282 Book Reviews

manageable-at least in the early stages of building grass-roots organisations, and limited in size both to assist manageability and to avoid the inclusion of elites likely to monopolise services.

Farmer participation promises to create pressure for performance from below-so often remarkable by its absence in the Third World countryside. The report argues for deconcentration of government operations, although the precise form to be adopted needs to be tailored to the context. Combined with this, governments need to clarify their development objectives and to simplify the range of tasks performed by their officers, especially at the lower levels. Policy-making and implementaion should be distinguished: the report twice makes the important, but little appreciated, point that much of what is attributed to ‘lack of coordination’ is the result of rapidly-changing, conflicting, and inconsistent policy decisions made at national level and passed down the line for implementation. The place for coordination and integration is not at the field level where attempts to do so often create administrative confusion to little gain but rather at national level, amongst the Permanent Secretaries and Heads of Department in the various line Ministries. Easier said than done, but a point worth making all the same. Field staff performance often disappoints for lack of motivation which might be improved by giving staff incentives for good performance and by training them. However training alone is unlikely to achieve much unless accompanied by other measures to improve the organisations in which the staff work.

This represents a reasonably fair summary of recent thinking: a statement of the newly- received wisdom of development management. Consequently to some readers there will be little new, and the significance of the report lies in its content than in its existence at all-that managerial aspects of rural development are being given a great more thought and attention than, say, 10 years ago. Whether this is a permanent change or a current fad in rural development is another question!

Two main weaknesses in this document stand out. First, little is said about how and why present administrative systems function in the way that they do. Without an understanding of organisations, changes may inadvertently undermine those parts of the system which are vital for its functioning. There may not be a commonly accepted theory of the operation of rural development organisations, but the report might at least have mentioned the desirability of filling this lacuna, especially as there has been some interesting writing on and around this topic of late. Second, the policy recommendations consist of a long list of desiderata, with little guide to which are the most desirable and which things to do first. Such is often the case when reporting the consensual results of international deliberations, but weakens the document’s value to senior policy-makers who might be encouraged to make one or two changes, but who fight shy of wholesale reform. In brief, this Report provides a useful update on recent thinking in management of

agricultural services to small farmers to those unfamiliar with it, but contains little news for the cognoscenti.

STEVE WIGGINS University of Reading

TALKING ABOUT DEVELOPMENT Edited by Altaf Gauhar Third World Foundation for Economic Studies, London, 1983, 325 pp.

Altaf Gauhar, in his capacity as editor of ‘South’ magazine, provides the transcripts of interviews which he conducted between 1978 and 1981 with a very impressive line-up of sixteen politicians, economists and others on the issue of third world development. The book is valuable in that it brings together some useful impressions of the views of eminent personalities such as Julius Nyerere, Michael Manley, Lee Kuan Yew, Robert Mugabe. Willy Brandt and the late Indira Gandhi.

Book Reviews 283

Inevitably politicians often tend to be non-commital on controversial issues and this shows through in many of the responses recorded. There is, therefore, a certain superficiality about many of the contributions but despite this the collections would undoubtedly be of some value to undergraduate students studying the main issues and views of the personalities for the first time.

The content of such a book quickly becomes dated. Gauhar himself points out that the Iranian upheavals, for example, were yet to be fully assessed when the interviews were being collected. This, taken together with the diversity of questions and responses suggests that the collection would have benefited from a much stronger contextual introduction than that provided. It would also have provided an opportunity for Gauhar to have presented an impartial identification and consideration of the basic issues which form the book’s subject matter.

As it stands, the book should still stimulate the reader to discover the underlying concerns of the contributors to Gauhar’s ‘forum’. In this context the book provides a very broad canvas against which a general impression of the ‘South’s economic. social and political problems may be better appreciated. Gauhar seems to be particularly concerned with some of the major structural questions concerning economic development and this helps to amplify the generally low priority which the political figures interviewed give to such matters. This, in itself, should mark the book out as a useful prompt in discussions about development issues and about the practicalities of world leadership as they contrast with the more idealistic objectives of academics and global theoreticians. We are also left asking exactly what ‘structural change’ actually means and whether there can ever be any worldwide consensus on this question given the diversity of moral and political outlooks of world leaders and decision makers.

BRIAN JACOBS Department of International Relations 13 Politics

North Stdordshire Polytechnic

ETHICS IN GOVERNMENT: THE PUBLIC SERVICE OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA Edited by 0. P. Dwivedi in collaboration with Nelson E. Paulias Administrative College of Papua New Guinea, Boroko, P.N.G.. 1984, v + 210 pp.

Papua New Guinea is one of the few Third World states which can claim to be a parliamentary democracy in which the peaceful change of power between administrations has successfully occured. It also has witnessed one of the most thoroughgoing attempts at political decentralisation. Power is dispersed in the modern political system to an exceptional degree between the participants in a multi-party system, the public service and provincial governments. These institutional achievements are all the more remarkable given developments elsewhere in the Third World, the rapid movement of the Highland population in a quarter of a century from isolation to incorporation in a new national political system, and the general low level of development of the educational and political systems prior to independence in 1975.

This book is a collection of seminar papers by politicians, public servants and academics concerning issues of ethics, responsibility and accountability in the Papua New Guinea public service. It will be of great value for those involved in that country in university and college teaching in the social sciences and for the training of administrators and politicians. The outside observer will also learn of some of the central value dilemmas involved in public administration in Papua New Guinea.

For the vast majority of Papua New Guineans the modern nation state is a recent and alien intrusion upon customary behavioural and value patterns. Participation in it inevitably creates tensions between the competing cultural constraints of the modern and traditional sectors. Obligations to clans for instance, conflict with western derived ideals of public service