If it is naive to think that scholarly analysis of policy means can be easily divorced from evaluative preaching about its ends, it is sloppy not even to try to make the distinction. But few people in the development field do. As a new version of the concern with poverty and distribution, ‘basic needs strategy’ seems to carry the confusion of analysis and preaching even further, and to be neither as explicit, as imbued with an awareness of long‐term growth problems, nor even as effective an aid‐stimulator as earlier versions. Its production has more to do with the institutional imperative of international. organisations than with anything else.