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RURAL DEVELOPMENT

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 RURAL DEVELOPMENT

Johannes Aldrin Timbuleng

Universitas Katolik De La Salle Manado

Introduction
It has been argued that rural development is the key to meeting the Millennium
Development Goal (MDG) on poverty reduction (IFAD 2004). Statistic shows that
about three quarters of 1.2 billion people that live in extreme consumption poverty
works and living in rural areas (rural poverty report 2001, p. 1). Moreover, in these
poor rural areas, human development indicators have been continuously
deteriorated. Foege (2000) reports that more than 900,000 children under five still
die each year from measles; Neonatal tetanus kills 200,000 each year; 370,000
under-fives die from whooping cough and 50,000 from tuberculosis per year; Half of
all pregnant women are not immunized against maternal tetanus, which kills 30,000
women every year. The other 30,000 young children die every day caused by a
major earthquake. Besides, the statistical evidence issued by the Joint United
Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimates that over half of the 28 million
people living with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa live in rural areas (FAO, 2002).
These statistics indicate that a negligence of rural areas is a global phenomenon. It is
reflected by the absence of infrastructures and basic services such as health services
as well as limitations of job opportunities. Foege (2000) perfectly pictures such
conditions by saying that “They die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth,
far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and
weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.”

The concern of development thinkers as well as institutions such as IFAD, UNDP,

UNFPA and the World Bank is that the poor rural condition will encourage if not
impose migration from rural to urban areas in search of better living. Urban life
attracts the rural people since it offers the promise of a multitude of economic and
social advantages, including employment availability, whether in the formal or

Lasallian Journal, Vol. 6 No. 1, Februari 2009. 1

informal sector (Deen 2008). They also seek to have access to better health care, a
wide range of social services as well as educational opportunities (Deen 2008). It is
not surprising that in 2008 more than half world human population or about 3.3
billion people will be living in urban areas. It is projected that by 2030 urban
population will reach 5 billion (UNFPA 2007). The growth of urban population in
developing countries is faster than developed countries. From only 27% in 1975, it
increased to 40% in 2000. By 2030 the developing countries will be 56% urban or
will be inhabited by 4 billion people (Population reports, 2002). The increasing
number of urban population will have impact in world’s poverty condition. There
will be a shift from rural poor to urban poor. By 2035 urban areas will be the home
to the majority of world’s poor (Deen 2008).

From the explanation above, it could be argued that there are two main reasons for
improving the live of the people in the countryside. The first is humanity reason.
People should be treated equally regardless its gender and political, social,
economical, geographical as well as cultural background. The second is to prevent
the proliferation of poverty and other social problems. It is evident that rural to
urban migration has caused serious problem such as an increasing number of poor
people and social problems such as crime rates. Moreover, the fact that about 1250
million people in the Third World dependent on agriculture (Webster 1990, p. 22)
then it is obvious that shortages of food or famine is also one possible threat of rural
urban migration. It is for these reasons rural development has become a main
concern of international community. A large number of programs and projects had
been implemented for this purpose but the reality showed unexpected outcomes.
Rural poverty remains unperceived. This paper seeks to discuss what Robert
Chambers calls ‘rural development tourism’ and the biases that keep rural poverty
unobserved. It begins with providing some theoretical background that has caused
rural neglect. It further explains a recent approach to development and then it
discusses the notion of rural development tourism. Some conclusions are presented
in last part of this paper.

Lasallian Journal, Vol. 6 No. 1, Februari 2009. 2

Rural Neglect in Development Theories
Rural backwardness is rooted from development approaches that put inadequate
attention on rural areas. Development strategies during the 1950s and 1960s was
marked by excessive roles of central government and focused on increasing growth.
Therefore, the role of development policy, in this period, was to facilitate the biggest
possible extraction out of agricultural and rural resources to promote
industrialization and urbanization (Boothroyd & Nam 2000). It was also seen as a
transformation process from traditional to modern society by adopting Western
countries experience (Hulme and Turner p. 34). According to this school of thought,
agricultural sectors were only a means to promote industrialization and support
growth policy (Bruce Johnston and John Mellor, Simon Kuznets in Boothroyd &
Nam 2000). Moreover, W. Arthur Lewis’ in his theory of unlimited supplies of labor
argues that national development strategies to promote industrial development could
be accommodated by shifting farmers to factories (cited in Buckland 2006, p. 10).
Shifting workers from agriculture to industry could promote industrialization.
Experiences from developing countries, however, showed that during the 1960s and
1970s high rates of growth of per capita income did not have significant impact in
employment, equality, and the real incomes of the bottom 40% of their population
(Todaro, 1994, p. 15). Gordon (cited in Townsend and Gordon, 2002 p. 54) points
out the evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa, South America and in the countries of
the former Soviet Union in which growth policies have resulted in terrible
consequences such as the increasing number of poor people. Besides, Brookfield
(1975, p. 50) shows facts from Latin America where income inequality is widening;
unemployment remains high and great numbers of people are destitute, or living
only at a most basic subsistence level.

The development priority then changed in the period of 1970s and early 1980s
toward promoting more equitable distribution of the benefits of development,
reducing disparities in income and wealth between urban and rural areas and among
regions, and increasing the productivity and income of the poor (Rondinelli in Smith
1992, p. 103). This shift, unfortunately, only in a level of rhetoric or it was

Lasallian Journal, Vol. 6 No. 1, Februari 2009. 3

unattainable in the prevailing global context (Turner and Hulme, 2003, p. 6). The
reality is that the number of Least Developed Countries (LDCs) had been
continuously increasing (WIPO, 2008). Starting from only 24 countries in 1971, the
number of LDC’ rose to 38 countries in 1986 and then increased to 50 countries in
2005. Four out of 50 LDCs are in Africa, 15 are in Asia and the Pacific, and 1 is in
the Latin American and Caribbean region. It is important to note that in LDCs poor
people is concentrated in rural areas. UN-OHRLLS (2008) states three quarters of
the world's poor (more than 900 million people) live in rural areas, and over 70 per
cent of them make their living from agriculture and rural activities. Apart from
theoretical debates of what has gone wrong in the development approaches, this fact
indicates a failure of development strategies proposed by some school of thought
such as Neo-liberalism and Structuralism (Siddiquee, 2008) to promote equitable
outcomes to the entire society.

Recent Approach to Rural Development

Distributing wealth and income equitably is a moral concern of neo-populist school
of thought (Hulme and Turner 1990, p. 59). It proposes alternative development
approaches in terms of analytical and normative aspects. As explained by Kitching,
the neo-populist focuses on ‘‘small-scale enterprise, on the retention of a peasant
agriculture and of non-agricultural petty commodity production, and a world of
villages and small towns rather than large industrial cities (cited in Hulme and
Turner, p. 58)”. It is obvious that this perspective is aimed to response to the
previous development approaches that have failed to distribute the benefit of
development equally particularly to the people living in the countryside. This
perspective also proposes community participation as a normative aspect of
development. By participation, the problems of rural neglect and gender biases
created by existing development approaches could be overcome (Ingham 1993, p.
1810).

Lasallian Journal, Vol. 6 No. 1, Februari 2009. 4

In this sense, the notion of participation has actually straightforwardly attacked the
heart of market model approach promoted by the Modernization and the Neo-
liberalism school of thought. It has also criticized the state domination promoted by
the Structuralism. Neo-populist, thus, proposes a third way or alternative mode of
development by emphasizing the importance of people participation in solving their
own problems. Through some of its influential writers such as Robert Chambers and
Schumacher, the concept of ‘development from below’ or ‘participatory
development’ has gained significant support and to some extent influenced the
policies of international community particularly development institutions. UN-
OHRLLS (2008), for example, states that its goal to empower the poor and
marginalized can only be achieved through a participatory process and by listening
to the voices of the poor and involving their organizations. Putting people at the
centre of development is the first step to enabling the rural poor to take their destiny
into their own hands.

Rural Development Tourism

The term rural development tourism is actually one of Chambers’ basis arguments to
support the concept of participatory development. Through his works, it can be seen
that Chambers has been consistently advocating this conception as a means to ensure
that development programs and projects will have impacts to the intended
beneficiaries, the poorest of the poor. Chambers wrote in Challenging the
Professions (1993 p. 9) that the main consequence of the intellectual narrowness that
results from specialization and scholarly isolationism is a failure to allow the
meaningful inclusion of indigenous experience and knowledge (cited in MacKenzie
2002). Chambers, in this sense, criticizes the existing top-down development
approaches promoted both by the Neo-liberalism and Structuralism and at the same
time underlines the importance of involving the people knowledge and experience in
solving problems. Participation, thus, will not only help in providing adequate
knowledge and information but also solution to the real problem faced by the
society. By not having sufficient data and evidences, the policy outcomes will very

Lasallian Journal, Vol. 6 No. 1, Februari 2009. 5

probably not be accepted by the intended beneficiaries. Or it simply cannot work
according to the stated objectives.

As a development theorist cum practitioner, Chambers has a huge number of

evidence about the failure of rural development projects that have been initiated by
both national governments and international development institutions. A large
number of literature also shows a similar trend. Africa, for example, receives US$ 6
billion in technical assistance each year but they still have the lowest level of human
development in the world (UNDP 1991, p. 57). Binns, Hill, & Nel (1995) argue that
past rural development strategies have failed to raise living standards significantly in
African rural communities since they have typically adopted centrally driven, top-
down approaches, often failing to appreciate the skills, perceptions, knowledge and
aspirations of intended beneficiaries. Moreover, International Fund for Agricultural
Development (IFAD) has provided LDCs with USD 2.6 billion to finance projects
with a total investment cost of USD 6.4 billion in the past 25 years. There are a total
of 258 IFAD projects in LDCs, which account for more than 40 percent of IFAD's
annual lending. This translates into a total of USD 200 million going to LDCs
annually. IFAD has also committed USD 463 million in grants to support research-
for-development programs, many of them involving LDC countries (UN-OHRLLS,
2008). In reality, poverty incidence in LDCs has become worst. There are also many
other examples of such programs failing to reach the poor, particularly those living
in remoter rural areas

Chambers explains that the above phenomenon is caused by incomplete, very partial
and inappropriate evidences collected to formulate development policy. There is a
strong argument that one of the key reasons for the failure of many rural
development approaches stems from the fact that they are derived from
inappropriate methodologies which have failed to fully understand the dynamics of
rural life. It is because, rural development is initiated by outsiders who are neither
rural nor poor (1983, p.2). For the outsiders which he also calls urban-based
professionals, the major source of direct experience of rural life is rural development

Lasallian Journal, Vol. 6 No. 1, Februari 2009. 6

tourism, the phenomenon of the brief rural visit (1983, p. 10). Chambers argues that
such a visit is not adequate to have a clear and comprehensive understanding about
the real conditions of rural life. Rather, it is a subject of anecdote and an object of
shame (1983, p. 10). The rural poor are scanned in misleading surveys, smoothed
out in statistical averages, and moulded into stereotypes. All these lead to the
imbalance evidence for drawing a complete and clear picture of rural conditions
(1983, p. 106). To fully capture the rural life, its problems and changing reality,
those who concern with rural development should continuously learn and unlearn, to
be in touch and keep up to date (Chambers 2006, p. 8). Dialogues, learning from the
people are some sorts of tools to recognize the five clusters of disadvantage of poor
people. Those are not only poverty, but also physical weakness, isolation,
vulnerability and powerlessness (Chambers 1983, p. 110).

Chambers (1983, pp. 13-22; 2006, pp. 28-32) identifies several biases that keep rural
poverty unobserved. The first is spatial biases that include urban, tarmac and
roadside. Most learning about rural condition is mediated by vehicles. Urban bias
concentrates rural visits near towns and especially near capital cities and large
administrative centers while tarmac and roadside biases direct attention towards
those who are less poor and away from those who are poorer. In this sense, the
poorest rural people that are mainly concentrated in the remoter area will remain
unseen since it is hard to be reached either by vehicles or foot. Chambers (2006, p.
17) shows some examples in which the poorest rural people live in remoter areas,
such as: north eastern Brazil, Zambia away from the line of rail, lower Ukambani in
Kenya, the Tribal districts of central India, the hills of Nepal. The second is project
bias in which those concerned with rural development and with rural research
become linked to networks of urban-rural projects. The third is person biases. It
consists of elite bias, male bias, user and adopter biases, active, present and living
biases. Those are usually the main source of information in rural area for rural
development tourism. The fourth is dry season biases. The most difficult time of the
year in the poor rural area is usually wet season. Food is short, food prices are high,
work is hard, and infections are prevalent. Malnutrition, morbidity and mortality all

Lasallian Journal, Vol. 6 No. 1, Februari 2009. 7

rise, while body weights decline. The poorer people, women and children are
particularly vulnerable. In short, this is the time when poor people are most likely to
become poorer and the urban based professionals are unlikely to visit. The fifth is
diplomatic biases. Urban-based visitors are often deterred by combination of
politeness and timidity from approaching, meeting and listening to and learning from
the poorer people. The sixth is professional biases. Professional training, values and
interest make it hard for observers to understand the linkages of deprivation. The
seventh is security bias (see Chambers 2006, p. 28). Considerations of security
discourage or exclude visits to areas where the visitor might not be safe.

There are several important points highlighted by Chambers in the preceding

explanation. He, first, refuses top-down approaches. In order to get more rigorous
and comprehensive assessment of rural poverty situations the urban-based
professionals should work it out in cooperation with the poorest of the poor. This
indicates that it will be needed redefinition of roles both the development agencies
(government agencies, aid workers, researchers, etc.) and the poor itself. Both have
important roles in determining the outcomes of development. The more the poor get
involved entire the development processes the more likely they grasp the benefits of
development. Second, Chambers emphasizes that through the processes, every single
individual is an important sources of information. No one can be excluded since
each of them has their own problems that cannot be generalized. Besides, every
people have knowledge and experiences that might be useful. Third, Chambers
points out that development is a never-ending project. Since the reality and condition
of the poor continuously changing, the development agencies should keep in touch
with the poor in order to get up-to-dated information.

Even though in his conception Chambers underlines the importance of the poor
people’s experiences, knowledge, and capacity to solve problems, he puts heavy
emphasis to the outsiders to help it comes through. This is interesting as well as
challenging idea since most of the outsiders are relied on limited funds provided
either by government or donors. How could they afford to finance this very high cost

Lasallian Journal, Vol. 6 No. 1, Februari 2009. 8

projects? It is obvious that Chambers would like to stress that a pure development
needs highly committed people as well as institutions. Therefore, he does not take
into account the obstacles that could come from domestic political condition as well
as religious and cultural values. He does aware about those barriers but for him those
who concern with the poorest of the poor should take actions regardless the potential
threats that they could face. They are workers without boundaries. Rather then
asking them to politely cooperate with the host countries’ officials, he provides some
tips to strategically deal with narrow-minded government officials (see Chambers
2006). This is a very radical view if compared, for example, with Sen’s view about
the importance of developing and strengthening a democratic system as an essential
component of the process of development (1999, p.157).

Conclusion
Rural development has become the major concern of international community for
humanity reason and for the purpose of preventing the proliferation of poverty and
the other social problems such as criminality and famine. Rural backwardness is, to
some extent, caused by the existing development approaches which are typically
top-down and in favor of city rather than countryside. Such policies have widened
the rural-urban gap and led to a rampant urbanization. A large number of rural
development programs and projects implemented have failed to improve the quality
of rural life and rural poverty remains unobserved. In the crossroad of development
theory, populism and neo-populist present a new approach to development in terms
of analytical and normative aspects. These schools advocate community
involvement in the development process. Each person is seen as a capable entity. Its
values, cultures, experiences and knowledge are all valuable for help reshaping their
community which has been destroyed by existing development strategies. Chambers
shares a faith with populism and neo-populist. However, Chambers offers more
practical rather than theoretical perspectives. Chambers assumes that the failure to
improve rural life is caused by inadequate evidence used to assess the real condition
of the rural people since it is based only on a wrong generalization. There are several
biases that according to Chambers hinder the efforts to generate comprehensive

Lasallian Journal, Vol. 6 No. 1, Februari 2009. 9

understanding of the rural poverty conditions: spatial, project, person, dry season,
diplomatic, professional and security biases.

To get a more comprehensive understanding about the rural poverty conditions,

there are several factors that need to get serious attention. Comprehensive, in this
sense, refers to Chambers’ five clusters of disadvantages: poverty, physical
weakness, isolation, vulnerability and powerlessness. The first is a need of changing
paradigm for those who work with the poor (the outsiders). Top-down development
approach is no longer suitable since it has failed for many times to promote
wellbeing. The new approach is a bottom-up approach. It requires more
commitment, times, finance, and the other things depend on a field needs. The
second is the experience and knowledge of the rural poor is really mater in creating a
right approaches or strategies to overcome problems. The main idea is that each
people have capacity to deal with their own condition, problem, etc. In this regard,
the role of outsiders must be redefined as facilitator rather than initiator. Facilitator
should help guiding the poor recognize those disadvantages through intensive
dialogues. In so doing, the outsiders also learn about the problems of poor people. It
will give the outsiders clear perspectives about the problems faced by the poor. The
third is no one can be excluded. Every single individual regardless its gender,
isolation, poverty and social status, religion is a very important source of
information. They all are also important sources of learning.

Lasallian Journal, Vol. 6 No. 1, Februari 2009. 10

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