Book Review

Abstract

This is a review of a book, ‘Rural Development, Putting the Last First’, by Robert Chambers. The author stresses the need
to fight rural poverty by avoiding rural biases. He outlined six biases that rural development experts, researchers and policy makers
should avoid. These are: Spatial biases with sub-biases on urban, tarmac and roadside; project bias, in which case attention is put to
areas which are somewhat developed and personal bias. Other biases include dry season bias, the tendency of experts to visit rural areas during the dry season; diplomatic biases where people who report about rural life tend to hide the reality of the people from their superiors; and lastly is professional biases. Chambers argues that professional training, values and interests impart biases about rural life. The author named experts and other people who work on rural poverty only from the outside as ‘outsiders’. According to Chambers, Rural poverty is often unseen or misperceived by outsiders. Outsiders are the people concerned with rural development who are themselves neither rural nor poor. This group include academic researchers, aid agency personnel, bankers, businessmen, consultants, doctors, engineers, journalists, lawyers, politicians, priests, school teachers, staff of training institutes, workers in voluntary agencies, and other professionals. The principal objective of rural development must be the eradication of rural poverty and its underlying causes; this can be achieved through avoiding the six biases. The purpose of this review was to assess whether the book is still valid today, given the socioeconomic changes that have happened globally. The review has confirmed that the message from this book is still valid today, especially in developing countries where more poor people live in rural areas and depend on agriculture. The book is particularly suitable for teaching rural development and development studies at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.