Rural Development and Rural Change

Abstract

A whole chapter of rural planning failures in Africa and the faltering progress of the Green Revolution in South-east Asia draw attention to the fact that in general the treatment of rural development problems in less-developed countries has been at best heavy handed and at worst grossly inept. While there are many contributory factors which are responsible for the failure of any single project there are three fundamental, interrelated sets of errors of approach which bedevil most attempts to create the appropriate circumstances for rural development. These are the errors associated with the demands made by governments for short-term political solutions to intrinsically long-term problems; the errors deriving from an overwhelmingly self-confident belief in the virtues of the Euro-American approach to development in which progress is equated with urbanisation and industrial growth; and the mistakes associated with a lack of knowledge concerning the patterns of life in rural areas.