Message-ID: <961231064438_1043022879@emout12.mail.aol.com> Date: Tue, 31 Dec 1996 06:44:39 -0500 From: mailto:EUNSteve@AOL.COM> Subject: Re: Escalating philosophising To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
In a message dated 96-12-30 18:14:42 EST, mailto:juwandem@NMSU.Edu (J.C. WANDEMBERG) writes:<< My research (covering close to two thousand development projects throughout the world) points to project designs (associated with bureaucratic approaches, that is top-down) as the main reason for failure and participative democratic approaches (where at least functional participation --as defined by Pretty-- has been achieved) as the main reason for project success (i.e. achieving and maintaining objectives). >>
You're much better equipped than I am, Dr. Wandemberg, to deal with two widely held and related "taken for granteds" by that wing of the development community that sees the history of North-South relations as the long story of domination and oppression of the North by the South.The first narrative is the story of the destruction of authentic indigenous cultures by rapacious Western capitalist cultures--principally the US--in search of raw materials and/or markets, plundering the South and leaving cultural debris in its wake.
(Freire's "pedagogy of the oppressed" would be the educational version of this story.)
The second is the story your research documents: USAID and similar unilateral and multilateral external agencies ignorant of the need for development to grow out a participatory ethos who bring in their notions of what the poor nation needs without genuine awareness of what the nation needs and without grass roots participation, and foist schools and roads and dams and tractors on a country that doesn't need them and can't handle them, so that the money brings cultural destruction and little durable gain.
("Liberation" theology is the religious version of this narrative, and such agencies as The World Council of Churches have told this story many times.)
Are these stories really true? Has , for example, USAID or CIDA or World Bank really been doing things this way in, say, the last 25 years?
And is there real evidence that grass roots development by indigenous, as, say, in Tanzania, really brings genuine development?
Isn't there some evidence that the "liberatory" and indigenous development movements have brought hardship and death as often as development?
I have not done the research you have, and want very much to review the evidence. The little searching that I've done does not reveal a picture in black and white, with indigenous development a story of virtue and success, and external aid a story of exploitation and failure.
I am eager to learn.
Steve Eskow
Dr. Steve Eskow, President The Electronic University Network 288 Stone Island Road Enterprise, FL 32725 407.321.8770;Fax:407.321.4861 December 30, 1996