Development agencies and researchers are preoccupied with policy; with exerting influence over policy, linking research to policy and with implementing policy around the world.
But what if development practice is not driven by policy? Suppose that the things that make for 'good policy' - policy that legitimises and mobilises political support - in reality make it impossible to implement?
By focusing in detail on the unfolding activities of a development project in western India over more than ten years, as it falls under different policy regimes, this book takes a close look at the relationship between policy and practice in development.
David Mosse shows how the actions of development workers are shaped by the exigencies of organisations and the need to maintain relationships rather than by policy; but also that development actors work hardest of all to maintain coherent representations of their actions as instances of authorised policy. Raising unfamiliar questions, Mosse provides a rare self-critical reflection on practice, while refusing to endorse current post-modern dismissal of development.
Rural Environmental Planning for Sustainable Communities offers an explanation of the concept of Rural Environmental Planning (REP) along with case studies that show how to apply REP to specific issues such as preserving agricultural lands, planning river and lake basins, and preserving historical sites.
Winner of the Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History, Organization of American Historians
Co-Winner of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History Book Award
Thinking Small tells the story of how the United States sought to rescue the world from poverty through small-scale, community-based approaches. And it also sounds a warning: such strategies, now again in vogue, have been tried before, with often disastrous consequences.
“Unfortunately, far from eliminating deprivation and attacking the social status quo, bottom-up community development projects often reinforced them…This is a history with real stakes. If that prior campaign’s record is as checkered as Thinking Small argues, then its intellectual descendants must do some serious rethinking… How might those in twenty-first-century development and anti-poverty work forge a better path? They can start by reading Thinking Small.”
—Merlin Chowkwanyun, Boston Review
“As the historian Daniel Immerwahr demonstrates brilliantly in Thinking Small, the history of development has seen constant experimentation with community-based and participatory approaches to economic and social improvement…Immerwahr’s account of these failures should give pause to those who insist that going small is always better than going big.”
—Jamie Martin, The Nation
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