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Development in Practice
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Sustainable development at
the sharp end
Cecile Jackson
Published online: 09 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Cecile Jackson (1997) Sustainable development at the sharp end,
Development in Practice, 7:3, 237-247, DOI: 10.1080/09614529754477
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Introduction
The direction of much modern social theory
suggests that in development studies we may have
been rather too structuralist in our approaches to
development policy, programmes, and projects:
too concerned with the formal, the planned, the
intended, too willing to see institutions as sets of
rules and procedures (Giddens 1984; Clay and
Schaffer 1984; Long and Long 1992; Booth
1994). Current interest in agency-oriented and
actor-oriented analysis of social change suggests,
on the other hand, a different vision: of a mutual
determination between individual action and
social structures, of choice, resistance and
struggle, of the power of the apparently weak, of
the multiplicity and contingency of perceptions of
reality, of the negotiated character of develop-
ment outcomes rather than the imposition of
policy. The implications for development practice
include the questioning of the degree to which
development plans and policy can ever be
‘implemented’ in a straightforward way, or the
degree to which outcomes relate to intentions; a
lesser emphasis on designs, plans, blueprints, and
rules and a greater emphasis on enlisting support,
often via participation, for shared development
aims, on changing attitudes and work cultures so
that agency becomes an opportunity rather than a
(subversive) constraint. There is a special interest
here in the particular experience of the ‘street
level bureaucrat’ (Lipsky 1980), i.e. the person
who is at the direct interface of project with
people, and the ways in which this shapes their
agency, their choices, their interpretations and
strategies, and thereby actively shapes the project.
There has been a widespread recognition of the
importance of the work cultures, conditions, and
relationships of this person, often on the lowest
rung of the organisation in terms of status and
authority but capable of making, or breaking, a
project (Wade 1992, Goetz 1996). Curiously,
Manufacturing and consuming knowledge
2371364-9213 © Oxfam UK and Ireland 1997
Sustainable development at the sharp end:
field-worker agency in a participatory project
Cecile Jackson
This paper takes an actor-oriented approach to understanding the significance for policy and
practice of field-worker experience at the interface between project and people. It is set in the
context of an Indian project which aims to reduce poverty through sustainable, participatory
agricultural change, based on low-cost inputs, catalysed by village-based project staff. Diaries
kept by such staff are analysed to reveal how the social position of field-workers enables and
constrains their interactions within and without the project, and the ways in which ‘street level
bureaucrats’ shape projects through their discretionary actions. They show the Village Motivators
struggling to communicate project objectives, to establish their roles and distinguish themselves
from other village-level bureaucrats, to negotiate participation, to overcome hostility to Partici-
patory Rural Appraisal, to arbitrate access to consultants and seniors, to interpret project
objectives and lobby for changes in these without admission of failure, and finally to develop a
shared vocabulary of participation and belief in success. Some of the implications for partici-
patory approaches are that there may be significant contradictions between sustainability and
participatory development.
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however, participatory thinking often casts the
field-worker as desirably passive, responding to
the initiatives of villagers but not imposing his or
her own subjectivity. This notion of the field-
worker is unrealistic (for no person can efface his
or her identity in such a way), and is a potentially
costly illusion.
The project context
This paper is a reflection on some social-
development issues which have arisen in the first
five years of the Rain-fed Farming Project (RFP),
Eastern India, funded by ODA.
1
The RFP started
in 1989 in three States (Orissa, Bihar, and West
Bengal) and was conceived as a project which
would ‘develop a new approach for the
development of rain-fed areas, specifically
incorporating the principles of poverty focus,
participation, minimum subsidy and the
involvement of women’ (ODG, 1995: i). The
analysis of the failure of the green revolution to
benefit rain-fed areas mainly emphasised the
inability of poor farmers to adopt crop
technologies requiring a high input of cash,
except where adoption has been induced by heavy
subsidies (by which was meant resources offered
to farmers at below cost). Genuine participation,
and sustainability, were seen in terms of farmer
adoption without subsidies (ODG, 1995: 1). The
project aimed to focus on the needs of resource-
poor farmers, on development without recourse
to subsidies, with the full involvement of women
in all aspects of the development process.
Participation was conceived as villagers playing
‘a full part in the choice, testing, and development
of innovations ... {as} the surest way of arriving at
low-cost technologies appropriate to villagers’
own circumstances’ (ODG, 1995:1).
The structure of the project was based on a
team consisting of a Cluster Agronomist (CA)
and a Village Motivator (VM) covering each
cluster of two or three villages, located in the
poorest parts of eight poor districts. Each district
was coordinated by a District Agronomist (DA),
and each of the three States had a Senior
Motivator (SM). A Women in Development
(WID) cell was established at the Bihar
headquarters in Ranchi, and at the head office in
Calcutta there were subject specialists (crops,
soils, agro-forestry), as well as a participation
specialist (over a short period), staff engaged in
monitoring and evaluation (M&E), and the
Project Manager. The CAs were older than the
VMs, and had technical skills or qualifications.
The analysis here is based on interviews with
field-staff of RFP, carried out on two visits to the
project, and on the detailed daily records kept in
three field-worker diaries over a period of three to
five years. The diaries were kept by all VMs and
are official, in that staff were asked by project
management to keep them. Thus they are not
explicitly personal and what was written in them
no doubt reflected the expectation (at least at the
beginning of their employment) that they would
be read by their superiors. In practice they were
almost never read, however: only two comments
(both by consultants not project managers) were
found in one of the three diaries, to indicate that
anyone had read it. The diary became a useful
record for the VM of activities and discussions
and, at times, an outlet for frustrations and
concerns which give insights into the field-
workers’ experience and the operation of the
project. VMs were in a structurally weak position
within the project and yet, I shall argue, their
position at the interface gave them considerable
influence in shaping what the project was to
become.
The diaries used in this paper refer to three
clusters, two in Bihar and one in West Bengal.
They are referred to as cluster A and B (both in
Hazaribagh District of Bihar) and C (in Purulia
District of West Bengal); information from
diaries is referenced by location and date.
2
The
diaries contain a wide range of material: accounts
of on-going project activities; the thoughts and
experiences of the VMs; notes on meetings and
conversations with villagers; brief reports on
items of research. They were kept daily (or
nearly) and reveal a ‘blow by blow’ account of the
making of a project. The material has had to be
used selectively; here I have selected that which
illuminates the subject position of VMs. All three
of these diaries were kept by men. I have
elsewhere (Jackson 1997) examined the gender-
related aspects of the experiences of VMs and
participators at this project interface.
Cecile Jackson
238
Development in Practice, Volume 7, Number 3, August 1997
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Sustainability was conceived as necessary in
environmental, social, and political terms. Doing
sustainable poverty-reduction through the RFP
involved no or minimal subsidies, since low-
external-input agriculture was seen as both
environmentally sustainable and socially
sustainable, since a subsidy-dependent activity
cannot endure in poor areas in the absence of State
or project intervention. This approach had a
number of implications for field-staff. One is that
the project tends to be self-targeting towards the
poor, since better-off farmers can gain little from
direct participation; for example seed quantities
distributed are less than a kilogram. Another
benefit is that the absence of subsidy allows RFP
to remain free from the unwanted attentions of the
panchayats (elected councils covering groups of
five villages), in States where political rivalry at
local level results in attempts to monopolise
projects for the benefit of particular groups. The
absence of subsidised inputs, however, also
makes the work of the VM and CA more difficult,
for all other development organisations do offer at
least payment for labour.
Institutional sustainability was, at the project-
design stage, seen as best approached through
working with a State-funded institution, such as
the Hindustani Fertiliser Corporation (HFC),
with permanent staff seconded to work on the
RFP. However, such organisations were in the
process of being overtaken by history — in the
form of economic liberalisation — and HFC has
now been replaced by KRIBHCO, a marketing
cooperative with western Indian roots, as the
management organisation; in this organisation
almost all staff are on short-term contracts.
3
The position of the VM at the interface of the
project with village society means that s/he is the
person who brokers the deals whereby project and
participants cooperate in activities; who interprets
the project to the people and vice versa; who
negotiates differences of opinion; who enlists
people into project activities and allows the
project to be enlisted into their agendas; who
manages the interlocking of the perceived
interests of the project and the people. The VM is
therefore vitally important to the project and also
carries a peculiar burden of interpretation, being
part of two worlds.
The next section describes the shape of the
VMs’ experience over the first few years of the
project, how they enlisted participants and
implemented the poverty focus, and the contra-
dictions faced at the sharp end.
Field-worker identity
One of the insights gained from studying the VM
diaries is how, over time, a project is shaped
through the accumulation of daily interactions of
staff and participants. All the diaries record the
initial encounters with the poor tribal and low-
caste communities in which the VMs went to live,
and the problems of communicating what the
project was, and who they were, across the divides
of language, culture, education, and class. All
mention the hostility, the fear, and the confusion
between themselves and the villagers. The VM in
cluster A mentions one very common problem
when explaining the trial programme: ‘Most of
the farmers are afraid ... they were saying that
their land may be taken away’ (A, 9 June 1989).
Fear and suspicion are vividly recorded by the
VM in cluster B, who wrote in December 1991,
when he first went to live there: ‘In Borogora
farmers simply refused to speak to me.’ People
ask about his real work and do not believe his
account of the RFP; he sadly notes: ‘I felt it bad’
(H, 30 December 1991). The people in Borogora
were still refusing to talk to him by the end of
January 1992, and he records that he went and
helped them harvest mustard for a whole day, at
the end of which he writes with relief: ‘Mr
Makadeo Munda smiled.’ A few days later they
speak to him a little about their declining maize
yields, but on his next visit they confront him with
a rejection, saying ‘We don’t want anyone to
come into our village.’ One older person says:
‘We are illiterate and can’t read anything so I shall
not be able to know what you are writing.’ In
despair the VM writes: ‘I was standing where I
had started!’ He offered to write nothing. At the
end of February the VM records the following
exchanges:
Today I went to Badka Karam and they asked me
a series of questions. They asked me ‘Are you from
missionaries?’ I said no. I am from HFC who
make fertilisers. They looked happy and said
Sustainable development at the sharp end
239Development in Practice, Volume 7, Number 3, August 1997
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‘Well give me a packet of fertiliser’. Then again I
told that I am not giving you any fertilisers simply
I want to improve your cultivation by good seeds.
Then one young man told ‘Oh you are VLW!
4
I
said no. He looked a bit confused.
VMs encountered considerable resistance and
fear, and faced real problems in explaining their
identity. They needed to establish a new kind of
relationship with villagers which had few
parallels; it was not based on authority or on hand-
outs: it demanded cooperation and trust of a
stranger, from people who had little reason to
believe the promises of educated and privileged
‘outsiders’. The comments recorded in the
diaries, and the time and effort taken to open up
communication, raise a large question mark over
any expectations that poor village people
willingly divulge truthful and accurate
information in one-off ‘participatory’ research
exercises, and suggests that project initiation is a
lengthy process. The VM of cluster B writes of the
problems of identity and communication as
follows:
In these 8 months I find that to make one’s identity
like government official is very easy. Like
whenever I went to any village they gave me a cot
to sit on and offered water to drink. But as far as
project philosophy is concerned one has to make
rapport ... (and) they should start coming with
their own ideas. To charge them to speak
something of their own is time taking. (B, 27
February 1992)
He recognises too, with the word ‘charge’ that he
requires them to communicate and participate.
Clearly village people tried to fit the VM into the
role of one of the familiar cast of characters,
known if not loved, in rural India. The cast may
vary from State to State: in West Bengal, where
the peasant vote is courted by politicians, the VM
was suspected for a long time of being a politician
(some saw his beard as conclusive evidence), a
suspicion far from the minds of Biharis, whose
democratic clout is largely irrelevant to local
politics. These records of first encounters suggest
that, even with well-trained and committed staff, a
minimal interaction and degree of trust are
difficult and slow to establish. The formative
experiences of VMs left them rather desperate to
get something going, in a weak bargaining
position, and disinclined to make too much of the
poverty focus.
Mutual enrolment by field-workers
and participants
The VM diaries also show the early staking out of
positions by actors. The explanations by the VM
of the project objectives and the perception by
villagers of the dependence of the VM on their
cooperation are glimpsed in other comments,
such as when a VM records the persistent,
explicit, and almost threatening demands for
water from villagers: ‘Farmers said “If you want
to develop, give me well, otherwise nothing can
be done”’ (B, December 1991). The tenacity of
farmers’ demands for irrigation is remarkable in
all areas: in cluster A, after three years of project
involvement, a note in the diary for 3 October
1992 shows that farmers are still asking for pumps
and check dams.
The process of mutual enrolment, by
persuasion and by threat, eventually involves
some kind of compromise in areas of shared
interest, but it takes some time to get there. Most
VMs faced a double challenge: the misconception
that they had more resources on offer than they in
fact could command, and the mismatch between
what they actually had to offer, given the project
objectives, and what emerged from open
discussions with villagers. In discussions of
needs, most villagers expressed their wish for
irrigation facilities (for example, A, 16 December
1989 and C, 28 April 1992), yet the RFP was
committed to crop technologies for dryland
development. The RFP agreed with villagers that
rain-fed areas were poor because they lacked
irrigation, but differed in that the RFP seemed to
view irrigation as costly, inequitable, and
physically unfeasible for the majority of farmers.
The persistent expressions of desire for irrigation
reflect the social status of many of those who
initially approached, or communicated with, the
VM. The VM resistance to enrolment in demands
for irrigation was necessary, given the project’s
focus on poverty, but not comfortable, given the
feeling that the project should respond to
Cecile Jackson
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expressed needs. The apparent contradictions
between elements of the project approach have to
be resolved by the VM. How does a VM decline
enrolment in a villagers’ project? One example is
recorded for cluster A, where a check dam was
being demanded: the VM explained to people that
‘The paths will be shown to them and they will
have to walk on that path by themselves’ (A, 5
May 1989). How to decline, though, is probably
less difficult than the decisions over what to
decline.
Project enrolment involved a number of
different kinds of participant relations. There
were (at least) the relations with the ordinary
project participants, and those with people who
became brokers and facilitators with a closer
involvement and a shared sense of responsibility.
Such ‘super-participants’ seemed to be people
who became friends at a personal level with the
VM, or who were especially cooperative
individuals who placed a high value on their
connections with the project. It would be too
crude to suggest that such people were only the
powerful, conspiring to turn the project to their
own ends; there were also those who had
enhanced their social standing through project
identification, or for whom the visits of
consultants (for there is no doubt that visitors tend
to see the same people when they visit) validated
their own idea of themselves, or who simply liked
and got on well, at a personal level, with the VM.
Friends of field-workers are seldom from the
opposite sex, nor do they tend to cross other major
social divides.
Over time, the project and the people, or a
selection of them, increasingly accommodate
themselves to what is known of the other, and
each becomes skilled in representing their wishes
in ways which are likely to be more acceptable.
For example, in cluster C, farmers learned the
discourse of participation and, after four years of
the project’s existence, presented a suggestion for
the purchase of crop-spraying equipment as
something ‘which will help in group action ... a
sprayer can play a vital role in establishing
harmony’ (C, 28 November 1993). The ‘harmony
and group action’ card was played by these
farmers in an attempt to mitigate the
agrochemical-input and subsidy-dependent
aspects of their request, which are not favoured by
the project.
The growing conflation of the personal and
professional lives of the village-resident VMs
over time is an important feature of field-workers’
experience and behaviour. Living in the village
removes the usual separation between personal
and professional life to a large extent and has
considerable implications, which the diaries
reveal. The VM in cluster A learns about
corruption (A, 9 May 1989) in the withholding of
women’s wages by contractors, but is unable to do
anything about it; on other occasions he notes
social problems beyond his control. VMs struggle
to defend the boundaries of the personal, and to
cope with the discomforts of life and the small but
cumulative physical and mental privations of
village life. In cluster B, the VM explains that he
is so much in view that he cannot eat chicken
because it would be tactless, given the poverty of
the villagers and his wish to identify with them.
This becomes acute in drought years, and he
records after a bad year that ‘Farmers have
nothing to eat, whenever I go to them they ask for
food, so they can feed their children’ (B, October
1992). On other occasions he has a hard time
politely refusing offers of alcoholic drink from
tribals (27 January 1992). After the 1993 drought,
the VM writes that farmers are coming daily for
financial aid and that he ‘does not loan but where
he can he donates’ (19 April 1993). This is clearly
a stressful situation, shared by most VMs. As the
monsoon fails in cluster C, the VM writes
poignantly that ‘Everybody is looking to the sky
with blank eyes’ (C, 2 July 1991). Some VMs do
lend money to villagers in need, and at least one
took land in return for a loan, which he
commenced to farm.
Field-worker discretion
Field-worker discretion (Goetz 1996) allows the
shape of the project to be influenced, to varying
degrees, by the personal choices, opinions, and
behaviour of staff at the lowest level. Field-
worker discretion may be a question of selecting
what initiatives the field-worker responds to. The
discretionary element, the field-worker agency, is
often invisible (Wade 1992), for various reasons:
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the representation of discretionary choices as
determined by project policy, concealment of
various kinds, and the tendency for villagers to
collude in field-worker representations to
outsiders. Added to this is the dominant view in
participatory thinking of the field-worker as
relatively passive in relation to the active
participant. The tip of the discretionary iceberg is
seen in some of the field-worker activities which
were unsuccessful, in that they attracted a degree
of disapproval from other project staff. One direct
example is the action taken by a CA in West
Bengal who planted Shabita (a new paddy
variety) at the village tank, i.e. on intensively
managed lowland, despite the project emphasis
on rain-fed upland crops. He was rebuked by HFC
and no further lowland promotion took place;
nevertheless, the variety took off as a successful
lowland crop.
More indirectly, we get glimpses of field-
worker discretion which does not overtly
transgress project policy. In Orissa a District
Agronomist (DA), using his discretion, tried
unsuccessfully to get a canalisation scheme
funded by the Block Development Officer (BDO)
for a small group of farmers, including the
sarpanch (the head of the panchayat) of one
village. Both the DA and the CA complained
widely that the BDO had finally failed to approve
the scheme, claiming a corrupt reallocation to
another applicant. The CA and DA took a series of
visiting consultants to see the individual who was
to have been the main beneficiary of the scheme,
and thereby publicised what they saw as a good
initiative which the project (given the approach to
subsidies) was unable to support directly. They
made it clear that the project approach to such
cases, to assist in accessing State BDO funds,
failed as a result of the inefficiencies and
corruption of the State. Field-worker resistance to
the project’s approach to subsidies was greater
from the agronomists, who were trained within
different development paradigms, and who were
less concerned about the poverty focus than VMs
were. The persistent steerage of visitors to the
farmer who did not get the canalisation appeared
to be part of a lobbying campaign to bring the
issue to the attention of those who might help to
redirect the anti-subsidy policy through
conceding the value of the canalisation project,
the worthiness of the beneficiaries, and the
absence of alternatives indicated by the failure of
the application for BDO funding. Field-worker
discretion can amount to subversion. The use of
particular participants as regular contributors and
interviewees in consultancy visits is one means by
which field-workers can selectively represent
their work and lobby for changes in accepted
policy.
VM discretion is called into play particularly
in the tension between the poverty focus of the
project and the social pressures within villages
towards interaction with the more prosperous.
This took a number of forms: the problem of
residential location (whether to accept the
hospitality of the Mukiya — the village head); the
unwillingness of poor farmers to stick to agreed
locations of trial plots, or to share the seed of
successful varieties; the ethical dilemmas of the
risk of crop failure in experimentation with poor
farmers; the pressures from wealthier farmers for
seed, and their sneers at ‘crop neglect’ by poor
farmers. The diaries show VMs’ inclinations
towards a less rigid focus on poverty and their
rehearsal of arguments that ‘the project should
also include such surplus members who are
morally well enough to help the deficit group’ (A,
26 June 1991). Discretion in this direction was
also exercised in the enthusiasm for ‘block
planting groups’ which involved all contiguous
farmers (of whatever status) planting together,
and in the manipulation of wealth-ranking, which
was carried out so loosely as to classify the vast
majority (some 80 per cent) of many villages as
deficit, i.e. as the target group.
Overall, the diaries show that the VMs
substantially influenced the course of events in
the specific project experiences in the three
States, but in a complex way, both defending and
conceding the poverty focus, depending on
circumstances.
Field-worker authority and PRA
One area which demonstrates the limitations on
project plans deriving from the particular social
position of the VM was the experience with
Participatory Rural Appraisal. PRA exercises
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were conducted by VMs as the basis for
workplans; but, despite the PRA training, widely
held to be well done with plenty of practical work,
and visits to clusters from a well-known foreign
expert, most VMs did not have a happy
experience with PRA as a means of discovering
farmers’ priorities and preferences, and doing
participatory planning. One striking feature is that
no diary noted refusals from villagers when the
foreign expert was demonstrating PRA methods,
but when the VMs tried to use them
independently, villagers expressed opposition.
The most likely explanation, given the empathy of
VMs with villagers, is that villagers’ cooperation
with demonstration PRA exercises was at least
partly based on the implicit authority of the
foreign expert, which the VM lacked when
seeking to use PRA independently. The VM of
cluster A found that farmers in one hamlet blankly
refused to cooperate with wealth-ranking (A, 15
December 1989); and the VM in cluster B
expressed his problems with carrying out
preference-ranking and social-mapping thus:
‘When I ask them to think about themselves and
to do preference ranking, social mapping, they get
confused’ (February 1992). He remarks that
‘PRA is a long process. Here things doesn’t come
out very easily’ (27 February 1992). What an
‘expert’ can do on the basis of implicit authority is
not necessarily replicable by the VM.
If the authority of the VM was inadequate to
engage villagers in PRA, it was also problematic
within the management organisation. After
eventually making his diagrams and maps and
presenting them at a project planning workshop,
the VM of cluster B returns to his village and
notes that the PRA materials presented were not
accepted and that ‘the revision of the preference
ranking {for agroforestry tree species} was
essential’. He repeats the ranking, but gets the
same result.
Furthermore, in this case, the outcome did not
suggest that the methods had indeed uncovered
preferences strong enough to sustain active
involvement, for by 14 September 1992, when
drought has hit cluster B, the VM finds farmers
watering their papaya plants but not the sisoo,
which are dying, and on enquiry he finds a lack of
interest in sisoo, because timber is available in the
forest and sisoo takes a long time to reach
maturity. These species were, however, those
chosen on the basis of preference-ranking.
Supporters of PRA may argue that the ranking
may have been done incorrectly. This is possible,
but if a method cannot be reliably used by well-
trained, highly motivated graduates, its
usefulness is surely open to question. Later still,
the diary shows the farmers failing to show up for
nursery training, and it is difficult to escape the
conclusion that incentives amount to more than
sound preference-ranking, and that such ranking
is not a definitive statement of a static and
generalised preference.
5
A series of diary entries in cluster A illustrates
some of the problems and ironies of the VM
situation. In cluster A, a sequence of diary entries
records that farmers in meetings are repeatedly
demanding irrigation in late 1989. Then the
famous foreign PRA expert visits for a night (25
January 1990), followed by the VM going out and
doing social-mapping and holding discussions
with villagers in which ‘problems were identified
by tamarind seeds’ (D, 26 January 1990). The
irony of the vociferous villagers demanding
irrigation, which the VM is unable to provide,
given the poverty focus of the RFP, and the
subsequent turn to divination by tamarind seed
was not, I think, lost on the VM. The VM
comments in the following days that he has
visited the sites that the expert had visited and
everywhere they asked him what had been the
purpose of the visit. He explains. Villagers
seemed puzzled and suspicious in the aftermath
of the PRA. One can understand the puzzlement
of those who, after clearly articulating what they
saw as problems (lack of irrigation), are asked to
play games with tamarind seeds to discover what
the problems were. The PRA here, arguably, both
silences spontaneous demands and elicits at least
a re-packaging within the vocabulary of
participation, and at most a complete revision of
‘local’ priorities.
What much of the diary evidence suggests is
that participation is understood as a discourse by
villagers, a vocabulary which brings them into
transactions with project staff, but from which
they still seek material gain. For them
participation is not an end in itself; it is the name
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of the game. Coming to meetings in order to get
access to new seeds, or the food distributed at
meetings, is one thing; sharing the time and
information required by PRA, without any
immediate return, is another. The VM as ‘street
level bureaucrat’ experiences quite profound
power-shifts which mean that his or her ability to
carry through project objectives, or indeed to
subvert them, is very dependent on context.
Weakness and strength co-exist in quite
contradictory ways, as the next section elaborates
in looking at relations with other project staff and
external organisations.
Field-worker relations within and
between institutions
The VMs’ legitimacy in village opinion depends
to quite a large degree on their ability to command
practical support from State institutions which are
hierarchical, bureaucratic, and corrupt; to bring
important visitors to their clusters; and to be seen
as having a high status beyond the village. Yet
they bear markers of low status in that external
world — such as residence in a village, youth, or
sometimes tribal origins. Similarly, within the
project staff, although the CA and VM were
considered a team, the reality was rather different.
An indication is seen in the note in the cluster A
diary following an ODA visit, when a Social
Development Adviser asks what would happen in
his cluster if he was not there. He notes his reply:
that the CA could not cope, because ‘the CA
cannot do all the work. He cannot run after every
plots’ (A, 16 September 1990). Interestingly, he
justifies his position in terms of being the person
who actually visits and supervises the trials — a
kind of assistant to the CA — not as a social
analyst, not as a facilitator, or as the implementor
of the non-agronomic project activities. This level
of insecurity reflects the de facto relations
between CA and VM, in which the cultural
attributes of status (here age, caste, technical
education, permanent employment) disempower
the VM, the person who is at the front line.
VMs also have to manage the interface with
other institutions, such as those of State rural
development agencies, where they are at the front
line in a clash of organisational styles. While the
field-worker is relatively powerful in an informal
and everyday sense, the external status of field-
worker is quite low. The bureaucratic problems
for a relatively low-status field-worker operating
within the very structured and hierarchical work
cultures of the Indian State, such as in trying to
locate and obtain suitable seed, proved
considerable. In Dantokhurd, the VM records a
trip to Birsa University for this purpose in which
he was kept waiting for four hours before being
referred to three different departments, where he
had to haggle (only partly successfully) for seed,
and was then sent to the university farm, where he
waited for an hour — only to be told that the farm
had closed and he should come back the next day.
He spent the night in Ranchi and returned in the
morning, but had to wait until the afternoon to be
issued with the seed and then several more hours
in order to pay (A, 4 October 1989).
Village residence results in friendships as well
as less welcome obligations and demands. In
cluster B, the VM found himself under
considerable pressure to represent the villagers in
approaching the BDO for a well. He tried to
explain that this was not his job, but they insisted,
pointing to his education and greater ability to
command the attention of the BDO, an argument
which proved hard to deny or resist. The social
dynamics of power and patronage may help to
deliver more apparent evidence of project
achievements, but at the same time threaten
longer-term sustainability, and possibly the
danger of abuse of power. This is a dilemma
confronted daily by VMs.
The VMs’ relations with external consultants
are described in their diaries.
6
One aspect of
consultants’ roles was that they directed the
project back to a focus on poverty when the
pressures in the village began seriously to
undermine it. Thus the experiments with seed-
multiplication encountered disapproval from the
consultants and ceased; and the consultants’
continuing concern with identifying the socio-
economic status of participants resulted in a visit
which suggested the use of wealth-ranking to
classify and monitor participating households (A,
5 December 1989). The VMs were always keen to
respond to consultants’ advice, even where it was
problematic, as wealth-ranking was.
Cecile Jackson
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The activities in any one cluster, therefore, are
a mixture of actors’ preferences, including those
of visiting consultants, in which the significance
of farmers’ preferences is difficult to gauge. For
example, in cluster A, the move towards what was
called agro-forestry emerged mainly from project
managers and consultants; at cluster-level,
meetings were held in March 1990 to discover
‘farmers’ choice’ of trees. Following this, a
meeting was held in April to plan a eucalyptus
plantation — but no one attended. The VM
discovered that on that day some of the people
concerned had gone to their daily work and others
had attended a meeting over the rape of a small
girl by a 14-year old boy. The VM, however,
continued to push agro-forestry and by early May
was told by his superior that, before the imminent
consultants’ visit, ‘agroforestry program is to be
given stress and trial plot should be selected’ (A, 3
May 1990). The VM still fails to get participant
support and plaintively notes on 18 May 1991 that
he is doing it ‘I, myself, alone’. The VM is willing
to substitute for the participants in order to cover
the gap between the consultants’ desires and the
participants’ resistance, rather than challenge the
consultants, or reveal the absence of participation.
Where interlocking projects cannot be
constructed, the VM shoulders the burden.
The question of whom the consultants choose
to speak to has been raised in connection with
field-worker discretion; it is also an issue with
participants, who frequently make comments and
criticisms to VMs about being excluded.
Participants also clearly saw high visibility to
consultants as a favour dispensed by the VM (with
the possibility of resources following in the wake
of consultants’ visits), and complaints were made
when certain hamlets, often the less accessible,
felt left out (C, 23 September 1991). A greater
problem for consultants to overcome is the degree
to which the relationship between field-worker
and participants makes it difficult to hold critical
discussions about the project with villagers, who
tend to close ranks with project staff,
understanding the possible consequences of
perceived project failure. Participants and field-
staff collude in representing success.
As far as status is concerned, there are
contradictory demands in the field-worker role:
low to minimise the social distance from villages
and facilitate participation, but high in order to
have effective relations outside the village;
formally equal to the technical staff, but
informally inferior to them. In addition, the
pressures towards patronage within the social
dynamics of the village, but against it in project
objectives, are real problems in the lived
experience of field-workers — but largely
unrecognised in project planning and
management.
Conclusions
The field-workers’ diaries were an inspired
suggestion and offer unusual insights into the
making of a project in a specific local context.
They provide, in long-term projects such as RFP,
a valuable opportunity to study interactive change
during the course of a development intervention.
Some of the lessons learned from their analysis
derive from an understanding of the social
positioning of the village-based field-worker, and
others are gained from the view of the field-
worker as a subject interactively constructing the
project around his or her own understandings and
villagers’ own ‘projects’, rather than as a project
‘implementor’.
The diaries show that it takes time to establish
meaningful contact with poor villagers, and this
process cannot be accelerated. It is not the case
that a model of participation can be evolved in one
place and then applied elsewhere much more
quickly, and the implication for the expansion of
the RFP is that movement to new areas may well
need as much time as the work in the original
clusters. Understanding the complexities of
power and patronage in field-worker experience
indicates potential problems in the notion of a
catalytic project, igniting participatory
development and moving on to new areas. There
are also conflicting tensions between the
pressures on the VM towards a benign
relationship of patronage, in which the VM is
recognised and valued by local people, and the
needs of the project for the development of
sustainable institutions, in which project staff are
dispensable, in advance of the withdrawal of the
project. As a participatory mechanism, PRA can,
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ironically, be difficult to conduct where field-
workers are not in a position of authority. Finally,
consultants have been, and will continue to be,
important actors in the shaping of RFP in indirect
ways, of which they will usually be unaware and
to which there needs to be greater sensitivity.
When the subjectivity of field-workers is
addressed, a less innocent view of participation
follows from the insight that farmers and field-
workers are engaged in a process of mutual
enrolment in their interactions; farmers readily
learn the language of participation, and what is
articulated should not too readily be taken, at face
value, as a thoroughgoing adherence to
participatory philosophies. Participants and field-
workers collude in representing project success to
‘outsiders’, be they HQ staff, evaluators
contracted by donors, local or foreign
consultants; this is rarely taken into account, but is
important to both evaluations and the working
understanding of the project by all non-field-staff.
As well as offering some observations on the
character of the RFP, I hope this paper has made a
convincing case that we should conceive of both
field-workers and participants as active agents,
interacting at the critical social interface, and
trying to find common ground between project
objectives and villagers’ aspirations and desires.
Project managers, funders, and consultants can
learn a great deal from a better understanding of
the struggles of field-workers at the sharp end,
recognition of which is long overdue.
Notes
1 I would like to thank the following people for
helpful comments on the draft of this paper:
Ros Eyben, Mike Wilson, Richard Palmer-
Jones, Sarah Ladbury, Ian Carruthers, Alan Rew,
and Steve Jones. This paper is based on two
visits to the project, firstly in the Phase 2 prepara-
tion mission, which visited project staff in all
three States and included time spent with staff
in their clusters, and then later when I spent
several weeks researching, with project field-
staff, three cluster histories in 1994–5. I am grate-
ful for the assistance of PK Mukherjee, Mr Phani
and all the project staff at RFP. But above all
else this paper is a tribute to the VMs of the RFP.
2 Of course, the VM view is only one perspective,
and other important actors were the Indian
management organisation, the Hindustani
Fertiliser Corporation (HFC), the