Challenging the Professions

Robert Chambers

ISBN 10: 1853391948 / ISBN 13: 9781853391941

Published by Practical Action Publishing, GB, 1993

About this Item

Seller Inventory # LU-9781853391941

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Challenging the Professions
• Publisher: Practical Action Publishing, GB
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1853391948
• ISBN 13: 9781853391941
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 284 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Challenging the Professions questions the dominant approaches of professions, disciplines and bureaucracies concerned with rural development. The theme is that 'we', who call ourselves professionals, are much of the problem, and to do better requires reversals of much that we regard as normal. The challenge is to upend our thinking, to turn values on their heads, to invent and adopt new methods, and to behave differently. The frontiers are personal and professional, requiring changes which are radical but quite surprisingly practicable: to question our values; to be self critically aware; to see simple as often optimal; to offset our spatial and seasonal biases; to help rural people do their own analyses; to stay in villages and learn from and with rural people; to test and use participatory approaches, methods and procedures; to encourage decentralization and diversity; to put people before things, and poor people first of all.

About the Author

Robert Chambers is Research Associate and Emeritus Professor, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex and the author of Participatory Workshops (2002) and Ideas for Development (2005).