Rural development : problems and practices

Two things stand out from the papers collected in this volume. The first is that rural development is a key concept in contemporary rural studies. The second is that no agreement exists as to what development as a process, as a goal or as a perceived achievement actually is. The ubiquity and generality of the term has deprived it of specific meaning.

It is a bold author who entitles his book 'Rural Development'. What, after all, is 'rural development'? Is it a field of study and research? Is it a form of state in tervention to promote the well being of rural people, or is it something which is happening anyway no me what the academics or the bureaucrats des? (Rese

1983, p.27)

The term has the ideological fickeness of words such as progress and revolution Although for the outspoken Leonard Frank it has become a debauched word (1995) p.231), it is surely still a fal word, describing specific processes of betterment and positive change which in rural areas are frequently associated with a move away from dependence on agriculture as a principal employer (Paartberg 1990, Arkleton Trust 1993), From the general age, 's lary thinker's catch all term (Welch 1984, p.4 to the specific, supporting groups in a village or neighbourhood which set up local activities and tackle local issues (Taylor 1986, p.5), development means a wide var iety of different things but like basic education or equal opportunity, it is an ideal that no one has the temerity to disclaim or define" (Barth and Gale 1982)

Perhaps the best way for us to proceed here is to offer a tentative definition and then subject it to subsequent qualification. Our starting point therefore is that devel Apment is an ongoing and essentially interventionist process of qualitative, quantita tive and/or distributional change leading to some degree of betterment for groups of people. Such a definition raises four points)

The first point concerns the notion of development as a process. Although the ef ficacy of development may be judged in terms of differences between the 'pre-de veloped and "developed community or region (to use the two most common development arenas in the context of western development studies), development it self is a gestalt process (Ball 1974) involving any number of components which, taken individually, may not in themselves constitute development. They are simply the means by which the process operates (Copp 1972), though this is often forgotten by those involved in development policy formulation (as pointed out by Lumb, this vol ume).

This itself has a number of implications. The definition of the length and end-point of the processes is fraught with difficulty and is often subject to political interpreta tion, as Grieco's paper in this volume demonstrates. Furthermore, as a process, de velopment must be sustainable