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Daniel Immerwahr

Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development Hardcover – January 5, 2015

by Daniel Immerwahr (Author)

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Thinking Small tells the story of how the United States sought to rescue the world from poverty through small-scale, community-based approaches. And it also sounds a warning: such strategies, now again in vogue, have been tried before, with often disastrous consequences.

It is common for historians to interpret the United States’ postwar development campaigns as ill-advised attempts to impose modernity upon poorer nations. The small-scale projects that are popular today mark a retreat from that top-down, heavy-handed approach. But Daniel Immerwahr shows that community-based development is nothing new: it has been present since the origins of international development practice, existing alongside―and sometimes at the heart of―grander schemes to modernize the global South. His transnational study follows a set of strange bedfellows―the Peace Corps and the CIA, Mohandas Gandhi and Ferdinand Marcos, antipoverty activists and Cold Warriors―united by their conviction that development should not be about engineers building dams but about communities shaping their own fates. The programs they designed covered hundreds of millions of people in some sixty countries, eventually making their way back to the United States itself during the War on Poverty.

Yet the hope that small communities might lift themselves up was often disappointed, as self-help gave way to crushing forms of local oppression. Thinking Small challenges those who hope to eradicate poverty to think twice about the risks as well as the benefits of community development.

Print length

272 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Harvard University Press
Publication date

January 5, 2015
Dimensions

6.3 x 0.9 x 9.7 inches
ISBN-10

0674289943
ISBN-13

978-0674289949
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Daniel Immerwahr’s Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development pours a bucket of cold water on this type of thinking, now experiencing a resurgence among development agencies, policy entrepreneurs, and influential foundations. It uses three case studies (in India, the Philippines, and the United States) to upend the stock portrait of mid-twentieth century development, which focuses on the evils of top-down intervention. In the conventional story, development is a field dominated by ‘modernizers,’ whose hubristic efforts result in catastrophic consequences for those they were designed to benefit… Unfortunately, far from eliminating deprivation and attacking the social status quo, bottom-up community development projects often reinforced them… This is a history with real stakes. If that prior campaign’s record is as checkered as Thinking Small argues, then its intellectual descendants must do some serious rethinking… How might those in twenty-first-century development and anti-poverty work forge a better path? They can start by reading Thinking Small.”―Merlin Chowkwanyun, Boston Review

“An impressive history that will quickly become required reading for the growing ranks of historians interested in topics ranging from modernization to the War on Poverty. Immerwahr’s rich and insightful book has much to offer to anyone interested in twentieth-century America and, especially, its efforts to combat poverty at home and abroad.”―David C. Engerman, author of Know Your Enemy

“Persuasively fills a major gap in both the study of American interventions in the developing world and the history of the Cold War. Immerwahr demonstrates that the inspiration for community development projects was not simply the product of social science research and domestic initiatives, but―particularly in the case of the War on Poverty―was shaped by the nature and outcomes of programs in developing nations, especially China, India, Mexico, and the Philippines. Thinking Small should be read not only by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and economists, but also by policymakers, activists, planners, and field agents.”―Michael Adas, author of Dominance by Design

“As the historian Daniel Immerwahr demonstrates brilliantly in Thinking Small, the history of development has seen constant experimentation with community-based and participatory approaches to economic and social improvement…Immerwahr’s account of these failures should give pause to those who insist that going small is always better than going big.”―Jamie Martin, The Nation

About the Author

Daniel Immerwahr is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harvard University Press; Illustrated edition (January 5, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0674289943
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0674289949
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.3 x 0.9 x 9.7 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,521,123 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,081 in City Planning & Urban Development
- #2,111 in Urban Planning and Development
- #2,379 in Development & Growth Economics (Books)

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MES

Should be required for all planners

Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2019

Verified Purchase

One of the best books written on institutional histories of 20th century planning and development. Really demonstrates the binary of top down vs bottom up as an arbitrary and false construction. All planners should read this.

6 people found this helpful

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Culture Wars Vet

An Historical Perspective Unknown to Today's Development (and Counterinsurgency) Practitioners

Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2016

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This history of community development in the 20th Century makes clear that the current enthusiasm among development practitioners and donors for bottom-up, participatory, community-based or community-directed projects is not new and that much of what is touted as the benefits and outcomes echoes the promises of similar interventions decades ago both overseas and in the U.S. The World Bank and other funding institutions are committing billions of dollars to these projects which are held up as examples of how the code has been cracked for doing humane, efficient development which not only improves the beneficiaries' material well-being but also builds their stock of social capital for other matters such as improved governance. Although several recent rigorous, large-scale reviews of scores of these projects have cast doubt on the promised outcomes, this has not slowed the enthusiasm for and momentum of such projects.

Immerwahr presents three cases from the middle of the last century where large-scale community development had been tried and then abandoned or drastically scaled back. He also lays out the context for these in terms of trends in social philosophy, intellectual history, and the social sciences.

While development practitioners may insist that they are too busy and too focused on the nuts and bolts of their projects to delve into the history of development and what they view as proven, humane, and effective approaches, they risk repeating what Immerwahr shows were also seen as promising, transformative approaches but which didn't deliver.

This readable volume is strongly recommended for those involved in development policy and practice and also those in the military concerned with counterinsurgency and stability operations. In Afghanistan, for example, since 2001, tens of development programs including the $2.5 billion National Solidarity Program have adopted the community development approach in sectors including health, education, natural resource management, and poverty reduction. The military has applied the same approach for its much-touted Afghan Local Police program. Growing evidence however suggests that the ALP is beset by the problems and weaknesses that Immerwahr describes have afflicted community development programs decades ago.

The U.S. military and civilian organizations are currently pursuing costly, ambitious "lessons learned" exercises in order to make sure that the mistakes made in Afghanistan won't be repeated. As "Thinking Small" makes clear, one lesson which development organizations and governments have yet to learn is that such exercises are pointless if nobody bothers to look at available information on what has been tried before and then to learn from it.

18 people found this helpful

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Kyle Dunlap

Well Researched

Reviewed in the United States on November 24, 2018

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I read this book as I've been volunteering in the Peace Corps. This book was well researched and worth the read. It forced me to consider the role of community development work.

8 people found this helpful

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J. Fattal

I don't normally review, but I had to put ...

Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2015

Verified Purchase

I don't normally review, but I had to put a different voice than the other reviewer who clearly doesn't know how to read properly.

The book is fascinating and is not simplified in the way that that reviewer suggests, at all. In fact, it is full of nuance and lessons for academics and people in the field.

31 people found this helpful

Helpful

Sarah E Garcia

Two Stars

Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2016

Verified Purchase

Very hard read for me. Kept falling asleep every time I had to read it.

One person found this helpful

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D. E. Voth

Community Development is Inept and Pernicious

Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2015

Verified Purchase

This author collects stuff from all over in order to try to make the case that local level action, especially Community Development, is futile and inept,if not positively pernicious. The perniciousness charge is made by associating Community Development with US Colonialism in the Philippines and with the terrible US role in the Vietnam War. I can say with certainty that the author's effort to tie the field and practice of Community Development to US policy in Vietnam, while a clever way to get attention to his book, is uninformed and and completely wrong. It demonstrates that the author has not even an elementary understanding of Vietnam's long and profound tradition of communalism and communal activity, nor of the actual facts of US involvement there. Nor, for that matter, can the author's argument that somehow, the US War on Poverty of the 1960's was infected by this pernicious history in the Philippines and Vietnam, make any sense. That, too, is simply wrong. The book's only redeeming feature is that it does bring together lots and lots of references and documentation to things that various historic figures said and/or did. Even this, though, is always presented very selectively. For example, FDR is said, once, to have said that the US should help the French to manage Indochina. But, of course, what is not mentioned, is that he frequently also said the exact opposite, and is regarded by virtually all historians of the period to have opposed US support of French re-occupation of Indochine. Another example is that Richard Poston, who actually discovered Community Development almost by accident, and became a prominent promoter and writer about the field and the founder of the Community Development Department at Southern Illinois University, is presented as some kind of proponent of this pernicious use of Community Development by the US abroad. The charge, which is made by implication of that fact that he published a book entitled "Democracy Speaks Many Tongues," and that he consulted with Community Development programs abroad, is simply shameless.

Maybe this is what it takes to be published by Harvard University Press, eh?

24 people found this helpful

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