Robert Chambers, one of the critical optimists of international development, returns with a new book that reviews, together for the first time, some of the revolutionary changes in the methodologies and methods of development inquiry that have occurred in the past forty years, and reflects on their transformative potential for the future.This book breaks new ground by describing and analyzing the evolution of a sequence of approaches. It starts with the provocation of the "dinosaurs" of large-scale multi-subject questionnaire surveys, and the biased visits and perceptions of rural development tourism-the brief rural visits of urban-based professionals. This is followed by the explosive proliferation of methodologies and methods of recent years, especially rapid rural appraisal (RRA) including observation and semi-structured interviews, and participatory rural appraisal (PRA) with its group-visual analysis. Dramatic developments in the still largely unrecognized fields of participatory numbers and statistics, and of participatory mapping including participatory GIS, are described and analyzed, demonstrating their great potential as sources of data and insights. Chambers shows how these can empower local people and at the same time provide rigorous and valid substitutes for some more traditional methods of inquiry. Also presented is a repertoire for offsetting the biases of the urban trap, which has become so serious for officials and aid agency staff. Importantly, he points out that we are now in a different space, methodologically, from a few years ago. He makes the case that participatory methodologies, evolved through creative and eclectic pluralism, can be transformative, and a waveof the future as drivers of personal, professional and institutional change.

Seasonality is a severe constraint to sustainable rural livelihoods and a driver of poverty and hunger, particularly in the tropics. Many poor people in developing countries are ill equipped to cope with seasonal variations which can lead to drought or flood and consequences for agriculture, employment, food supply and the spread of disease. The subject has assumed increasing importance as climate change and other forms of development disrupt established seasonal patterns and variations. This book is the first systematic study of seasonality for over twenty years, and it aims to revive academic interest and policy awareness of this crucial but neglected issue. Thematic chapters explore recent shifts with profound implications for seasonality, including climate change, HIV/AIDS, and social protection. Case study chapters explore seasonal dimensions of livelihoods in Africa (Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi), Asia (Bangladesh, China, India), and Latin America (Peru). Others assess policy responses to adverse seasonality, for example through irrigation, migration and seasonally-sensitive education. The book also includes innovative tools for monitoring seasonality, which should enable more appropriate responses.

This sourcebook is for all who work with others on participatory learning and change. Written in a spirit of critical reflection and serious fun, it provides 21 sets of ideas and options for facilitators, trainers, teachers and presenters, and anyone who organises and manages workshops, courses, classes and other events for sharing and learning ideas. It covers topics such as getting started, seating arrangements, forming groups, managing large numbers, helping each other learn, analysis and feedback, dealing with dominators, evaluation and ending, coping with horrors, and common mistakes.

Rural poverty is often unseen or misperceived by outsiders. Dr Chambers contends that researchers, scientists, administrators and fieldworkers rarely appreciate the richness and validity of rural people's knowledge or the hidden nature of rural poverty. This is a challenging book for all concerned with rural development, as practitioners, academics, students or researchers.

Seasonality is a severe constraint to sustainable rural livelihoods and a driver of poverty and hunger, particularly in the tropics. Many poor people in developing countries are ill equipped to cope with seasonal variations which can lead to drought or flood and consequences for agriculture, employment, food supply and the spread of disease. The subject has assumed increasing importance as climate change and other forms of development disrupt established seasonal patterns and variations. This book is the first systematic study of seasonality for over twenty years, and it aims to revive academic interest and policy awareness of this crucial but neglected issue. Thematic chapters explore recent shifts with profound implications for seasonality, including climate change, HIV/AIDS, and social protection. Case study chapters explore seasonal dimensions of livelihoods in Africa (Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi), Asia (Bangladesh, China, India), and Latin America (Peru). Others assess policy responses to adverse seasonality, for example through irrigation, migration and seasonally-sensitive education. The book also includes innovative tools for monitoring seasonality, which should enable more appropriate responses.

Scaling Impact introduces a new and practical approach to scaling the positive impacts of research and innovation. Inspired by leading scientific and entrepreneurial innovators from across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East, this book presents a synthesis of unrivalled diversity and grounded ingenuity. The result is a different perspective on how to achieve impact that matters, and an important challenge to the predominant more-is-better paradigm of scaling. For organisations and individuals working to change the world for the better, scaling impact is a common goal and a well-founded aim. The world is changing rapidly, and seemingly intractable problems like environmental degradation or accelerating inequality press us to do better for each other and our environment as a global community. Challenges like these appear to demand a significant scale of action, and here the authors argue that a more creative and critical approach to scaling is both possible and essential. To encourage uptake and co-development, the authors present actionable principles that can help organisations and innovators design, manage, and evaluate scaling strategies. Scaling Impact is essential reading for development and innovation practitioners and professionals, but also for researchers, students, evaluators, and policymakers with a desire to spark meaningful change.

Rural poverty is often unseen or misperceived by outsiders. Dr Chambers contends that researchers, scientists, administrators and fieldworkers rarely appreciate the richness and validity of rural people's knowledge or the hidden nature of rural poverty. This is a challenging book for all concerned with rural development, as practitioners, academics, students or researchers.

Robert Chambers, one of the critical optimists of international development, returns with a new book that reviews, together for the first time, some of the revolutionary changes in the methodologies and methods of development inquiry that have occurred in the past forty years, and reflects on their transformative potential for the future.This book breaks new ground by describing and analyzing the evolution of a sequence of approaches. It starts with the provocation of the "dinosaurs" of large-scale multi-subject questionnaire surveys, and the biased visits and perceptions of rural development tourism-the brief rural visits of urban-based professionals. This is followed by the explosive proliferation of methodologies and methods of recent years, especially rapid rural appraisal (RRA) including observation and semi-structured interviews, and participatory rural appraisal (PRA) with its group-visual analysis. Dramatic developments in the still largely unrecognized fields of participatory numbers and statistics, and of participatory mapping including participatory GIS, are described and analyzed, demonstrating their great potential as sources of data and insights. Chambers shows how these can empower local people and at the same time provide rigorous and valid substitutes for some more traditional methods of inquiry. Also presented is a repertoire for offsetting the biases of the urban trap, which has become so serious for officials and aid agency staff. Importantly, he points out that we are now in a different space, methodologically, from a few years ago. He makes the case that participatory methodologies, evolved through creative and eclectic pluralism, can be transformative, and a waveof the future as drivers of personal, professional and institutional change.

Scaling Impact introduces a new and practical approach to scaling the positive impacts of research and innovation. Inspired by leading scientific and entrepreneurial innovators from across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East, this book presents a synthesis of unrivalled diversity and grounded ingenuity. The result is a different perspective on how to achieve impact that matters, and an important challenge to the predominant more-is-better paradigm of scaling. For organisations and individuals working to change the world for the better, scaling impact is a common goal and a well-founded aim. The world is changing rapidly, and seemingly intractable problems like environmental degradation or accelerating inequality press us to do better for each other and our environment as a global community. Challenges like these appear to demand a significant scale of action, and here the authors argue that a more creative and critical approach to scaling is both possible and essential. To encourage uptake and co-development, the authors present actionable principles that can help organisations and innovators design, manage, and evaluate scaling strategies. Scaling Impact is essential reading for development and innovation practitioners and professionals, but also for researchers, students, evaluators, and policymakers with a desire to spark meaningful change.

Originally published anonymously in 1844, "Vestiges" proved to be as controversial as its author expected. Integrating research in the burgeoning sciences of anthropology, geology, astronomy, biology, economics, and chemistry, it was the first attempt to connect the natural sciences to a history of creation. The author, whose identity was not revealed until 1884, was Robert Chambers, a leading Scottish writer and publisher. "Vestiges" reached a huge popular audience and was widely read by the social and intellectual elite. It sparked debate about natural law, setting the stage for the controversy over Darwin's "Origin." In response to the surrounding debate and criticism, Chambers published "Explanations: A Sequel," in which he offered a reasoned defense of his ideas about natural law, castigating what he saw as the narrowness of specialist science.
With a new introduction by James Secord, a bibliography of reviews, and a new index, this volume adds to "Vestiges" and "Explanations" Chambers's earliest works on cosmology, an essay on Darwin, and an autobiographical essay, raising important issues about the changing meanings of popular science and religion and the rise of secular ideologies in Western culture.

* From one of the 'gurus' of development and author of the best selling Participatory Workshops* Chock-full of provocative and actionable ideas drawn from four decades of development work and written in Robert Chambers' infectious and highly readable style Our world seems entangled in systems increasingly dominated by power, greed, ignorance, self-deception, and denial, with spiralling inequity and injustice. Against a backdrop of climate change, failing ecosystems, poverty, crushing debt, and corporate exploitation, the future of our world looks dire and the solutions almost too monumental to consider. Yet all is not lost. Robert Chambers, one of the 'glass is half full' optimists of international development, suggests that the problems can be solved and everyone has the power at a personal level to take action, develop solutions, and remake our world as it can and should be. Chambers peels apart and analyzes aspects of development that have been neglected or misunderstood. In each chapter, he presents an earlier writing which he then reviews and reflects upon in a contemporary light before harvesting a wealth of powerful conclusions and practical implications for the future. The book draws on experiences from Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, covering topics and concepts as wide and varied as irreversibility, continuity, and commitment; administrative capacity as a scarce resource; procedures and principles; participation in the past, present, and future; scaling up; behavior and attitudes; responsible wellbeing; and concepts for development in the 21st century.

This book challenges readers to examine the pervasive significance of power in forming and framing knowledge. "Into the Unknown" reflects on the journey of learning and encourages readers to learn from observation, curiosity, critical feedback, play and fun. This book includes tips on how to lead into workshops and on how to convene workshops that can co-generate knowledge and have an influence.Development is about change, and lives immersed in researching international development should be prepared for exploration, for discovering the unexpected, and for questioning the direction that development is taking. Robert Chambers reflects on experiences in his own life, which led him to examine personal biases and predispositions. Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) and Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) are two movements that have benefited from sharing practice, innovations and experience through participatory workshops. Finally, the author asks whether the new dual realities virtual and physical are getting out of balance and encourages readers to explore through experiential learning in the physical and social world."

This book challenges readers to examine the pervasive significance of power in forming and framing knowledge. "Into the Unknown" reflects on the journey of learning and encourages readers to learn from observation, curiosity, critical feedback, play and fun. This book includes tips on how to lead into workshops and on how to convene workshops that can co-generate knowledge and have an influence.Development is about change, and lives immersed in researching international development should be prepared for exploration, for discovering the unexpected, and for questioning the direction that development is taking. Robert Chambers reflects on experiences in his own life, which led him to examine personal biases and predispositions. Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) and Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) are two movements that have benefited from sharing practice, innovations and experience through participatory workshops. Finally, the author asks whether the new dual realities virtual and physical are getting out of balance and encourages readers to explore through experiential learning in the physical and social world."

Do we use obscure words to impress our colleagues - or fashionable ones to win research proposals? How do poor people define their poverty? How can we use aid budgets most effectively? Are many of our actions against poverty simple, direct...and wrong? Provocations for Development is an entertaining and unsettling collection of writings that questions concepts, conventions and practices in development. It is made up of short and accessible writings by Robert Chambers reflecting on the evolution of concepts like participation and of organizations like the World Bank. Besides provocations, there is mischief, verse and serious fun. The book is organized into four sections: Word Play, irreverently examines vocabularies of development and how words are instruments of power; Poverty and Participation challenges concepts of poverty, presents empowering breakthroughs in the current explosion of participatory methodologies; Aid, is critical of past and present procedures and practices in aid and points to feasible changes for doing better; For our Future touches on values, ethics, gender and participation, immersions, hypocrisy, and paradigms, and sees hope in children. The final provocation invites readers to find answers to the question 'what would it take to eliminate poverty in the world?'

Do we use obscure words to impress our colleagues or fashionable ones to win research proposals? How do poor people define their poverty? How can we use aid budgets most effectively? Are many of our actions against poverty simple, direct and wrong? "Provocations for Development" is an entertaining and unsettling collection of writings that questions concepts, conventions and practices in development. It is made up of short and accessible writings by Robert Chambers, many from the past ten years and some from earlier, reflecting on the evolution of concepts like participation and of organizations like the World Bank. Besides provocations, there is mischief, verse and serious fun. The book is organized into four sections. The first, "Word Play," irreverently examines vocabularies of development and how words are instruments of power. The second, "Poverty and Participation," challenges concepts of poverty, presents empowering breakthroughs in the current explosion of participatory methodologies, and concludes with what can be done at the personal level. The third, "Aid," is critical of past and present procedures and practices in aid and points to feasible changes for doing better. The provocations in the last section "For Our Future" touch on values, ethics, gender and participation, immersions, hypocrisy, and paradigms, and sees hope in children. The final provocation invites readers to find answers to the question what would it take to eliminate poverty in the world? "Provocations for Development" will be enjoyed by development professionals, including academics, students, NGO workers and the staff of international agencies, as well as the wider public."

"To the Hands of the Poor" confronts the paradox of mass poverty coexisting with vast resource potentials in much of rural India. The authors present evidence that the potentials from groundwater and trees are larger than earlier estimated. To identify how the poor can gain more from their exploitation, they start with the livelihoods and priorities of the poor themselves. Empirical research and the principles of practical political economy are combined to identify new and hopeful policies. The agenda of the book places stress on changing regulations and abolishing restrictions as a means of benifiting the poor quickly and on a large scale. Reduced hassle, secure rights, and effective communication of those rights are argued to be keys to freeing the poor from rent-seeking hassle and exploitation, and enabling them to claim and gain more from lift irrigation and trees.