Essential reading for all rural development students and practitioners in the 1990s, this book examines the paradigm shift in rural development from an industrial to an holistic approach to technology development, from a technocratic to a participatory approach to management, and from resource control by big organisations to local resource management. It provides a broad-ranging assessment of agriculture and local-level institutional development and sets out a range of agendas for development practice, management and policy into the twenty-first century.

Based on a decade of research by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre, this volume includes material on inter-generational transmission, the importance of assets and vulnerability, and conflict, and new thinking about the close relationship between social exclusion and adverse incorporation.