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...