1. Development: an active learning process
2. Potentialities rather than problems
3. Development practice: Creating capabilities for innovative action
4. Planning core: Animating innovation
Development is not something that happens to things but something that happens to people and systems of people: groups, institutions, communities, societies. What is it that happens to them? Let us consider first a general characteristic they have. People, communities or societies are not isolated beings. They live, work, change, grow or decay surrounded by other beings. They have an external milieu or "environment" within which they carry out their existence. And this environment is usually dual: social and bio-physical. In the rural case, the social environment involves other people, institutions, and communities. The bio-physical one (the "Environment" in usual terms) may include untouched ecosystems (virgin forests), man-changed ecosystems (agricultural land), houses, roads, irrigation works and similar components.
Any social system we may consider, such as a rural community, is continuously being challenged by its environment: prices that rise or fall, technical support that comes or leaves, financing that becomes available or unavailable, weather conditions that cannot be predicted, irrigation works that become silted, roads or markets that are opened or closed, and so on. These challenges are a part of real life and have to be faced. And development is a process that has to do with facing these challenges. (Note that we do not call them "problems", because they are often positive.)
Take the most common way of facing environmental challenges, i.e. resorting to experience. Some unexpected event occurs, and then occurs again and again. The normal practices of the community start to be questioned, and to be modified so that the event may not take it by surprise. At last, the rural community learns: it finds ways to face the challenge and incorporates them into its concepts, techniques and values, i.e. into its culture. What has occurred has been a reaction to the environmental challenges, and the kind of learning it has given rise to is reactive learning. For the community as a whole, this corresponds to a long-term process of passive adaptation to the environment that should be called evolution.
Development is a related but different process. It also involves learning and incorporation of new concepts, techniques and values into the community's culture, and it also involves adaptation to the environment. But it is a matter of action rather than reaction. It involves active adaptation and especially active learning. It is the community the one that takes the initiative of understanding the environmental challenges it faces, and trying to make use of the opportunities that they open to it.
There are three general challenges that face any rural community and also the whole society. More specific challenges, such as those in the previous examples, are related to these general ones. The three challenges, which should be dealt with harmoniously and which together define development, are:
i) Improving the capacity for self-reliance, or the community's capacity to make its decisions according to its own interests.ii) Improving quality of life, or the community's capacity to satisfy the needs of its members and to allow them to exercise their personal potentialities.
iii) Improving the community's sustainability, or its capacity to maintain in the long term the improvement in quality of life on the basis of its own resources.
The remaining concepts and the planning methodology presented in this paper are focussed on this notion of development.
Social systems in the Third World, such as institutions, communities or societies, are usually unaware of the opportunities that exist in their environmental challenges. They tend to be aware only of their problems, and the experts who work with them tend to draw comprehensive diagnoses of such problems. But problems have always some implicit solution to them that is being sought, such a solution has a cost, and the money is not available to pay for that cost. Otherwise, nobody would be aware of the "problem". There is, in the background of all this, the generalized belief that development work has to start from the analysis of the problems and that the scarce money available has to be allocated to implementing the solutions, which should be ranked by some indicator of cost-effectiveness. The name "planning" is often given to this type of ranking-and-allocation activity.
It is easy to see that this problem-solution approach has little to do with the notion of development that was just presented. It even falls short of evolution, since there is no actual learning involved: only ready-made solutions brought in from the outside.
Development, in our view, does not start from problems but from opportunities or potentialities. They are the expected or possible results of actions which the community could undertake under its particular environmental conditions, that might improve its quality of life, sustainability and/or self-reliance. For instance, "each family of community A could save two five-kilometer trips a week to bring in fuelwood, if it utilized this improved stove that can be manufactured according to these directions, under the supervision of this particular technician". The environmental conditions, both social and bio-physical, are explicit in this statement of the potentiality.
In principle, there may exist rural development potentialities in a number of fields related to energy; time and fuel saved through efficient wood stoves, improved sustainability of forests from better use of fuelwood, improved agricultural productivity from wind-powered irrigation, etc. What matters, however, is what occurs in practice in such and such particular community, given its particular environmental conditions. Potentialities, therefore, are not general ideas or vague advantages of technologies that may be voiced by some experts. They are concrete, practical and communicable results of actions that the members of the community understand as positive for their development and could see themselves underaking.
If clear and attractive potentialities can be shown to exist, then the community could become motivated by them and could undertake action to make use of them. The reason for this is that potentialities are in fact resources of its own that the community now knows it has available. This is exactly the opposite of the case of the problem-solution approach, in which the solution has a cost that requires external resources to pay. The one we are introducing, therefore, is a potentialities-action approach.
It is an unfortunate condition of underdevelopment that potentialities are usually unknown to the rural communities who possess them, and that the same happens with most other social systems. In fact, we believe that the central difference between developed and underdeveloped countries lies in their capacities to discover and make use of potentialities.
An example from the Coquimbo experience may help to comprehend these concepts. While the PRIEN team was working with the "comuneros" on improved fuelwood equipment, the "problem of water" came up over and over in the conversations. In the arid Coquimbo region, this was found to mean the desire to have access to the conventional solution seen elsewhere, i.e. irrigation works to bring in water from other places, which is clearly a non-feasible idea in economic, financial or political terms. A detailed research into the real situation of water was then undertaken in the community of Cuz Cuz (Díaz and Espinoza, 1983). Three viable water-related potentialities were found: (a) using water more efficiently, (b) using existing water resources that are not being employed and (c) accumulating water. If they were made use of, the irrigated area could grow from 30 to 100 hectares. These potentialities were unknown to the comuneros, and searching for them was prevented by the problem-solution mode of thinking.
Which is the starting point in the "active learning to face the environmental challenges", as we conceive development, and how is the ensuing process? Indeed, the initial point is the awareness of the potentialities. Then, the motivation may emerge for the corresponding actions that should follow. But no effective action can be taken in practice if the specific capabilities required to make use of the potentialities are not available. And there are capabilities to do things the community was not able to do before, i.e. things that are new to it. The community, therefore, has to prepare itself to innovate.
The creation of capabilities, therefore, is the crucial element in the qualitative change, or innovation, that the community now is going to make. These capabilities involve concepts (e.g. water accumulation), techniques (e.g. some particular type of dam) and values (e.g. self-confidence) that are to be acquired by some people or groups, or by the community as a whole. And a change in concepts, techniques and values is no other thing than a cultural change. Consequently, as we have seen up to this point, this particular learning process, called innovation, begins with the awareness of the potentialities and culminates in a cultural change, which is materialized as capabilities to do things the community was not able to do before.
A final question refers to the active or reactive character that this learning process might have. It seems clear that it is active, since it does not come about as a consequence of any pressure of external events to which the community might seek to adapt passively. Rather, it is the result of an internal process of becoming aware of its own potentialities and of the consequences that may derive from making use of them: new resources and new possibilities of improving quality of life, sustainability and self-reliance. In other words, becoming aware that the community can enable itself to build its own future.
Let us take now a step back. Our discussion has assumed that there is knowledge of some particular potentialities of the community that has become available to it. Has the community started a research process of its own, which led to this knowledge? Obviously not, although this could be the case in social systems other than rural communities. There is some external agent who is linked to the initial research and has started a communication process with the community, focussed on the research findings. This has been a role of PRIEN in the case of Coquimbo to be presented further on. This is in general one of the roles of the animator, a crucial figure of this planning approach.
There is no innovation "instinct" in rural communities of developing countries, and the same happens in most of their private and public institutions. But innovation is the core of the process of development and somehow it has to be promoted. This is the point where our particular notion of planning comes into the picture. We stand for planning by the corresponding social systems (the rural communities in this case) rather than planning for them. This is what distinguishes participatory planning from technocratic or authoritarian planning. How can this type of planning be brought about in practice, so that it promotes innovation?
Our answer rests on the specification of a particular function: the animation of social systems into self-planning. Somebody is assumed to play this special kind of support to the community and thus to play the role of animator. Let us start by distinguishing the animator from two other characters, the "expert" or technician and the "technocrat" or plan-writer:
- The "expert" selects means for ends (objectives or goals) defined by somebody else. For instance, the most appropriate stove for a community that wants to save fuel and has available some particular type of mud. He is a specialist in the efficiency of means.- The "technocrat" defines ends for some social system whose plan he is preparing. For example, some government agency that prepares a plan for afforestation of a number of rural communities and then offers them financing for it, without asking what would they themselves do if allowed to allocate the money. Since no participatory mechanism for validation of the ends is involved, the technocrat assumes that he is a specialist in the ends of others and that he has the right to be so.
- The "animator of planning" assists in the self-definition of ends by the social system (e.g. rural community) whose planning process he is supporting. This self-definition is based on the community's getting to know its development potentialities (i.e. something similar to a person getting to know the personal potentialities that make up his/her identity). If the animator is also an expert - which helps in animation - he may also assist in the selection of means.
The role of the animator is essentially methodological: to assist the members of the community in the precise specification of what it does and what it could do, the identification and evaluation of the existing potentialities, and the specification of the capabilities to be acquired in order to actualize those potentialities. In other words, to help them modify their outlook and move in practice from the problem-solution mode of thinking and acting to the potentialities-action mode. The animator has to be trustworthy to the community. The main ability he has to show, in addition to a good understanding of planning processes, is that of an effective communicator.
The specific methodology that the community applies, under the coordination of the animator, is the topic to which we turn now.
