Development Discourse and Rural Development : Cases of Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Thailand

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Our research team carried out a comparative study on rural development in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand (1996-1998) and also on Taiwan (1997-1998). In this fiscal year (1998-1999), we continued to conduct the same research, especially on "Janasaviya Program" (a poverty alleviation project) in Sri Lanka, "development monks" in Thailand, a development project of marshy peat bed in Indonesia, and a rural history under the development dictatorship in Indonesia.Having these research experiences, we have come to realize some theoretical and methodological implications for the study of "development phenomena". For instance, we need to look at not only development discourse but its concomitant institutional settings as a whole. In other words, we have to focus on "local development event", in which actors, institutions, material things and discourses are related each other on the network of power, and also need to analyze how actors such as development workers, farmers and planners construct their subjects for development/anti-development (or even ones indifferent to development). Having understood these micro networks of power and the construction of subjects in local development events, we then will be able to see and describe a micro-process of development phenomena.This is, however, still a preliminal stage of our research. For further study on development phenomena, We have to elaborate our theoretical concepts (such as subject, agency, political economy and so on) and analytical framework, and at the same time need to accumulate ethnographic experiences on development events.