Informal Session: Community Development as Fantasy?
Organizer: Penelope Schoeffel

This informal session was attended by 26 people from Australia, USA, New Zealand, PNG, Netherlands, Germany and the UK. Our academic backgrounds included anthropology, geography, history and political science. Our Oceanic areas of interests included PNG, Solomons, Vanuatu, and Tuvalu, Aotearoa, Samoa and East Timor. Our topical interests included oil palm resettlement schemes; local government, devolution and leadership; governance and corruption; Maori-led development; food banks; fisheries and marine conservation; mining; water supply; agriculture; islander perceptions of development; issues of working with aid agencies and NGOs; the evolution of responses by aid donors to social and cultural concerns; and the genealogy of the notion of community development.

We agreed that the existence of collectively oriented communities with undifferentiated interests is a fantasy but one that underlies most community development projects. We recognized that most anthropologists and scholars in allied areas who work in the Pacific know this. So why don't "they" know what "we" know? The first part of our discussions focused of the question of why anthropological knowledge has little influence on development actions and policies, and why--at least in a Pacific context--it lacks much influence in development studies. We considered various explanations of why anthropological knowledge does not inform notions of local level or "community" development. We criticized the arcane styles of communication among anthropologists; the exclusive arenas in which anthropological knowledge is disseminated; the anthropologists' preference for particularizing cultural contexts; and the contemporary caution amongst many anthropologists about the application of knowledge to development enterprises. We more or less agreed that there are strong incentives in the behavior of patron agencies to pretend ignorance of anthropological knowledge. That the client recipients of development projects have their own fantasies, which rarely coincide with those of the patron provider. That the problem is not necessarily one of` innocence or ignorance: there is often a covert patron understanding that the realities of social organization among the so-called undeveloped or marginalized was not as the patrons overtly idealize and proclaim it to be. In the second part of our discussion we told stories of successes and failures from various perspectives. Why the improvements, regardless of patron motivation, offered in the name of "development" do not turn out as the patrons intend them to. Whether there are different perceptions of success and failure. If all externally generated innovations fail? By what and by whose criteria is success or failure attributed? Are self-generated changes in ways of living that occur via remittances rather than aid more successful?