Conventional approaches to evaluating international development programmes undervalue
the local contexts within which development initiatives occur. Programmes are most often assessed
according to economic criteria, which do not fully represent the aspirations and concerns of
community members. Consequently, formal development evaluations are poor reflections of a
programme's total influence on the social organisation of communities and the daily lives of
community members.
Two objectives guided my research. The first was to develop an approach to evaluating
rural development programmes, at the level of individual communities, which was more sensitive
to indigenous social contexts and priorities than are conventional approaches. My second objective
was to demonstrate the utility of this new approach by using it to evaluate the influence of Aga
Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP) initiatives on Shimshal community, Pakistan. The first
objective was theoretical; the second, empirical.
The study begins by addressing the initial objective with two major theoretical points. First,
draw from the critical social theory of Habermas to develop the concept of community
sustainability, which I offer as a universally acceptable standard against which to evaluate the
results of development programmes. Community sustainability is defined as follows: (a) a
universally desirable, ideal state; (b) in which community members' shared norms and supporting
institutions are established consensually; (c) where decisions are validated according to those
shared norms within accepted institutions; and (d) where those norms and institutions, and changes
to them, are supported through time by the material resources available to the community.
According to this conception programmes should be evaluated in tenns of their influence on
community decision making processes, and not on specific technical innovations.
Second, I employ Matthews' sociological work to suggest that we can evaluate the
contribution of development programmes to community sustainability by examining their influence on decision making in four areas of organisation: social, political, economic, and ecological. These,
when integrated with the larger concept of community sustainability, facilitate the identification and
definition of four categories according to which community sustainability can be empirically
evaluated: social vitality, political validity, economic viability, and ecological volition.
I applied this framework to interpreting the nature of sustainability in Shimshal community,
in northern Pakistan, and to evaluating the influence of an initiative by the Aga Khan Rural Support
Programme to create village organisations in Shimshal. Two main research strategies were
employed. First, I analysed historical and contemporary texts to provide the following contextual
understandings: (a} Shimshalis' formal interpretation of their community; (b) outsiders' historical and
contemporary perspectives on Shimshal; (c) the history of community sustainability in Hunza (of
which Shimshal is a part) over the past two centuries; and (d) the objectives and achievements of
the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme in the villages of northern Pakistan.
Second, I engaged in seven months of ethnographic fieldwork in the community of
Shimshal. Field notes collected during my two visits were coded along two dimensions: (a} into four
theoretically-derived categories (social, political, economic or ecological); and (b} into inductive
categories, each of which represented some theme or narrative of Shimshali lived experience {eg.
formal education} relating to the creation of AKRSP village organisations. These two dimensions
of analysis integrate in an interpretation that utilises small case studies to assess the influence of
AKRSP initiatives on the sustainability of Shimshal's four areas of social organisation.
This process of evaluation reveals that Shimshal has become more sustainable in the past
half decade because village organisations created by the AKRSP have facilitated an increasingly
consensual form of decision making within an increasingly rationalised culture and society. That
AKRSP village organisations have facilitated this change is due mainly to the social and cultural
context of Shimshal, particularly an indigenous tendency toward community autonomy and
collective decision making. The study's significance relates to its initial objectives. First, the approach to evaluating
agency development I advanced improves on conventional approaches to programme evaluation,
and also contributes to the evaluation of social change more generally. Second, the application of
this evaluation approach to AKRSP development in Shimshal contributes to AKRSP's practical
understanding of the influence of its endeavours in Shimshal, and provides guidance for improving
development efforts in Shimshal and elsewhere within its programme area. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/15588 |
| Date | January 1993 |
| Creators | Butz, David Aaron Otto |
| Contributors | Eyles, John, Geography |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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