In this powerful new analysis of development stategies and projects, Thierry Verheist draws on his unrivalled experience of grassroots development in many different parts of the world. Published during the UNESCO Decade on Culture and Developmnet, his book argues that development is often seen by the poor of the Third World as a Trojan horse of Westernization. Far from eliminating mass poverty, it often destroys the very environment on which people depend for their liveihood and uproots them from their tradional ways of life. Too frequently, Western aid takes on an ethnocentric bias that assumes that one model of society is valid for all. Yet a strong local cultural identity and spiritual inspiration can be the reservoir for people's creative resistance to alineation and oppression.
This book stresses the cultural dimension of any meaningful effort towards self-reliance. In a critical but optimistic anaylsis, it argues that local knowledge and valuses must be the starting point for a people-centred alternative path of development.
Publication Details
- Publisher: Zed Books
- ISBN-10: 0862328497
- Dewey Decimal: 330.917
- ECHO Library: 330.917 VER