Majid Rahnema (ed.) - The Post-Development Reader

Majid Rahnema was born in Tehran in 1924. A career ambassador for much of his life, he represented Iran at the United Nations for twelve successive sessions. Among the many posts he held were UN Commissioner for Rwanda and Burundi (1959), Chairman of the Fourth (Decolonization) Committee of the General Assembly (1965), Member of the Executive Board of UNESCO (197478) and of the Council of the United Nations University (197480). In 1967 he was asked to form his countrys first Ministry of Science and Higher Education, a post from which he resigned in frustration four years later. He subsequently founded an Institute for Endogenous Development Studies, which, inspired by the educational ideas of Paulo Freire and the bottom-up vision of pioneers of the time, worked in several neglected villages to try to discover alternatives to the authoritarian and top-down development pursued by the Shah. Having left Iran some time before his countrys revolutionary upheavals, he was invited by Bradford Morse, the UNDP Administrator at the time, to become the UNDPs Representative in Mali, and later his special advisor for Grassroots and NGO Matters, in which role he sought to open a window on the concerns of the drop-outs in the development process. Following his retirement in 1985, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley for six years. He has held a similar position at Pitzer, Claremont Colleges since 1993. He is currently a visiting professor at the American University of Paris.

Victoria Bawtree was born in Australia. Educated in England, she has a degree in economics from London University. She has spent over thirty years of her life in Italy, during most of which time she edited Ideas and Action, a journal of the Food and Agriculture Organization. In the late 1950s she joined the social reformer Danilo Dolci in Sicily as a volunteer, after which she spent two years in the USA working as a speech-writer with the Iranian and Egyptian Missions to the United Nations. In the early 1970s she founded the Human Rights Information Group for FAO staff; during this time she actively supported the African liberation movements and participated in the work of the International Tribunal on the Rights and Liberation of Peoples. In 1979 she became a founding member of the Research and Information Centre on Eritrea (RICE), and in the early 1980s set up the 1% for Development Fund in Rome. She now lives in the Alpes de Haute Provence, in Southern France, where she has helped to create an association to promote local social, cultural and ecological issues.

Edited by Majid Rahnema

with Victoria Bawtree

The Post-Development Reader was first published in 1997 by:

In Bangladesh:

The University Press Ltd, Red Crescent Building,

114 Motijheel C/A, PO Box 2611, Dhaka 1000.

In Southern Africa:

David Philip Publishers (Pty Ltd), 208 Werdmuller Center,

Claremont 7735, South Africa.

In Canada:

Fernwood Publishing Ltd, PO Box 9509, Station A,

Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3K 553.

In the rest of the world:

Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London N1 9JF, UK, and

165 First Avenue, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey 07716, USA.

Second impression 1998.

Editorial copyright Majid Rahnema and Victoria Bawtree 1997

Copyright individual contributors 1997

The moral rights of the authors of this work have been asserted by them

in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Cover design by Andrew Corbett.

Designed and typeset in Monotype Bembo by

Lucy Morton & Robin Gable, Grosmont.

Printed and bound in Malaysia by Forum.

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

The post development reader / compiled and introduced by Majid Rahnema

with Victoria Bawtree

p.cm.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

The post-development reader.

Includes bibliographical references and index

ISBN 1-895686-84-9

1. Subsistence economy.2. Economic development.

3. Acculturation.4. Economic anthropology.I. Rahnema, Majid, 1924

II. Bawtree, Victoria, 1934

GN448.2.P67 1997 306.3 C97-950060-5

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1 85649 473 X (Hb)

ISBN 1 85649 473 8 (Pb)

Bangladesh: ISBN 984 051389 3 Pb

Southern Africa: ISBN 86486 331 4 Pb

Canada: ISBN 1 895686 84 9 Pb

Rest of world: ISBN 1 85649 473 X Hb; 1 85649 474 8 Pb

Introduction

Majid Rahnema