Rural community development: What sort of social change?

Abstract

In rural development it is accepted that many rural problems derive from the way decisions are made. Rural Community Councils play an intermediary role and their community development is geared not only to changing communities, but even more to changing the ways authorities operate. But how do their field officers do this? It is argued that field officers work in a local, national and international context which shapes expectations of their role and of the outcome of their work. Their rhetoric of community development is often more radical than the context would seem to allow. Out of the tension between context and rhetoric, the actual practice of community workers is negotiated. Changes in the context, rhetoric and practice of community development are traced through three phases in the 1970s and 1980s. A case study of a village with a failed water supply examines the way the author, as a community worker, negotiated her practice. It shows the limitations on putting into practice a rhetoric of empowerment and participatory development which sought to change the way authorities relate to residents.