The self-deceiving state

Publication year: 
1992

While change accelerates in rural conditions in the South, professionalism and bureaucracy are buffered against change. In their top-down mode they produce and promote standard programmes, packages and technologies. Rural development programmes in India for agriculture, canal irrigation, watershed development, and poverty alleviation illustrate how there is a mismatch between such standardisation and diverse needs and conditions. This mismatch is underperceived, and status at the cores is sustained, by misleading positive feedback from the peripheries. Falsely favourable impressions and information have five sources: misreporting; selected perception; misleading methods; diplomacy and prudence; and defences against dissonance. Error and myth among the development professions further aggravate the misfit between belief and reality. The costs of the resulting psychosis of the state are colossal. Therapy can be sought through policies and practices which empower poor people: reversals for local diversity; clarifying and communicating peopleÆs rights; and personal choices by the powerful.

Source publication information
Journal Title: 
IDS bulletin
Volume: 
vol 23, no. 4, 1992
Pages: 
31-42
Publisher
IDS
Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9RE, UK
Brighton
http://www.ids.ac.uk/ids
Publisher reference: 
Institute of Development Studies

How to find this resource

Shelfmark in IDS Resource Centre
A : Participatory approaches 4973
Contact:
r.chambers@ids.ac.uk
Post date: 01/01/2000 - 00:00