'Community Development' was our Peace Corps assignment, for which nothing in our undergraduate studiers had prepared us. In the early 60s there was certainly talk of "the Developing World", but I can recall almost no practical connection to what that meant as a bound phrase pre-1965. I think that The Ugly American and some of Shute's novels, together with the spate of new Nations emerging from colonial domination, provided some conceptual background for 'Development' as an emerging concept.
In 1964-1965 at Harvard I was in contact with Graduate School of Design "city planner" types, whose concerns were tantamount to 'Development', though I scarcely understood that at the time.
Ward Hunt Goodenough's Cooperation In Change: An Anthropological Approach to Community Development (1963) I think I bought during Peace Corps Training in Hilo HI, and it accompanied us to Sarawak. My reading of it was ...cursory and basically ignorant. A month or so ago I retrieved the book from the shelves and opened it to Alexander Leighton's Foreword , where I found these useful bits [emphasis added]:
...(the book) constitutes an essential library and reference source that should accompany every worker in cross-cultural situations, or situations of rapid social change (9)The phrase "elicitation of felt needs" is probably the main idea I absorbed from the book, opaque as it was and is. In 2025 the book reads to me as neocolonialist and patronizing....the fundamental problem: achieving cooperation among individuals and groups of individuals ... in implementing programs for change (15)
...we shall concentrate on the problems that arise when a community undergoing change is in a client relationship with some outside person or group serving as a catalyst or helper in the change process (16)
...'community' broadly, referring to any social entity in a client relationship with a development agent or agency (16)
...the usual reason for creating new environmental opportunities is to enable people to engage in new activities and to free them for economic, social, and political growth (18)
(lists 10 "principles")
...2. Development agents must have a thorough knowledge of the main values and principal features of the client community's culture...4. The goals of development must be stated in terms that have positive value to the community's members. They must be something they, as well as the agent, want. (22)
So there we were in September 1965, at Melugu Land Development Scheme, one of several innovative projects under the aegis of the Sarawak government, and our job was to assist the Manager of the Scheme in the creation of a new settlement that would bring together from a dozen or so longhouse communities more than 300 families, each to occupy a separate house with 'modern' amenities, and to become tenders of high-yielding rubber trees planted by government direction... in short, we were involved in resettling people from a mixed economy of rice-based subsistence farming and independent production of 'jungle rubber' into lives as rubber-growing peasants who would buy rice... The term people were encouraged to use for the process was 'pemansang', more or less "progress" and thus "development". Children could go to school, and life would be modern...
This experience raised for me the notion of the consequences of infrastructural development for the people to whom such centrally-planned affordances were ...to be afforded. Roads, dams, electrification, services... which seemed to define a research problem for the graduate study I anticipated.
And so I landed at Stanford in 1967, in a program called Stanford International Development Education Center (SIDEC), where our 1962-1964 employer Bob Textor was the staff Anthropologist. It took almost 2 years for me to recognize that I was ...unsuited... to the career path that a SIDEC PhD would lead to (a Foundation functionary). I came to see 'Development' as something done to people by Authority from outside ("Land Development Scheme"), the PURPOSE of which as to bring 'people' into the Economy according to government Plan, by providing inducements and "modern" infrastructure. I think both the economic and the political aspects of 'Development' were personally repellent to the person I was becoming in the late 1960s, and my encounters with *Whole Earth Catalog* and *Systems Theory* eased me into Stanford's Anthropology Department, and it took another year for me to realize that a return to Sarawak for field research was impractical. Impossible in fact. And so I hatched the notion of fieldwork in ...Nova Scotia.
Three Worlds of Development; the Theory and Practice of International Stratification Irving Louis Horowitz (1966) pretty much defined the trope of "The Third World" or "The Developing World" in the mid-1960s. I don't think I read the book (certainly not carefully, maybe not at all), but its framework of "3 Worlds" was in the air when I was in SIDEC, and my concerns were surely with the Third World.
(see EF Schumacher's 1966 review ...he of Small Is Beautiful)
...are naturally curious to know what the author wishes us to understand by the word "development." This proves to be a somewhat difficult quest. To start with, we are told that "Any sound theory of social change must indicate what development excludes; that is, how it distinguishes itself from such cognate concepts as industrialization, externally induced transformation, growth of population and of the economy." Development must not be identified with any of these: it "differs from industrialization in that the latter implies a series of technological, mechanical, and engineering innovations in forms of social production." It "differs from change in that the latter implies a continual adaptation through small steps and stages to an existent social condition" (sic!). It "differs from externally induced transformation in that the latter implies a prime mover which is external to the development process," and it differs from growth in national wealth or population since "these do not call forth any new process, but are simply processes of adaptation." What one is to make of all this, I do not know. Let us search for some positive statements. We are told that development implies "a genuine break with tradition"; that it implies "a new technology which makes available consumer goods"; that it reflects "at some level culture and consciousness and factors which are 'unnatural'. ... In human development, alternative forms of social structure are not only possible but almost inevitable. But to conclude from these facts, as some sociologists have, that it is impossible to arrive at a scientific statement of human development is simply to abandon the major question posed for social science."...Professor Horowitz says that "the sociologist must become a physician of society." As a sociologist-turned-physician, I suppose, he recommends worldwide industrialization; yet he also insists that "Industrialization is in its essence a process of dehumanization." How can the physician recommend a process of dehumanization? Or can he perhaps show us types of development and types of industrialization which humanize instead of dehumanizing? This, surely, is the crux of the whole matter. To insist that development is desired by the Third World; that it is necessary; that it should be helped along; that the rich can help the poor—no one disagrees. But how can all this be done without dehumanization, without driving people "to a new pinnacle of desperation"?
...The subtitle of the book—referring to "Theory and Practice"—is certainly misleading. No one engaged in development work will learn anything practical from these pages.
Another seminal book of the early 1970s was The Limits To Growth: A report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind (1973), which linked Systems and Development and Ecology and demography; others I associate with the time are Small Is Beautiful,/a> EF Schumacher (1973) and Frances Moore Lappé's Diet for a Small Planet (1971).