First published in 1998. This is Volume XIII of eighteen in the Sociology of Development series. Originally published in 1969, this book is a study of organizations and development of two rural development projects by the author whilst working in the Administration in Kenya: a grazing control programme and the Mwea Irrigation Settlement.

This best selling textbook focuses on the changes in geographical patterns that have taken place in recent years i.e. on the geographical pattern of recent and current economic change. The area covered includes the countries lying between the limits of the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. In this second edition substantial changes have been made in every chapter in order to keep up to date in respect of both the geographical pattern of development and prevailing attitudes towards it. The discussion is still largely confined to the twenty year period between 1956 and 1976, and to the economic component of development

The typical image of the Gezira Scheme, the large-scale irrigation scheme started under British colonial rule in Sudan, is of a centrally planned effort by a central colonial power controlling tenants and cotton production. However, any idea(l)s of planned irrigation and profit in Gezira had to be realized by African farmers and European officials, who both had their own agendas. Projects like Gezira are best understood in terms of continuous negotiations. This book rewrites Gezira’s history in terms of colonial control, farmers’ actions and resistance, and the broader development debate.

The many ideas and opportunities include: narrowing the gaps between words and actions; reducing demands on administrative capacity; using minimum rules, non-negotiables and downward accountability to transform power relations; finding new potentials for participation; improving scaling up; critical reflection and experiential learning; complementing rights-based with obligations-based approaches; pro-poor realism; and responsible well-being."

The gestation period of this collection has been lengthy even by academic stan dards. Some of our long-suffering contributors prepared their original drafts for a workshop held in Nairobi in 1967, and although they have all up-dated their contributions they are still essentially reporting on research conducted in the late 1960s. However, we feel that their various findings and analyses of the issues they respectively treat have a continuing validity in our comprehension of the problem of rural development. Other contributions reporting on more recent work have been incorporated at different times since, most of them not commissioned especially for this symposium but all adding something to our understanding of the problem. The slow accumulation of material which makes up this fmal collection parallels an evolution in our own collective thinking, if indeed not that of most students of 'development' over the past decade. The progression has not been towards fmal clarification of the complex and changing East African realities, nor towards formulation of an accepted model for their analysis; rather, it has been marked by the questioning of the initial, somewhat simplistic assumptions with which some of us started out and a continuing debate and widening polar ization of views about the significance of that process of government 'pene tration' of the rural areas which is our focus, about the positive or negative value of 'development' policies in East Africa and, indeed, about the appropri ate theoretical approaches to the study of 'development' in general.