Volume 2 Number 3 July 1969
Edited by: Emmanuel de Kadt
This issue of the Bulletin contains articles which look at the way in which non-governmental initiatives overseas may help or hinder the achievement of development goals. Two points emerge clearly from the contributions. In the first place, views on this matter differ quite sharply; secondly, the differences can to a large extent be traced back to alternative choices regarding the path and the ultimate goals of development.
Volume 2 Number 2 May 1969
Edited by: Emmanuel de Kadt
This issue of the Bulletin is largely devoted to the Report of the Commissioú on International Development (the Pearson Commission), constituted in August 1968 at the invitation of the President of the World Bank, Nr. Robert McNaivara, to assess the results of twenty years of development assistance and propose new policies for the future.
Volume 2 Number 1 January 1969
Edited by: Dudley Seers
According to the Duncan Committee, a diplomat is a man who goes abroad to sell washing machines for his country. He may lie, but mainly he sells washing machines. The application of this view to reorganising British representation overseas has provoked strong feelings among those who feel that it wilfully undermines Britain's contribution to development. The part given to aid administration is too small and by not recommending an increase (as well as by expressly relegating less developed countries to the second division of British interest overseas) the Committee is seen as conniving to waste and under-administration.
There are several kinds of moral and political concern in the opposition expressed by contributors to the Duncan Report: most involve a feeling, altruistic or paternalistic, of continued responsibility for ex-colonial states and some have to do with the 'condition of Britain' - as with Guy Hunter's organic view that society needs a sense of common purpose. We hope that this symposium makes it clear that feelings about the Report have not been assuaged by the passing of time.
Volume 1 Number 4 November 1968
Edited by: Oscar Gish and Martin Staniland
An important facet of all research is the opportunity it affords to isolate and examine basic assumptions. In development studies, this activity is extremely important, for the relationship of the research worker to poor countries is often, like that of a medium to the spirit world, marked by infrequency of contact, scarcity of data, and ambiguity of response. In such circumstances, myths, in the crude sense, tend to flourish. As an article in the last issue identified three such myths, we felt it would be interesting to scan the area of development research more thoroughly, with the results to be found in the middle section. A particularly rich field of "crude" myth is that of manpower supply. For the first section of this issue, Oscar Gish and Richard Jolly have written two articles which cast a powerful demystifying light on this topic.
Volume 1 Number 3 July 1968
Edited by: Clive Bell
The peasant was, according to Turgenev, "the sphinx of all the Russias." How much more is known about the peasants of the developing countries by those who rule them and those who set out to help them? Governments, social scientists, planners, claim to understand and to articulate their interests, but very often in development studies it is assumed that "development" is something the elite does to the peasants. The elite, urban bias of academic work has quite clear causes, to do with the greater intellectual accessibility of the ruling groups.
The peasants are more inscrutable: as Professor F. G. Bailey writes. "The alien social scientist cannot so easily understand what the human majority of the developing nations - the mass, the non-elite - are thinking, or why they are thinking it; they are strange, remote, annoyingly diverse, unpredictable, a mystery even to their own elite, apathetic, afraid to take risks, improvident, parochial in their outlook, superstitious - and so on, through a string of adjectives which range from the patronizing to the contemptuous." (The Peasant View of the Bad Life).
Some of the myths and simplifications which have grown up as a result are examined in this issue of the Bulletin, especially in the review article Back to Grass Roots . The problems of studying rural development are considered in the other article of this sector by Raymond Apthorpe. We revert to "aggregism" in a heuristic form, in Clive Bell's description of his computerized "development game", while at the end.
Dr. Hans Singer returns us to the question of development activities on the ground, with his review of Professor Albert Hirschman's Development Projects Observed. We are happy also to publish Lord Balogh's reply to the views of Harry Johnson and Enoch Powell published in our symposium on development aid in the October issue of the Bulletin.
