Learning from Gal Oya: Possibilities for Participatory Development and Post-Newtonian Social Science

This book recounts the drama of a remarkably successful experiment that introduced farmer organization for self-managed development in the largest and most run-down irrigation system in Sri Lanka. Gal Oya, initially considered one of the least desirable areas in the country, became one of the most progressive and peaceful during the 1980s, despite the ethnic violence that surrounded it. People reshaped their working and living conditions and accomplished changes no one previously thought possible.
In an unusual combination of description and analysis, Norman Uphoff here seeks to interpret the Gal Oya project, and he draws far-reaching conclusions for participatory development and contemporary social science. The major portion of his book deals with concrete field experience in Sri Lanka, working with and learning from impoverished farmers, young community organizers, irrigation engineers, government officials, and others involved in an impressive reversal of circumstances. It presents the detailed dynamics of social change in a series of time slices, direct first-person narratives of what was being seen and heard in the field.
Uphoff shares with his readers his discovery that prevalent reductionist assumptions proved inadequate to explain or achieve the mobilization of people's cooperative efforts to improve the Gal Oya irrigation system. Rethinking his entire approach to development strategy, he found himself--much to his surprise--receptive to a new social science literature now emerging in response to many concepts from twentieth-century physics--from relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and especially chaos theory.
Drawing impetus from a concrete, self-directed experiment in social change, Learning from Gal Oya suggests how social science should move beyond its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century moorings and benefit from some of the intellectual advances of the twentieth century. It speaks to readers outside comparative politics or development administration. With its avoidance of social science jargon, it will also be accessible and attractive to humanists.