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Since the 1950s, governments of developed countries, United Nations
agencies and development banks, working with developing countries,
have tried one approach after another to reach the poorest members
of global society. Pilot projects in poor rural or urban settlements
used the best methodologies that development thinkers could devise,
hoping for successes that could be duplicated in more and more communities
in a war of attrition against poverty. More often than not, when
the project finished, the empowered individuals slowly settled back
into a hand-to-mouth existence.
But poverty alleviation as a science continued to grow.
“We’re getting closer; we have experience of what works
and what doesn’t work,” says Diana Carney, a DFID economist
and one of the chief theorists of the “sustainable livelihoods
approach”, which combines lessons learned from decades of development
efforts.
“The criticism of development has been that it is overly technical
and focused on one thing, while everything else is going down the
tubes,” she says. “There has been so much work on different
aspects of the development mosaic … huge debates on participation,
on rights, on social capital, but the livelihoods approach says
we can learn from all of those things.”
Put people first
“Put people first, not the technical bits and pieces. It’s
not true that they have nothing to bring to the table,” she
says. As an example, she cited an experimental fisheries surveillance
system recently tested in Guinea (see story "Poachers
routed by community patrols"), in which illiterate fishers
using radios and hand-held navigation sets work in partnership with
the coast guard. “Here is the approach building on people’s
strengths. After all, the small-scale fishers live in the area to
be patrolled.”
“The other key issue covered by this approach is that it doesn’t
get stuck at the village committee level,” she says. “If
the real issue is, for example, international fishing treaties,
let’s work on that.”
February 2003
Contact:
Peter Lowrey
Information Officer
Peter.Lowrey@fao.org
+39 06 570 52762
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