Throughout the 1980s there have been calls, often from development organizations of global repute, for the incorporation of social science perspectives into the design and management of sustainable development programmes. Practising Development is the first collection to offer first-hand critical assessments of the success and failures found within actual responses to these calls. Development planning and implementation has been simultaneously marked by the recurrence of broad universal patterns and a diversity of local interests and while the former receive ample attention in the work of economists, statisticians and agronomists, the latter remains largely under-reported and insufficiently understood. The contributors demonstrate that understanding local diversity is at least as meaningful as knowledge of seemingly universal categories and tendencies and illustrate a variety of organizational responses to provide a valuable contribution to the debate on whether these policies are, or can be, turned into practice.
By combining academic and practical experience from anthropology, development and aid organizations Practising Development examines, from both a social science and anthropological perspective, the processes of intervention, the methods by which this intervention can be assessed and explains the socio-economic and political worlds within which intervention and development evolve.