Abstract:Though many national and international agencies claim commitment to participative approaches to helping the rural poor, little progress has been made in translating ambitious plans into effective action. The record of earlier community development and cooperatives efforts is largely a history of failure, resulting more often in strengthening the position of traditional elites than in integrating poorer elements into the national development process. Many current calls for involvement of the rural poor are little more than wishful thinking, inadequately informed by past experience as to the investments in institutional innovation required to give reality to an important idea. The prevailing blueprint approach to development programming with its emphasis on detailed pre-planning and time bounded projects is itself cited as an important impediment. Examination of a number of Asian programs suggests that the more successful grew out of village experience. Consequently they were able to achieve an unusual degree of fit between beneficiary needs, program outputs, and the competence of the assisting organization. The key was not preplanning, but an organization with a capacity for embracing error, learning with the people, and building new knowledge and institutional capacity through action. A model of the learning process approach to building program strategies and appropriate organizational competence suggests a new program should progress through three developmental stages in which the focal concern is successively on learning to be effective, learning to be efficient, and learning to expand. Implications for the role of the social scientist and for action by funding agencies are discussed.

     Keywords:community organization,rural development,cooperatives

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