414 Book Reviews

The book gives a comprehensive introduction to current thinking on the management of the water resource. It will be most useful to those involved in the various fragments of the sector who need to view their resource more holistically. They, and those who have recognized the importance of altering consumptive behaviour, have to look further into the application of the various instruments, and the necessary institutional and legal reforms. The book is a useful primer for those concerned with water.

JAMIE MORRISON Department of Agricultural Economics,

Wye College, University of London

CHALLENGING THE PROFESSIONS: FRONTIERS OF RURAL DEVELOPMENT Robert Chambers Intermediate Technology Publications, London, 1993, 143 pp.

Robert Chambers is well enough known in the rural development world for it to be unnecessary for this review to expound in detail on content. In this volume he brings together a number of papers that he has published over the years around a central theme, expressed in the title, Challenging the Professions. ‘The theme is that “we”, who call ourselves professionals, are much of the problem, and to do better requires reversals of much of what we regard as normal.’

The theme has indeed been central. In his early material-a part of Managing Rural Develop- ment, first published in 1974-he sought to reverse the biases of the rural development planning cadres of which he was a part, promoting ‘optimizing and not maximizing’, opportunity-based intervention rather than problem orientation, and empirical as against theoretical commitment. The middle chapters, written in the 1980s from a research base, reflect the ‘putting people first’ theme which he made his own, with two well-known papers on health and on farming. These concern seasonal differences, poverty, cooking practices, kinds of environment (hilly or flat) and other ‘obvious’ features of rural peoples lives of which professionals did not then take much account, but surely now do.

The later chapters spring out of Chambers’ NGO phase, displaying the excitement that he has experienced in being associated with the growth, and expanding influences of NGOs i n South Asia. This context suits him. It also suits the ‘new professionalism’ he now advocates and contrasts with the ‘normal professionalism’ that he associates with big projects, major donors and routine government. NGOs can allow for diversity, for smallness, activity at the periphery of society, organic processes, subsistence links and other aspects of ‘low’ techno- logy. NGOs are also showing that they can network and learn rapidly. Whether this means that professionals who are brought up in this environment will be able to make the ‘new’ into a new ‘normal’ and whether these new norms will make a difference in rural development we will have to wait and see. In Chapter 8 he suggests that it will.

Although it has been published twice before I confess that I had not previously read his last chapter, about the changing role of the state in rural development. He does not usually write at this level of generality and is apologetic. ‘Given the centralization of power and communications with which we live, we have to generalize; not to do so is to generalize by default (p. 107)’. Then he neatly labels and contrasts the aims, philosophies and practices of the neo-Fabians of the 1970s and the neo-liberals of the 1980s before asserting for the future a counter ideology of reversals ‘of location, learning, location, values, control, authority and power, to put first the poor and the periphery’ (p. 110). It is a piece that my students will certainly read.

To be a moral enthusiast for good practice in rural development and yet a constant and intelligent commentator upon it, is an art that Chambers achieved early and has sustained over the years. It is useful to see these key pieces of his work brought together in a volume whose size and price is acceptable for the practitioner.

DONALD CURTIS The University of Birmingham