Zed Books Unplanned Development: Tracking Change in South-East Asia

Unplanned Development offers a fascinating and fresh view into the realities of development planning. While to the outsider most development projects present themselves as thoroughly planned endeavors informed by structure, direction and intent, Jonathan Rigg exposes the truth of development experience that chance, serendipity, turbulence and the unexpected define development around the world. Based on rich empirical sources from the Southeast Asian region, the author sustains a unique general argument in making the case for chance and turbulence in development. Identifying chance as a leading factor in all development planning, Unplanned Development contributes to a better way of dealing with the unexpected and asks vital questions on the underlying paradoxes of development practice. Review 'Unplanned Development is a critical book for our times. Intensifying global problems and development crises mark the failure of grand theories and models beloved by planners while calling for new thinking able to grasp the contingency and complexity of development. Based on extensive experience in South-East Asia, the author of this study breaks new ground by reframing development as an outcome of the unplanned, unseen and unexpected. This superb work provides new conceptual tools for a better understanding of the paradoxes of development even as it enables the reader to see how 'ordinary' events and people are more central to development processes than hitherto thought. Highly recommended!' Professor Raymond L. Bryant, King's College, London 'This is a book with a powerful and disruptive message. Above all, Jonathan Rigg's superbly crafted and thoroughly documented critique warns us against prediction and prescription in the study and practice of development. This is a celebration of human agency and diversity, and also a warning for all those inclined to take a one-size-fits-all approach to understanding or shaping social, economic, political and environmental change in Asia.' Philip Hirsch, University of Sydney 'Rigg offers a trenchant critique of the hubris of grand theories that claim to know and predict the direction of historical change, showing how they are often misguided or completely wrong. He exposes the strangeness of our stubborn commitment to planned change, despite its remarkably poor track record. Through richly empirical accounts of what actually happened in Southeast Asia...he shows that the driving forces were context-specific and often surprising. His book is a manifesto for grounded scholarship and a more modest style of intervention, attentive to the what, where, how, and why of the little and big shifts through which history is made, and to the desires and practices of the people who make it. A stimulating read - highly recommended.' --Tania Li, University of Toronto About the Author Jonathan Rigg is a development geographer at Durham University. He has been conducting fieldwork in Southeast Asia, mainly in rural areas of the Lao PDR, Thailand and Vietnam, since the early 1980s, and, together with Peter Vandergeest, is currently coordinating a major re-study project examining trajectories of rural change across Southeast Asia