Two recent conferences of rural development administrators prompt reflection on the source and nature of the ‘programmatism’ which appears to dominate thinking on rural development policies—the emphasis on officially‐provided services and initiatives to the exclusion, on the one hand, of price‐incentive policies (suggestions for exchange‐rate adjustments, for instance, usually meet neither interest nor, apparently, comprehension) and on the other of mobilization strategies which assume peasants to have the capacity to take their own initiatives. Neither the internal logic of bureaucracy, nor the class interests of bureaucrats as members of the urban middle class fully explain this. Two other factors may be: the gap in life‐styles and ideologies inhibiting empathy between peasants and officials, and the ‘transfer of intellectual technology’ from academic institutions of the former metropolis of the two countries concerned.