Beyond the comfort zone: some issues, questions, and challenges in thinking about development approaches and methods

Jo Rowlands

'If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.' Abraham Maslow

'Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.' Albert Einstein (attributed)

Introduction

I have believed for many years that human beings are generally highly resourceful, intelligent, and creative. The more I have seen during my working life, which has given me opportunities to experience life in many parts of the globe and under many different circumstances, the more I have been reinforced in this belief. Unless their abilities have been badly interfered with, human beings are capable of evaluating and judging complex circumstances and acting on their conclusions – even where the range of actions available to them is limited by inequality and other circumstances. Any course of action is contextualised within culture and personal life trajectory – so people don't always act in the way that someone with a different story might expect. I recently had the opportunity to listen to a highly placed member of staff in the Ugandan Ministry of Finance talking about the choices made by poor people in Uganda in chopping down trees. She said that the Ministry used to believe that poor people did not act rationally (because they were destroying their own resource base), but that the more detailed picture which the staff were able to see as a result of their Participatory Poverty Assessment process showed that poor people act as rationally as it is practicable for them to do within problematic circumstances where it is impossible to look beyond the immediate needs of survival. She acknowledged that it was the policy makers' lack of understanding of the full reality and stark choices confronting poor people that was the problem. I am interested in finding approaches to development and methods with which to work that will enable us to free up that human resourcefulness, intelligence, and creativity in ways that bring the achievement of human rights and social justice closer to reality.

In this introductory essay, I will touch on many different aspects, perhaps thinking about approaches and methods not as 'science' but as 'art'. I want to challenge the notion that methodology is somehow neutral; to unpack some of the assumptions that lie behind development interventions; and to explore how power is embedded in everything that gets done. I am also concerned with the process by which priorities are identified and by whom, and concerned also with the elusive challenge of scaling up small progress. I shall take a particular look at participatory approaches, and touch on evaluation and learning. I want to throw many questions into the open: this is an essay that is full of questions. Many of the essays in this volume help to bring those questions back down to the ground again. I will not attempt to draw a complete picture, but I do want to add a degree of complexity which goes beyond what most accounts of particular approaches or methods allow for. I will delve as far into that complexity as space allows, but I shall not attempt to produce many tidy resolutions: readers will have to provide those for themselves, as far as they are able to.

Not neutral, not in isolation

'Approaches' can refer to a wide spectrum of things. They might be empowering, participatory, gender-equitable, people-centred, inclusionary. Or they might be the reverse of each of those: disempowering, top-down, male-biased, formulaic, exclusionary. Or, of course, they might be (and often are) a combination of these, whether intentionally or not. Any approach has behind it a set of values, beliefs, and attitudes that give it its flavour, set its tone. This is a fundamental point to be clear about: approaches to development are not neutral. If an approach has a transformative agenda, it is in a particular direction, towards a change in power relations or resource allocation. If the approach largely tends to maintain the status quo, in so doing it is supporting the maintenance of a particular set of power relations and resource allocations.

Approaches provide a rough guiding framework within which specific methods and techniques can be used. Methods, then, are the step-by-step specifics of how an approach is put into practice at the 'coal face', at the 'kitchen sink', on the 'factory floor', or in the 'field'. Problems can arise when the method is not compatible with the values, beliefs, or attitudes on which the approach that is being used ultimately rests. In a top-down approach, the use of a method which encourages individuals to identify what they want to have happen, but in a context where their wishes will not be realised, can lead to frustration, disillusionment, and non-cooperation. Equally, in a participatory approach, a method which privileges some people's participation over that of others, such as one that requires the ability to read, although not everyone can do so, will not achieve the participation intended.

Problems may also arise when the approach used and the methods employed...