4. The Structural Context of Development Approaches

There is an almost inseparable link between the structural context and agenda for rural development and the paradigms, narratives and approaches within which these are examined. The evolution of development approaches has been an extremely dynamic process, subject to continuous debate and review. A recent examination of this process notes^[11] that “ideas that first appear in one decade often gain strength in the following decade, and only begin to affect rural development practice in a widespread way ten or fifteen years after they were first put forward”. The process is made-up of substantive theories as well as trivial and transient ones; of majority discourses and minor ones; of general development themes and of rallying calls such as ‘poverty alleviation’, which Ellis terms rural development ‘spin’ as they serve the function of mobilising the development lobby in rich countries. The table below is adapted from Ellis and Biggs^[12] and includes substantive theories, minority discourses and development approaches.

Table 1. Rural Development Ideas Timeline

Since the 1950s, community development, intensive agricultural development, integrated rural development and a variety of participatory paradigms have all jostled for policy space, both as objectives and as approaches. In terms of development objectives, the focus has increasingly turned to the need to ensure the sustainability of the development process, to manage trade-offs between agricultural development and natural resources, to target the rural poor, and to protect and support human rights. Development approaches have become increasingly receptive to the need to include the perspectives of the poor and to work across sectors and disciplines. In particular, the need for methodologies to bridge the divide between social and technical aspects of development has been an ongoing objective. The central role played by institutions at all levels in determining livelihood options has led to a central focus on assets, entitlements and rights in development approaches.

Despite the changes in perspective and evolution of approaches since the 1950s there is arguably a common theme underpinning thinking on rural development: Faith in agriculture as a central driver of rural development and the persistence of a small-farm model as the big strategic idea in rural development. Since the late 1990s, there have been some significant changes in the structural context of the development agenda and with it a change in the focus of development approaches. Essentially, the faith in agriculture as the cornerstone of rural development and the small farmer as the main point of entry has been severely shaken. The reason for this is the emerging empirical evidence on the nature of rural poverty and livelihood strategies which have evolved in response. The following structural issues are central concerns in the current rural development agenda:

The Role of Agriculture - It is generally accepted that agriculture alone does not have the capacity to be the engine of rural growth and there is as yet no convincing and comprehensive alternative strategy for rural growth. With a decline of funding to the rural sector the search for a renewed direction in rural development is a major structural concern.

Diversification - Rural populations have become more occupationally flexible, spatially mobile and increasingly dependent on non-agricultural income generation. This has become the norm of rural livelihoods rather than the exception and there is an increasing policy trend in support of diversification and which appreciates its potential as a means to reduce risk and vulnerability.

Sustainability - The sustainability of current development continues to be a major concern with mounting empirical evidence of the trade-offs that exist between the environment and development.

Globalisation - The livelihood strategies of the poor are increasingly exposed to global processes of change, over which the rural poor have little control. International trade agreements, commodity chains, global capital flows and rapid technological change are some of the factors that have changed the super-structures of development. The consequences for poverty are complex and the subject of much debate. However the very fact of globalisation is indisputable and is central to the current development agenda and related approaches.

Communities - The community, for long the focus of development planning, is increasingly amorphous and hard to define. It has for long been argued that, whilst communities are heterogeneous, and constituted of unequal power relations, they are still essentially identifiable units. These assumptions are now being reconsidered; the geographical territory-based community is no longer assumed to be the best entry-point for development planning.

Decentralisation - There is widespread consensus that decentralisation is an essential component of future development. There are several reasons for this extensive support for decentralisation. Chief amongst them are: the widespread failure of centralised planning; an appreciation that self-governance is a human right; and the notion that decentralisation will be both more efficient and more equitable.

Institutional Linkages and Partnerships - Institutional linkages and partnerships between the public sector, the private sector, the voluntary sector and local communities building synergies and drawing on their complementarities is central to the current development agenda. This marks a change from previous phases of development thinking when the preference was for a clear demarcation of the functions of each sector.

Good Governance^[13] and Power^[14] - There is a broad agreement that poor local governance is often caused by and translates in a combination of factors that hamper the delivery of services related to forest goods and services to rural people, and especially the poor. Likewise, it is increasingly acknowledged that participatory processes that do not take into consideration issues related to local stakeholders' power seldom result into sustainable agreements between local stakeholders. This point out the need for “political capital” to achieve sustainable development.

Ashley and Maxwell^[15] comment that these structural changes amount to a loss of confidence in the rural development ‘project’, which has for long been central to the development effort. In policy terms, rural development has lacked a convincing narrative, offering manageable and internationally agreed solutions to clear and well-understood problems. Livelihood type approaches thus emerged in the 1990s in the context of an increasingly complex rural reality, and have evolved with the objective of providing a means to make sense of this complexity and a pragmatic system through which to identify development interventions. Targeting the poorest of the poor (the landless and asset-less) is an increasing concern as a result of the realisation that they are falling through the net of donor activities. As yet, such groups have not been effectively reached. Sustainable livelihoods-type approaches may be one way in which to overcome this as such approaches can be applied to any groups in society, rich and poor alike. The question remain as to whether sustainable livelihoods approaches can be interpreted as providing a new or different way forward for rural development in the future? The answer is a tentative ‘yes’, as these approaches potentially facilitate the cross-sectoral and multi-occupational character of contemporary rural livelihoods in low-income countries to be placed centre-stage in efforts to reduce rural poverty.

Clearly the evolution of both the development agenda and development approaches is much more complex than can be captured in the outline above. Although this study cannot go into these questions in detail, it is critical the one bears in mind the contexts in which development approaches evolve, and the issues that they seek to redress. In the specific context of our current enquiry within FAO, they have raised several questions which we have explored in interviews and seminars.

These questions are of three types:

1. What can the new livelihoods type of approaches learn from the evolution of farming systems, integrated rural development, gestion de terroirs, Latin American approaches and the plethora of participatory approaches that preceded them?

2. What lessons can we draw from examining the evolution of development approaches within different cultural, linguistic and regional contexts?

3. What are the experiences, critiques and propositions that FAO practitioners have of these approaches as well as of the state of rural development today?

There are several reasons as to why it is useful to pursue these questions for the comparison of development approaches and for our ultimate objective of improving access to development approaches that are relevant, pragmatic and mindful of time and institutional constraints. These reasons can be summarised in two useful clichés; not throwing the baby out with the bathwater and not trying to reinvent the wheel.

Livelihood-type approaches, which emerged in the 1990s, are currently undergoing a process of field-testing and adaptation. In this, they may have a lot to learn from the long applied history of both farming systems and Integrated Rural Development (IRD). IRD is generally thought of as having been a failure, but in its ambitions and objectives it shares much with livelihoods approaches from which they can draw. Furthermore, IRD has been through a process of adaptation to various international contexts that potentially constitute critical lessons for livelihood approaches. Likewise the “gestion de terroirs” approach used in Francophone West Africa has a long field exposure and has evolved significantly in order to adapt and overcome the limitations imposed by adopting a spatial framework, and one that does not go beyond the village territory. In Latin America and the Caribbean, people-centred approaches have considered the lessons learned from the approaches applied in the past. Although until now, no new structured frameworks or well defined principles exist, some new ideas are emerging; which have many similarities to those described in the SLA.

Although the current development agenda poses some new challenges there is continuity in many of the basic methodological questions. For instance, how do you overcome the divide between quantitative and qualitative information needs; create micro-macro level linkages; steer a course between pragmatic inputs and replicable system-wide relevance? How do you deal with power issues? Aside from the latter, all these issues have been copiously debated within Farming Systems Research, in particular, which has a long history of methodological evolution.

Another important question that emerges when considering the context of development planning is how and to what extent this context is limiting. This question arises both when considering the immediate institutional constraints of FAO, for instance, and the wider structures and processes of development.

Finally, an issue which is to be pursued further below, what difference does the cultural, linguistic and regional context make to development planning and the application of specific approaches?

4.1 The Cultural, Regional and Linguistic Context of Development Approaches (CRL)

Whilst the linkage between the structural context of development and related development paradigms is a well trodden issue the question of the specific role of culture and language in shaping development thinking has been somewhat less explored. Our entry point into this question, as already mentioned, is the perception that the SLA developed by DfID does not take into account developments in other cultural, regional and linguistic contexts. Our enquiry is however much broader than this perception.

In the course of our study it became apparent that there is limited communication, confrontation and exchange amongst approaches that have specific regional and/or linguistic appurtenance. Cross-semination is operated mainly by a handful of practitioners that have a broader regional and linguistic experience. Staff who have high level of expertise on more than one or two approaches are a minority. Most tend to ‘internalize’ an approach that works and use it across different countries (the ‘no-name’ approach discussed later). If officers are very familiar and have extensive experience of more than one approach, it is mostly due to a temporal sequence rather than a regional/linguistic cross-over. Respondents have told us how, over the years, they have followed the ‘evolution’ of development approaches from Integrated Rural Development (IRD) to Farming Systems (FS) to Sustainable Livelihoods (SL) or likewise through the various evolutionary stages of Gestion de Terroirs (GT) on to Développement Local. But most staff admitted that they prefer to stay within the boundaries of their own region and language domain. They may be familiar with the broad principles and applications of other approaches but not in any great depth. Another form of contamination between approaches is occasionally found through the route of related technical areas. For example, if participatory rural appraisal is leading to good results in nutrition it may be extended to food security or emergency. Non-Anglophones often have a better grasp of a range of approaches/methodologies since they are exposed to experience from their own linguistic group as well as to all the ones of the ‘dominant’ Anglophone culture. The predominance of Anglophone approaches is also connected to the wider and bigger availability of funding. Anglophone approaches have more and wealthier donor countries backing them, IRD and FS had strong USAID/American backing before being picked up by non-Anglophone donors. Likewise, SL has come at the forefront of development because it received substantive initial backing from the UK Department of International Development (DfID) in terms of money and setting of priority agendas. Gestion de Terroirs (GT) is confined to Francophone Africa not because it is any less valid but because it is mainly funded by Francophone donors who have priority interests in certain regions.

So what can we learn both from approaches unique to specific cultural, regional and linguistic contexts and the ways in which international development approaches - such as farming systems, IRD, GT and the like - were adapted to cultural, regional and linguistic contexts? The validity of such an enquiry can be underscored by three tentative facts:

English is indeed the dominant language - in terms of power - of the international development community. It is the main language of the Bretton Woods Institutions and of the United Nations;

English is not the most practiced language in many developing countries and by many poor people;

Livelihoods-type approaches (i.e. approaches that recognise diversity, principles that are people-centred, holistic and multi-level) have also emerged in the Francophone and Latin American contexts.

The livelihoods-type approaches have emerged from different cultural contexts but they embody significant similarities in their structure and objectives. This study attempts to compare the different approaches in terms of these similarities, differences, common blockages and potential synergies through the criticisms and experience of FAO officers interviewed. What is presented below is therefore not a ‘research’ based on facts and open to be challenged but more a narrative constructed upon the insights, comments and analysis of FAO practitioners.

As mentioned earlier in this study, cultural aspects related to the use of development approaches will be discussed in further stages of the work of the sub-programme entitled “Sustainable Livelihoods Approaches in Different Cultural Contexts”^[16]. At this stage we would like to put forward some considerations concerning FAO’s own “cultural” context.

We start by introducing the anthropological concept of culture and some of its outstanding attributes. FAO institutional culture is then sketched accordingly. The structure and functioning of the cultural constructs known as “development approaches” are subsequently discussed, emphasizing the role that these constructs play in the making of cultural hegemony over development institutions. Eventually, the way in which FAO institutional culture reacts to the promotion and mainstreaming of “development approaches” is outlined. Based on the above a number of working hypotheses on the interplay between cultural backgrounds and development approaches in FAO are presented.

4.2 Brief and Informal Histories of Development according to FAO staff^[17]

‘Approaches and experiences that do not enter the English speaking world do not enter the dominant discourse of development and are therefore invisible’

In order to better discuss the ‘where we are at now’, it is important to briefly review the main milestones and evolutions of development thinking and practice over the last couple of decades, as lived and related by some of its actors, in this case FAO staff with the relevant historical memory. The narrative below is a collage of the history of development as related by the interviewees. As mentioned above the evolution and spillage form one approach to another is more important from one decade to the next than from one region/linguistic community to another.

It is important to emphasise that within FAO the dominant ‘culture’ is Anglophone and that this has been the case over time. The Anglophone dominance is not strictly Anglo-Saxon but is of an international nature, amassed around a common working language. Despite the apparent openness of the dominant Anglophone culture, there is a juxtaposition of minorities that resist being absorbed. These are made-up predominantly of the Francophone and the Spanish-speaking communities of practitioners; they are the only two that have enough critical mass to avoid the ‘normative’ integration into the dominant Anglophone community. Other linguistic/regional groupings are de facto absorbed into the Anglophone community with few exceptions (Portuguese-speaking, African countries with Francophone traditions, Arabic). It is important to make this cultural/linguistic distinction because a number of aspects of the historical narrative of the changes in development theory and practice vary according to the regional/linguistic context.

The most significant shift in rural development thinking and practice over the last twenty years has been the progressive shift from a production focused vision to a people-centred one. As one interviewee explained:

Twenty years ago local people used to be almost in the way of agricultural development. Now FAO has become better at introducing the human dimension to projects.

(i) In the 70s

The shift happened from the 1970s onwards, with the increasing appreciation that the longer term objective of rural development was food security rather than improving agricultural production. Rural development had progressively moved away from the mainly dual vision of progress held in the 50s and 60s, juxtaposing industrialisation to the ‘backward’ agricultural sector and negative view of ‘peasants’. By the 1970s, the main concern was recognised as one of access and the focus moved progressively on people and whether they did or did not have access to resources and why. The role of the rural sector and agriculture had grown in importance and themes/activities such as extension and technology transfer were well established. People’s basic needs became a recognised element in development, as small farmers assumed a more important role as well as the need to adopt integrated approaches dealing with cross-sectoral issues (Integrated Rural Development).

Another major concern was the amount of time being spent on generating information and studies; one solution was to get clients more involved. Identifying beneficiaries as clients and getting them involved meant that the need to collect information decreased since it came with the clients. The shift was to a more targeted, pragmatic and less scientific approach. This was the dominant philosophy: Moving towards a more pragmatic and holistic approach where value was found in action. There was an increasing realisation that artificial experiments were not working and there was a need to link experiments to learning from the field and bridge the gap between research and extension.

The two approaches which were predominant in the 70s were Integrated Rural Development (IRD) and Farming Systems (FS). Both approaches were developing in different regional and cultural contexts even though the main drive behind both at the time was USAID. In Latin America there was a focus on the farmer and social and economic systems. The influence of IRD was particularly strong in this area. Farming systems realised that it was necessary to deal with the whole household system and that one could not afford to develop recommendations for each individual farmer. Recommendations had to be developed grouped in domains that were applicable to groups of similar farmers. The logical criteria marking out these domains were the agro-ecological zones and their typology of farming system.

In a broad generalisation, there were some differences in the regional foci of these approaches. In Africa development focused on technology and on improving the existing farming systems since the prospects of bringing about change at the institutional and policy levels were seen as very low. Efforts concentrated on improving old livelihood strategies with adequate technology. In Asia there was a realisation that policies and institutions had changed and that old livelihood systems were no longer appropriate to the new environment: new strategies had to be developed. This trend was more successful in East Asia while in South Asia there were numerous failures of farming systems programmes.

(ii) In the 80s

In the 1980s several changes took place. IRD was on the wane, recognised as being a top-down blue-print approach. The lessons of multi- sectoral integrated approaches had been mainstreamed but IRD was seen as failing since it did not properly involve stakeholders in needs assessments and decision-making. In the same years FS had made some progress. It had expanded its scope of interest to different areas such as fodder, livestock, policies and this made it much more comprehensive and attentive to the non-farm systems and activities. The approach was also recognised as overly Anglophone/American and efforts were made to create a larger constituency of Europeans, Latin Americans and Asians. Some effort was devoted to comparing experiences from different regions. One of the main differences is that Francophone FS was developed mainly outside institutional mandates, focusing on systems dynamics and very detailed analysis. The Anglophone one was promoted by development organisations and had a more practical and operational agenda. FS was effectively institutionalised in the national systems of many countries. It included participation and ‘farmer as client’ principles. Effectively, it was mainstreamed and disappeared as a separate approach everywhere except for FAO where there is an ongoing programme working with new generation FS.

(iii) From the mid 80s

From the mid-1980s onwards the Anglophone world moved more openly towards the promotion of participation as the main framework of development. Originally developed by academics/practitioners and NGOs, participation made a forceful entry into all realms of development. A new philosophy evolved, according to which development should be demand driven and designed through a process of negotiation between the interests of different stakeholders at different levels. Individuals, their families and local communities became the priority entry points. New methods and techniques to involve them in the decision-making process were developed and fine-tuned over time. Participation was quite successfully implemented in small-scale NGO-run projects which had the sufficient drive and flexibility to incorporate handing over a significant part of the responsibility and decision-making power to the local communities. For larger and more institutional organisations, participation ultimately resulted in two main trends: firstly, PRA techniques were more frequently used in order to collect information for project design. Decision-making stayed with the organisation, but more numerous and broader consultations were carried out with stakeholders from the local to the national level. Secondly, a number of very good handbooks and training materials were produced, dealing with the linking of participation philosophy and techniques to specific technical sectors both within agriculture and food security.

Extending development activities to local actors and including them more frequently in information and decision-making had a significant impact on rural development: It provoked a number of major shifts. Firstly, it displaced agriculture as a central and almost monolithic activity at the heart of rural development. There was a progressive realisation that off-farm and non-farm activities were crucial for poor people in rural areas as were all those actors who were not engaged in agriculture but were still very important stakeholders in rural areas. Attention and investigations progressively focused on the complexities of rural livelihoods and the intricate relation between agriculture and other activities. Eventually participation expanded from a more specific village/local community level to encompass the normative, policy and institutional aspects of development. The challenge remains how to combine bottom-up, demand-driven development with the current frameworks of national and international governance which are, for many aspects, in crisis and unable to provide adequate solutions, support and direction.

Related to this challenge, there is a substantive body of experience accumulated in Francophone regions in projects using gestion de terroirs. The effectiveness of the original gestion de terroirs approaches was challenged by the inability to deal contemporarily with horizontal and vertical spatial and institutional dimensions. Over time, practitioners realized that using the “terroirs” as an entry-point was insufficient. The “terroirs” needed to be put in a context of wider institutional and informal networks of political and social relations. The issue of the legitimacy and effectiveness of the local networks and institutions became a central one. Within FAO this has resulted in very extensive work on decentralization which, while being expanded to other regions, had as initial focus the Francophone areas of northern and western Africa.

As regards Latin America and the Caribbean, Table 2 tries to summarize the different agricultural strategies implemented in the region to promote rural development and, at the same time, attempts to identify the people centred approaches (PCA) applied during those periods.

Table 3 attempts to summarise the main approaches, regional focus and main players/donors associated with each of the main linguistic groups. The Anglophone group was divided into English and American, whereby English is identified as the default international (and not UK) language of development.

Table 2: Agricultural strategies and people-centred approaches applied in Latin America and the Caribbean (1950 - 2000)

Table 3: Summary of the main approaches, regional focus and main players/donors associated with each of the main linguistic groups

4.3 The FAO ‘No-Name Approach’: The informal organizational culture towards rural development and its applications. Initial findings from interviews

4.3.1 FAO’s Institutional Culture and the Emergence of the No-Name Approach

Two main trends can be observed when we discuss the impacts of different development approaches being mainstreamed into FAO’s institutional culture. These can be seen as:

Firstly, pluralism, referring to the coexistence of different approaches in the culture of FAO headquarters, which depend upon the specific mandates and technical specialisations of the different divisions and services, as well as on regional operation scenarios and the individual interests and preferences of FAO officers.

Secondly, there is a situation that anthropologists would dub syncretism. This relates to the internal and “evolutionary” creation of a “mixed” and distinctive approach, which captures various elements of the different approaches and then pragmatically combines them in an ad hoc synthesis. This is roughly what this study has identified as the “no name” approach; which is discussed below.

Both trends reflect some of the main characteristics of FAO’s institutional culture in their response to “imported” development approaches, including:

Its capacity to contain the hegemonic projects of the most powerful donors in order to maintain the basic identity of a United Nations organization in which all countries and national cultures must have a say;

The multiple interests and scopes of the institutional mission, each possibly requiring different analytical frameworks and methodologies;

The Organization’s world-wide coverage; which calls for a continued regional, national and local adaptation of theories and practices;

Its intrinsic multi-culturalism and multi-linguism, which facilitate the cohabitation (and some cross-fertilization) of approaches generated in a variety of geo-political and cultural contexts; and, last but not least,

the sceptical attitude of some professionals in FAO headquarters in regards to the claim to innovation of most “new” development approaches, which often simply consist of a “sexy re-wording” of concepts and methods which are already well known and practiced.

This has led to some preliminary findings and working hypotheses on the interplay between cultural background and development approaches in FAO, including:

The notion that there are no “Anglophone”, “Francophone” or “Spanish-speaking” approaches in FAO, but, more precisely, approaches created within the framework of particular national or regional streams of development studies which their respective countries seek to mainstream within FAO institutional culture and policy. Although some concepts used by development approaches might be language-specific (i.e. “livelihoods”, “terroirs”) and thus difficult to translate, language is more important as a facilitating or constraining factor of such mainstreaming strategy, than in shaping particular cognitive elements or structures. In fact, no approach has the chance to be mainstreamed internationally if presented in a language different from English (the lingua franca of FAO and international relationship at large)

Secondly, the success in mainstreaming any development approach most probably depends more on the financial and human investment capacity of the promoting member state (or cluster of member states) than on any technical virtue or alleged cultural adaptability of the approach per se. This might give a comparative advantage to the approaches supported by major donors or to those approaches that are able to gain the consensus of a higher number of donors or recipient countries.

Thirdly, due to its intrinsic pluralism, the institutional culture of FAO headquarters tend to resist the marketing of new approaches with a pragmatic attitude. This allows FAO headquarters’ officers to select within any approach those elements which are perceived as instrumental to solve the conceptual and the operational problems of their daily work, and to reject those that are perceived as useless or complicating these tasks.

Finally, this mediating function of FAO’s institutional culture is likely to be more effective at headquarters than at the regional or sub-regional levels, where the relative weight of both donors and recipient policies is higher and the capacity of the Organization to operate in a corporate manner lower. As a result, we may expect that approaches strongly supported by donors that have a major political interest in the area or “indigenous” approaches endorsed by several member state governments will have more weight at the regional and sub-regional level.

4.3.2 The “No-Name” Approach

The main approach that we use, you could call it the no-name approach: One that is not systematic but draws on general experience, broad participatory principles, and sector-specific methods. Missions are too short for anything else to work.

The emergence of what, for want of a better name, we are calling here the ‘no-name approach’ to rural development, is the result of a number of interviews and informal discussions held in FAO. The aim of the interviews was to define and compare the formal ‘institutional’ framing of development values and activities with the informal practice and thinking. For this purpose, the interviews were divided into two main blocks:

The first one explored the formal mandate and activities of the interviewee and their division or group

The second which explored the gaps between the formal dimension and the real life practices and outcomes of the development intervention, reflecting also the personal views and critique of the respondents.

In the course of interviews, FAO staff told us that, for the most part, when they had to design and implement a project they used a mixture of principles, methods and driving-elements which were the result of their ‘best practice’ experience. We soon realised that people in FAO had very similar milestones, references and toolboxes which could be categorised as the dominant practice within the FAO informal culture. The definition of ‘no-name’ for this broadly defined approach comes from an interview. Table 4 presents a summary of the main aspects of the no-name approach. This is by no mean exhaustive. The interesting feature of the discussions on the ’no-name’ approach is that they evidenced a number of issues that respondents identified as the main blockages to both their work an, in some cases, to development more in general. Rather than analysing them here, these make up the backbone of Section 5.

Table 4: Key features of the ‘no-name approach’ to development practice