Political and Technical Moments in Development: Agropolitan Development Revisited

The problem addressed is one of strategy and practice: how to promote agricultural and rural development in peasant societies in ways that will benefit the large majority of the people. In a number of earlier essays, the author had proposed what he called a strategy of agropolitan development which would stress the importance of linking a self-generated process of dynamic change from within agricultural communities to the larger processes of central guidance by the state. The strategy involved a substantial devolution of power to small territorial units within the overall system of societal guidance. In the present paper the desirability of such a devolution is considered in terms of political, ecological, and technical–administrative arguments. As a political strategy, agropolitan development requires a commitment on part of national elites, and this may be difficult to obtain. Alternative strategies, on the other hand, although possibly successful when measured in terms of production, are unlikely to involve more than a small proportion of the peasant population. The political choice, then, would seem to be between planning for equality and political self-determination at the lowest levels of territorial governance or planning for inequality and political autocracy.