3 - Organisations

Summary

In this chapter we describe the institutional means by which the agents of the state seek to organise people and resources in the effort to put development plans into effect. Again, these show striking similarities worldwide: there are cooperatives and communes, councils and committees, organisations which serve as meeting places between development administrators and ordinary people. This encounter invokes a contrast between the apparatus of the state and the local organisation of diverse subject populations – stereotypically, the difference between bureaucracy and community. We explore this in some detail from an anthropological perspective, examining the ways in which officials see themselves and the communities they aspire to develop, and how local people view their own relationships with officialdom. A concluding section on education and communications further reveals the differences of interest and understanding which affect, often adversely, the translation of plans into concerted activity and social change.

Introduction

Although many indirect devices like taxation, import controls and subsidies are used by the state, planned development is ultimately an encounter between officials and subject peoples. In their ‘attempts to organize the mass, to change an undifferentiated and unreliable citizenry into a structured, readily accessible public’ (Selznick 1949: 219), planners have recourse to a range of institutions whose purpose is to secure and control public participation in development activities.