are undeveloped fishermen, or that growers will become commercial farmers if only they are helped in particular ways, or go along with the donors’ implementation schemes because that is the way the development projects are designed.

Instead, what is needed is a model of development that includes the realities of village life in which the development is intended to take place. When these realities are ignored at the planning stage, they are likely to emerge as problems in the fruition of projects. At this point, the development agents frequently blame extended family values as obstacles to development. This makes absolutely no sense to the people concerned because it is these sets of values that give their life meaning and upon which they depend in practical terms to survive as people and as families. After all, it is usually only for the sake of their families that they undertake progressive ‘development’ projects at all. If the traditional values, embodied in village and family relationships are left out of the development project calculations, modern development ceases to have a great deal of personal relevance to the subjects of development.

It is time for both developmentalists and the people they intend to help to leave aside the empty rhetoric of development and to ‘get real’. Many people at the local level do not necessarily have the same development goals as their national leaders or the aid donors the leaders work with, but their aims are rarely sought or formally acknowledged, much less valued and respected. When both sides of the development equation are made clear, distorted no longer through official oversight or an over-eagerness to acquire particular forms of development aid, then both the developers and the people in whose interests the development is presumably being made will benefit. Substantial progress of a kind satisfactory to both is then more likely to take place. At present, the development process tends to involve a set of formal moves between aid donors, local bureaucrats, and local-level recipients and agents of change, in the course of which neither the appropriate personnel nor relevant grass-roots information is sought. This process of enquiry is time-consuming, not deemed necessary, and may even prove detrimental to the project design. As one Pacific island planner remarked, ‘Yes, it’s true: when we do a village project successfully, we tend to congratulate ourselves on having got the economics right; when we fail, we blame the culture and custom. We just put our failure right back on the poor people themselves!’