Critical reflections of a development nomad

This is a critical account of personal nomadism wandering on the boundaries of disciplines and exploring gaps between them. It sets the scene for the rest of the book by showing where I come from, what I am not, and where I have been, including episodes as a colonial administrator, trainer and researcher in Kenya, lecturer who never lectured, evaluation programme manager (failed), field researcher in South Asia, evaluation officer in Geneva, project specialist for the Ford Foundation, and later, collaborator, networker and disseminator of participatory methodologies, most of the time with a base at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.

Keywords: critical reflection, development studies, development studies research, freedom, funding constraints, methodologies, opportunism, optimizing reflexivity and managing ego, participation, participatory workshops, pedagogy for the powerful, personal mindset, power and error, radical agenda, reversals, self-critical epistemological awareness

Nomadn1 a member of a people or tribe who move from place to place to find pasture and food 2 a person who continually moves from place to place; wanderer.

Collins English Dictionary Millennium Edition

Prologue

The Egocentric Reminiscence Ratio (ERR) (the proportion of a person's speech devoted to their past – 'when I was ...' and 'I remember when ...' etc.) is supposedly higher among men than women, rises with age, on retirement leaps to a new high level, is higher in the evening than the morning, and rises sharply with the consumption of alcohol. Since in what follows my ERR is close to 100 per cent, let me assure any reader that I am sober and that I rarely work after seven in the evening. I am writing this less because of the compulsions of age, gender and ego (though of course they are there) and more (or so I would like to flatter myself by believing) because I have been asked to. All the same, writing about your experience is an indulgence. The only justification is if it makes a difference – whether through others' pleasure, insight or action, or through your own personal change.

Most of my working life I have been based at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, but much of this has been abroad. I have experienced and lived through changes in development studies, but not in any mainstream. As an undisciplined non-economist, I have been on the fringes. In consequence, my view of development studies is idiosyncratic. Writing this has helped me to understand myself a little better. Others will judge whether it is of interest or use to them.

What have reflections on personal experience to do with development studies, and what might be radical about this? Answers to these questions vary according to how broad development studies is taken to be, and what is taken to be radical.

The scope of development studies can be broad in two respects. First, empirically, it can refer to what people in centres, departments or institutes of, or for, development studies actually do and have done. In the UK, development studies has also to embrace whatever the Development Studies Association considers, names or explores. What people do or have done includes not just research and teaching, but consultancy, advisory work, dissemination, advocacy, convening, networking and partnerships. Some in development studies have also spent time as volunteers, or in governments, aid agencies, NGOs and foundations.

Second, normatively, if development is defined as good change, development studies are again broad. Values have always been there in the discourses of development even if often half hidden by pretences of objectivity. Introducing values expands the boundaries beyond, for example, what one may find in a book on development economics or social development, and includes ethics, individual choice and responsibility. What is good is then for individual and collective definition and debate, as is what sorts of change are significant.

The reader can judge whether it is radical or not to take these two broad meanings together and reflect critically on what someone in development studies does in a lifetime. To help and warn, the least I can do in my case is describe the more significant predispositions (aka biases, prejudices and blind spots) of which I am aware. I am an optimistic nomad. My spectacles are rose-coloured. Pessimists may be justified in claiming more realism. For whatever reasons, cups to me are more often half full than half empty. Life is more enjoyable this way, and I have a fond and possibly delusional belief that naïve optimism has a wonderful way of being self-fulfilling. Enthusiasm is another weakness, bringing with it the dangers of selective perception, and of doing harm when combined with power.

As for being a nomad, it would be flattering to explain this in terms of a drive to explore; and when writing I like to use that word. But I have been running away more than running to. I have run away from whatever was dull, difficult or conflictual. This has meant avoiding the challenges in the heartland of any discipline or profession and instead seeking life and livelihood in other, emptier spaces. Being nomadic and marginal like this has been exhilarating, fulfilling and fun, a mix of solitary wandering and collegial solidarity with others in a small tribe. But when the tribe grows, it is time to move on.

Two themes – reflexivity and choosing what to do – are threaded through this account. They are hidden in Section 2, 'Nomad and journey', which the reader may wish to skip, come into the open in Section 3, 'Reflections', and finally inform Section 4, 'A radical agenda for development studies'. This last draws on the preceding critical reflection to ask what are some of the things we – development professionals with one or more feet in development studies – should try to do in the future.

Nomad and journey

The five phases which follow are separated for purposes of description but were experienced as a flow.

Uprooting and running away

I was born and brought up in a small English provincial town (Cirencester). My parents were middle class, both thwarted in their education. My mother had fought for more years in school, but still got less than her brothers. My father's schooling was downgraded and shortened when his father lost his cattle and farm to foot-and-mouth. I think they passed their frustrations on to me. I do not regret it. I was sent to prep school and to boarding public school. These were followed by National Service and university. My script was to come top in school, to be a good little boy basking in approval, and go on and on to become Prime Minister or Director-General of the BBC. In the jargon of an earlier social science, I had a high N-Ach or need for achievement.

From early on, though, I wandered, pulling up roots and moving on. After School Certificate (GCSEs) I did a year of mathematics, then switched to botany, chemistry and zoology for A-levels, then to history at university, and then to public administration, becoming, as I have happily remained, undisciplined. Ever since university I have been running, and running away, never staying for long in one place or with one subject. I ran away from a safe family firm of estate agents in provincial England. I went on a scientific expedition with friends to Gough Island in the South Atlantic (Holdgate, 1958). Then there was a year in the USA on an English-Speaking Union scholarship studying for an aborted PhD on changes in the American ideal of success. I ran on then to my first regular job, in Kenya as a District Officer in what was known by then (1958) as Her Majesty's Overseas Civil Service. I made it clear that I was only interested if I could be spared another year at Cambridge on what was known as a Devonshire Course. This was sort of proto-development studies for those going into colonial administration; it included history, social anthropology and other subjects considered relevant. And that was how I got into 'development'.

Decolonizing

It is difficult to convey to others the exhilaration of the decolonizing experience in Kenya (Johnson, 2002). As a District Officer I would have been seen by some as a wicked colonialist. I am not here defending or glossing any of the outrages of colonialism. But the task then was to prepare for independence and one could not have wished for a better job.

Whether for my supposed left-wing political views, or because of my love of mountains, I shall never know, but I was posted for two and a half years to the remote Samburu District in Northern Kenya, where I was told there was 'no politics'. There was work as a third-class magistrate, administering tribal police, and a great deal of walking and riding horses. The most constructive part was finding dam sites, building dams and managing grazing control to save the Samburu pastoralists from destroying their environment. Or so I believed. This was followed by North Tetu Division in Nyeri District, where people were exploding with energy, and work included negotiating sites for new primary schools when existing ones exceeded their size limit, encouraging coffee planting, and getting tree seedlings to people who insatiably seized them to plant on their consolidated land.

There were then two big challenges in Kenya: training for the takeover of government with independence; and settlement of Africans on the former White Highlands. I wanted to get involved in one or the other. Because I was a mountaineer, and had accompanied a training course on Mount Kenya, the door opened to be a trainer. I was recruited to the new Kenya Institute of Administration (KIA) and was responsible for three back-to-back six-month courses for Kenyan administrators who were taking over. This was an extraordinarily intense experience, innovating and improvising on the run, and beginning to learn how to avoid having to lecture: this was anyway essential as I did know enough about anything to be able to talk about it for any length of time. The last course of 24 graduates straight from university, mainly Makerere in Uganda, challenged ('Why do we need to climb Kilimanjaro in order to be able to run our country?') but did not subvert the somewhat muscular approach of the training, which stressed character and self-confidence. The subjects covered included law, accounting, government procedures, natural resources, making district plans in real districts, and aspects of public administration covering all major ministries and departments (see Fuller, 2002: 240–3). We put together practical case studies using real government files with the names unchanged. Through these, trainees dealt with real problems and could compare their solutions and the memos they wrote with those of known senior colonial officers (Chambers, 1964). Another exercise was dealing with an overloaded in tray which we trainers had much fun composing. One of my subjects was politics, for which I concentrated on European pathologies as sources of lessons. For better or for worse this was probably the most influential six months of my life (several on the courses were Permanent Secretaries in under two years). Then suddenly there was no one left to train. De-Europeanization had been so fast that Kenyans could no longer be spared for training. Kenya was independent and I was put in charge of the KIA library. It was time to move on.

Retreading and research

After rejecting the idea of a career in politics in the UK (the Liberal Party, which I supported, was in deep, possibly terminal, decline), I opted, as did a few others, to retrain as an academic, registered for a part-time PhD at Manchester under W.J.M. (Bill) Mackenzie, and joined Guy Hunter, who was launching the East African Staff College. We ran three-week courses in Nairobi, Kampala and Dar-es-Salaam in rotation, for senior civil servants and business managers. We began asking participants to make population projections to 1980, and debated disbelief at the dramatic rises in rural as well as urban populations. Government and business case studies played a part, as did talks and discussions with political leaders. My 'research' narrowed to the administration of settlement schemes, and especially the well-documented and much-visited Mwea Irrigation Settlement north of Nairobi, a honeypot which attracted other researcher bees, or flies, besides myself. Mwea, with its strong disciplinary management, and its agricultural and economic success, was regarded as a model for development and much visited and referred to in policy discussions. However, the seminal much-cited and misquoted research of Jane Hanger and Jon Moris (1973) showed that women were much worse off on the scheme. Settlement schemes were a great subject at the time: they had high political priority, they were much researched, there was a burgeoning grey literature, and comparative analysis and practical lessons were in demand.

Camouflaged by a PhD, I then became a 'lecturer' in the Department of Politics and Sociology in Glasgow for three years. Development studies was not yet a subject at Glasgow. My mentor, Bill Mackenzie, was a wonderfully humane polymath, deeply committed to development in Africa, who gave me freedom to continue research and to write. I never had to give a lecture and did little teaching. I met and married Jenny who did lecture, in psychology. I got into writing and editing, and then moved in 1969 to an Honorary Fellowship at IDS Sussex, then three years old, and an appointment to IDS Nairobi to coordinate evaluation for the Kenyan government's Special Rural Development Programme (SRDP). After that and a spell in Botswana, while still based at (a very tolerant) IDS Sussex, I had two years mainly in Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu with Barbara and John Harriss and Indian and Sri Lankan colleagues, as assistant director to Benny Farmer doing fieldwork on agrarian change and the lack of a green revolution in rice (Farmer, 1977).

UNHCR and the Ford Foundation

Much of the time when I was physically at IDS is a blur. The periods abroad from IDS stand out more, two in particular. For a year and a half (1975–76), I was the first Evaluation Officer with UNHCR, based in Geneva. This was an organization largely staffed and dominated by lawyers recruited to deal with refugees from Eastern Europe. Their professional training and inclinations were to deal with legal issues. In terms of the breadth of concerns in development and so also in development studies, UNHCR was a sort of coelacanth, a survivor from an earlier, less evolved age. It had no in-house competence in health, education, resettlement or agriculture. At the same time there were millions of rural refugees in Africa. I concentrated on them and tried to bring them to light as people, not just statistics, and to counteract convenient myths that they could be taken care of by African hospitality. Colleagues could not believe that I would leave UNHCR after only 18 months, but by then I had done the main task. And someone had warned me that I was beginning to become like a UN civil servant, which I took as a health warning, since many were such political animals.

Later (1981–84), based in Delhi, I was the last Ford Foundation staff member to be a Project Specialist (meaning someone who works substantively on a subject). As a Programme Officer I was responsible for making and managing grants for irrigation management and social forestry. In this I was singularly unsuccessful, but had tremendous access and opportunities for learning and taking part in professional discussions and debates. These led into thinking and writing about irrigation management, livelihoods, trees, common property resources, rights and access.