| | In chapter 3 of Beyond the Impasse Michael Edwards claims that 'development research and development practice are moving together' (p.90) while Samwel Chambua in African Perspectives remarks that 'development theory constitutes practice' (p.37). The contributions by other authors in each volume demonstrate the degree to which the truth of such statements is constrained both by the limitations of theory itself and by academic fashion. In the former volume the various contributors, mostly male and all based in Western European Universities, grapple with the perceived 'impasse' in development theory to which the current intellectual obsession with the post-modernism allows only one way out - via deconstruction and particularisation. The contributors to African Perspectives, on the other hand, writing from African Universities in the late 1980s have not altogether taken this counter-structuralist intellectual trend on board but are nevertheless most highly critical of previous theoretical imports from the West. |
