Ideas for Development

Robert Chambers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781844070886
• eBook ISBN: 9781136563430
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Our world seems entangled in systems increasingly dominated by power, greed, ignorance, self-deception and denial, with spiralling inequity and injustice. Against a backdrop of climate change, failing ecosystems, poverty, crushing debt and corporate exploitation, the future of our world looks dire and the solutions almost too monumental to consider.

Yet all is not lost. Robert Chambers, one of the ?glass is half full? optimists of international development, suggests that the problems can be solved and everyone has the power at a personal level to take action, develop solutions and remake our world as it can and should be. Chambers peels apart and analyses aspects of development that have been neglected or misunderstood. In each chapter, he presents an earlier writing which he then reviews and reflects upon in a contemporary light before harvesting a wealth of powerful conclusions and practical implications for the future. The book draws on experiences from Africa, Asia and elsewhere, covering topics and concepts as wide and varied as irreversibility, continuity and commitment; administrative capacity as a scarce resource; procedures and principles; participation in the past, present and future; scaling up; behaviour and attitudes; responsible wellbeing; and concepts for development in the 21st century.

1

Words and Ideas: Commitment,
Continuity and Irreversibility

All words are pegs to hang ideas on (HenryWard Beecher, 1887).

Part 1 presents writing on settlement schemes in tropical Africa from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Part 2 reviews subsequent developments with settlement schemes, and then explores and develops wider contemporary meanings, relevance and applications for three words and ideas from the earlier experience: commitment, continuity and irreversibility.

Part 1: Learning from Experience

In the 1950s and 1960s, settlement schemes were conspicuous in tropical Africa. Many of them were politically committing and effectively irreversible. Once settlers had been introduced they were difficult to abandon. Schemes considered failures became robust dependent survivors. Many arguments could be mustered to justify continuing support, although this was often at high financial cost to governments. The Perkerra Irrigation Scheme in Kenya was one such project which by almost any criteria should never have been started, and once started, not continued. It performed disastrously but became increasingly difficult to abandon. In project appraisal, the political irreversibility of commitment is a neglected aspect of risk, and varies by type of project.

Introduction: Settlement schemes in tropical Africa (2004)

In the Sub-Saharan Africa of decolonization and early national independence, much prominence was given to agricultural settlement schemes. They seemed to promise win-win solutions to political demands, perceived pressures of population, and the need to produce more from the land. With many origins, taking many forms, having high political priority, and being bounded and visible, they were attractive to researchers. I was one of those who succumbed to the temptations they presented. I started my research on the fragile and vulnerable Perkerra Irrigation Settlement in Kenya, and then concentrated on its stronger sibling, Mwea. The Mwea Irrigation Settlement had several advantages. It was by most criteria more successful; it had a stable water supply and in irrigated rice a reliable crop and a protected market; it was better organized; it had a high profile and was frequently visited, being a convenient distance from Nairobi for VIPs;¹ and, for the indolent PhD student it had the advantage of being well documented, with time series tables which could (I hasten to add, with due acknowledgement) be transposed easily to make a thesis look good, at least to any examiner too pressed for time to look deeply. Many researchers were attracted to Mwea, and the managers were so interested and articulate that we were able to combine to produce a book with 13 chapters and 529 pages (Chambers and Moris, 1973).²

In parallel, numerous studies of settlement schemes were undertaken in other countries, especially Sudan, Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia as it was), Zambia (Northern Rhodesia as it was), Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana. These provided a wonderful collection for comparisons. Much of what was learnt is now of mainly historical interest. However, analysis at the time pointed to three neglected angles or themes which were important then and remain important and still relatively neglected: commitment, continuity and irreversibility. The two extracts of studies from this period, which follow, raise practical questions not only about projects, but also about policies and programmes promoted and pursued by lenders, donors and Governments in the 2000s.

Conclusions from Settlement Schemes in Tropical Africa (1969)

Risks and irreversibility of commitment³

A neglected aspect of evaluation, which has far wider application than merely to settlement schemes, concerns the relationship between risks and irreversibility of commitment.

Settlement schemes, especially those that are more complex in system and costly in capital, are high-risk undertakings. They share with non-settlement approaches to agricultural development the uncertainties of innovations, weather, pests and markets, and the disruptions of rapid turnovers in senior staff. In addition, however, they have to face other serious risks and difficulties which do not have to be borne in non-settlement situations. The land on which settlement takes place may be available for settlement for the simple reason that it is marginal or unsuitable for cultivation. The locations of many settlement schemes, often with poor communications and far from the services of urban centres, raise costs and the difficulties of management. There is a danger that both organizational and productive effectiveness will be restrained by the inbuilt incompatibilities of complex schemes, by the cancelling out of managerial and settler efforts, in the games of enforcing and beating the system. Moreover, adaptations of schemes to ensure the continued presence and participation of settlers may have to be made through increased payouts or through services which at best, reduce revenue to government and, at worst, add to a loss. In addition, where government withdrawal is intended, there is a high risk that it will take longer than expected. At the point at which implementation of a settlement scheme or programme is considered, all these factors, all of them implying economic risks, should be weighed.

But these risks do not present the complete picture. Wherever a government starts a programme or project the actual risks are compounded by the extent to which the commitment to maintain the programme or project is irreversible. The process of commitment can be lengthy, subtle and insidious. It begins with an opportunity and a vision. These may arise from a disturbance in the relationships of men⁴ and land, or the perception of unoccupied land: the Mwea [in Kenya], inviting development after the Kenya Land Commission's recommendations; the bush of South Busoga [in Uganda] after its evacuation in the first decade of this century; the narrow strip of uncultivated land on the edge of the Rift Valley at Upper Kitete [inTanzania]; the cleared bush of Kongwa, Urambo and Nachingwea after the Groundnut Scheme fiasco [in Tanzania]. Or the opportunity may be provided by a resettlement operation which presents a captive population which can be directed into a new agricultural system: the displacement of Halfawis by the Aswan Dam, [in Sudan] was exploited through resettlement on the controlled irrigation scheme at Khasm-el-Girba; and the evacuees from the Volta Lake were thought to provide ‘a unique opportunity to wean an appreciable proportion of Ghana's farmers from the wasteful, fragmented, and shifting system of agriculture to a settled and improved pattern of farming’.⁵

The opportunity attracts and nourishes the idea of a scheme. In such conditions a personal commitment can develop in a man of vision like Simon Alvord in Rhodesia or Chief Akin Deko in Nigeria. Funds are obtained for surveys: the surveys that are carried out are themselves committing. Where their findings are marginal, as was the United Nations Special Fund survey of the proposed Tana Irrigation Project in Kenya,⁶ further investigations are called for. It becomes increasingly difficult to turn back. Once funds have been made available for a substantive scheme, the successive activities of planning, construction, settlement and production draw after them deeper and deeper personal, departmental and political commitments. The establishment of settlers sets a seal on commitment at a higher level, making abandonment extremely difficult and the use of protective political arguments extremely easy. The full repertoire of defences to ensure scheme or programme survival can now be brought into play. Moreover, officials and politicians in circumstances such as these may regard government funds as fair game, as an ecological feature to be exploited much as a river might be tapped for irrigation water. The risks involved in the original initiation of a project are now more obvious: risks not merely that it would fail, but that having failed it would survive as a parasite that could not be shaken off or killed.

The issues involved in a decision to terminate a scheme are, of course, not simple. Those responsible for the decisions may not even agree about whether the amount of money already sunk in a project is a relevant consideration. Attitudes and ideas are sufficiently confused and contradictory for irrational elements to have free play. It is extremely difficult, for example, to see the large quantities of fine onions grown on the Perkerra Scheme in Kenya, and to compare the green irrigated fields with the surrounding desert, and at the same time to sustain a conviction that the Scheme should be abandoned. Running water through channels and onto dry land, growing abundant crops where there was only bare soil and barren bush before, and enabling people to enjoy a level of prosperity they have never previously known, appear inherently and incontrovertibly good. It is Isaiah's vision:

The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose (The Bible).

To suggest closure seems ignoble and destructive, an affront to the aspirations and achievements of the human spirit. If a neutral visitor can have this feeling, it may be expected all the more in those whose lives and work are bound up in a scheme. Yet the power of this emotion multiplies the risks of starting projects of this sort through making it exceptionally difficult to close them down however uneconomic they may prove.

There is, indeed, a strain of Utopianism in most complex settlement schemes. Often there is an idealized view of the human situation that settlement will create. In colonial times this was often the stabilized African, fixed and controlled on a piece of land. Since independence, it has varied: in West Africa it has been an urban farmer; in Kenya, a sturdy yeoman; in Tanzania, a co-operative worker. Another Utopian aspect is the frequency with which stresses and breakdowns are not anticipated: as Apthorpe (1966, p23) has pointed out, provision is often lacking either for failure of the social system or for mechanical repairs. Again, it is very common for the targets for land preparation, settlement, production and withdrawal to be wildly optimistic and for achievements to fall far short of them. These features are partly explicable in terms of the self-delusion of men who are transported by a vision. When an ideal is pursued by a whole community, as in some communal economy schemes, it may make a scheme feasible through the sacrifices the participants are prepared to accept; but when the vision is only in the mind of the initiator, as it has been with most complex settlement schemes, the effects are often a sequence of unrealistic estimates, uneconomic measures and personal commitments which comprise part of the risks of the project.

Resisting temptation⁷

Since all these disadvantages have applied in the past they can be expected to continue to apply in the future, and should be taken into account in assessing proposals for settlement schemes and similar agricultural projects. It is not enough to carry out evaluations⁸ which consider only those economic factors which can be quantified; it is necessary also to include administrative factors and the probable motivations and behaviour of the actors involved. Allowance has to be made, for example, for the expected patterns of settler and managerial behaviour, for departmentalism, for staff discontinuities and for the inbuilt incompatibilities of scheme systems. Moreover, comparisons with alternative approaches to agricultural development should take into account the high opportunity costs of trained staff and the expected ease or difficulty of abandoning a project or programme if it proves uneconomic. When all this is done the case against high capital and complex settlement schemes becomes stronger than when only conventional cost-benefit criteria are used. While this does not mean that such schemes should be ruled out altogether, it does mean that they should be approached with greater care and understanding.

Where a settlement scheme is unavoidable, and where there is a choice of type to be adopted, there is much to be said on organizational grounds for the simplest type of scheme that is compatible with the circumstances of settlement. The simpler approaches are relatively undemanding of scarce administrative and technical capacity, and engage it for shorter periods. They involve relatively low risk and low commitment. Moreover, schemes with individual holdings exploit the drives of property ownership and individual incentive which can make productive the labour which is the most abundant unused resource in much of the third world. The simpler schemes also require intermediate levels of organization corresponding with the intermediate technology which may also be appropriate. If the beginning is ambitious, a complex organization may collapse and find equilibrium at a lower level; but if the beginning is modest, a more complex technology and organization can grow up organically and gradually. For example, the tractors appearing on Chesa in Rhodesia and on the Kenya Million-Acre Schemes as a result of settler initiative represent a self-sustaining upward movement in which productivity may increase without heavy government investment or commitment. If such developments are to be possible, it is important that advisory and technical services be available when needed, and even more important that the system of land tenure adopted should allow for future flexibility in farm size. Given such flexibility, it is usually safer and sounder to develop piecemeal from an existing base, whether this is farmers already on their land or settlers, already on a scheme, than to attempt radical transformation in one long step.

Settlement schemes, particularly those which are complex in system, will remain temptations. Because of their creative possibilities, they will continue to find energetic and enthusiastic sponsors. Because of their visibility, clear boundaries, organizational coherence, and Utopian overtones, they will no doubt continue to attract successive colonization – by administrators who negotiate their emergence, constructors who build them, agriculturalists who manage them, settlers who populate them, and in their wake foreign aid personnel and research students⁹ in various capacities – all of whom will find satisfaction in occupying a bounded and identifiable territory. What is vital is not that such schemes should be avoided on principle, but that those who act in these situations should appreciate what is happening. It is especially important that those who make development decisions should understand themselves well enough to be able to compensate in their acts of judgment for the strong pull of the psychological attractions of such schemes, and should be able to see clearly the risks they entail and the benefits that might accrue from alternative uses of the resources involved. Exceptional restraint and imagination are needed among politicians and civil servants if the lure of the big scheme is to be neutralized so that a balanced and realistic assessment can be made. Perhaps it is fortunate that so many African politicians and civil servants possess and farm their own land. While this may be distraction it may also satisfy desires for property and territory, so that they are less prone than their expatriate predecessors to seek such satisfaction through their work. It may in the long term enable them to take more balanced views of policy and to appreciate more fully the alternatives that exist. Certainly it is important to recognize that the choices are neither clearcut nor easy. It is not enough, as was done in Kenya before independence (Government of Kenya, 1962, p1), to quote Gulliver's report of the views of the King of Brobdignag:

And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together (Swift, 1726, Chapter 7).

For the issues are less simple: they include whether, with the same resources, many more ears of corn, or many more blades of grass, might not be grown in other ways or in other places; and whether those politicians and civil servants who make major policy decisions have the freedom, the insight and the courage to choose those other ways or places, however unspectacular they may be.

Learning from project pathology:The case of Perkerra¹⁰

Introduction (2004)

The Perkerra Irrigation Scheme in Kenya was launched precipitously in 1952 during the Mau Mau Emergency. It was known that there had been a proposal for irrigation on the Perkerra river, but the 1936 exploratory report could not be found. Detainees were placed in camps on the site and employed on road building and preparing works and fields for irrigation. From the start, capital and recurrent costs were high and revenue negligible. Tenants were settled but many left. Areas irrigated consistently fell far short of those targeted. Agricultural and marketing problems were intractable. In 1959 with just over 100 settler families, it was decided to close the scheme down. The decision was then reversed and changed to running on a care and maintenance basis for three years. By 1962 closure...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms, Abbreviations and Organizations and Addresses
• Glossary
• 1 Words and Ideas: Commitment, Continuity and Irreversibility
• 2 Aid and Administrative Capacity
• 3 Procedures, Principles and Power
• 4 Participation: Review, Reflections and Future
• 5 PRA, Participation and Going to Scale
• 6 Behaviour, Attitudes and Beyond
• 7 For Our Future
• References
• Index