Robert Chambers

ByLong Sarou

06 April 2008

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Royal University of Phnom Penh

M.A. in Development Studies Program

Robert Chambers• Born on 1 May 1932• Open Scholarship to Cambridge in the natural science in 1949• In 1959, he got M.A•Travel and discovery (most of his life)• He has appointed a District Officer in Kenya between 1958 and 1962•A lecturer in Public Administration at the Kenya Institute of Administration•Research Officer at the East African Staff College

Robert Chambers• He received PhD from the University of

Manchester in 1967 on “settlement schemes in tropical Africa”.

• He returned to Kenya to become a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Nairobi (1969-1971)

• Research Associate at Institute of Development Studies, University Sussex in London (International reputation)

• Honorary Doctorates from the University of East Anglia in 1995 and the University of Edinburgh in 1998.

Robert Chambers• He has been at forefront – to place the

poor, the marginalized, the excluded and the powerless at the heart of the process of development problem identification, decision making, policy formulation and project management.

• “Farmer first” and “putting the last first”

• “His new paradigm has rapidly become the new orthodoxy/accepted view”

Robert Chambers• Journal World Development, entitled “Rural

Poverty Unperceived: Problem and Remedies” in 1981

• His argument presented us with particular ways of looking at and approaching the poor and disadvantaged, and “development” more generally, which are often far removed from frequently unseen and unperceived realities.

• “Doing development” typically falls to outsiders. • Their visions, interpretations and actions are thus

built upon preconceptions and misperception about the rural poor, and are often influenced by stereotypical views of their circumstances and capacities.

Robert Chambers• Putting the last first: emphasized the need for

new professionals and a new professionalism with which to rise to the challenge of an inclusive and emancipatory development.

• The last: the hundreds of millions of largely unseen people in rural areas who are poor, weak, isolated, vulnerable and powerless.

• Culture involved in development project – the academic and the practical.

• The tension between scientific/technical and local/indigenous knowledge.

• Bringing about reversals in learning and of underpinning effective practical action

Robert Chambers• Farmer first: Flesh out a “new paradigm”

centered on localized, particularistic, conceptualized, sympathetic, democratic and participatory means of supporting people in marginal contexts.

• The solutions to farmers’ problems lay, in part, within their own capacities and capabilities.

• Outsiders were to become the facilitators, not the paternalistic, controllers, of local development

• Farmer First adopted a holistic view of rural people’s development challenges, introducing for the first time a concept – “Sustainable livelihoods”

Robert Chambers• The principle of the sustainable livelihoods

approach were first put forward in an IDS Discussion Paper in 1992, jointly authored by Chambers and Conway.

• The livelihood approach to rural development has been adopted by UK’s DFID, SIDA, UNDP, and several other bilateral and multilateral development agencies.

• World Bank’s World Development Report 2000/01: Attacking Poverty, entitled “Consultations with the Poor”, and “Voice of the Poor”, where the Bretton Woods institutions’ understanding of the poverty phenomenon informed by the experiences and opinions of the poor themselves.

Robert Chambers• Chambers helped pioneer the tool of Rapid

Rural Appraisal (RRA)=>constitute not just a new research methodology but also a new way of understanding development.

• RRA steadily evolved into Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA).

• PRA centers on a raft of recipes for including the excluded and enabling local communities to express their development in way, which were suitable to their own cultures, literacy levels and so on.

• Chambers emphasizes that his contribution tot the Reversal of Development Directionalities.