Musings about “Rural Reconstruction”
Whenever someone asked me, what is “rural reconstruction?”, most of the time my response is that it’s another terminology for rural development. I will add further by saying that the rural reconstruction history started in the 1920s when there was no such thing as rural development as we know it today so the organization back used the term rural reconstruction. Then people would respond to me, why not use “rural development” as its more modern and easier to understand. It got me thinking really.
As a rural reconstruction worker of IIRR, I had my fair share of emails offering business proposals to buy new heavy equipment such as dump trucks and bulldozers. Of course, it made sense to people that rural reconstruction is another segment of the construction sector, perhaps a post-disaster construction business. I think for the past 10 years, we’ve considered changing the name of the organization twice or maybe more — to drop “rural reconstruction” in our name and replace it say “rural resilience” to still keep the IIRR acronym. In all those efforts to change the name — the leadership of the organization still decided to keep the original name. What makes the term “rural reconstruction” even more meaningful and relevant even at this time and age, after 100 years since the term emerged in the 1920s.
The term rural reconstruction started in rural China, in Tinghsien in particular in the 1920s up to the time when China embraced communism. Rural reconstruction work in China pressed on and there is in fact a resurgence of rural reconstruction movements in China today. I’ve had the chance of learning about this history of rural reconstruction in China, the story of the Chinese movement when its founder, Dr. Yen left China to start the various international rural reconstruction movements. Other scholars who worked with Dr. Yen such as the scholar Liang Shuming, considered the last Confucian scholar of China, continued the pursuit of Chinese rural reconstruction under communist China.
Back in 2016, in a conference for young people in southeast Asia, I had a chance to visit a place in Beibei province, just outside the city of Chongqing, a museum dedicated to the memory and work of Dr. Yen. I was impressed by the level of respect and popularity of Dr. Yen and his work in this part of China.
In a conversation between Dr. Yen and the author, Nobel Laureate Pearl Buck, Dr. Yen said that the Chinese term for reconstruction is “change and build”. He added that “while we aim to create a new society, we must not forget we are doing it with an old society”. (Buck, P., Tell the People: Talks with James Yen about the Mass Education Movement, New York: John Day, 1945). This further proved that Dr. Yen was a man beyond his time. The modern term for “change and build” we hear a lot today is “transformative” as in “transformative leadership” and “transformative approaches to development”.
This philosophy is still found embedded in many of IIRR programs — we seek innovations that are built from the experience of the people and together with the people. We go where the people are and seek improvements to their existing knowledge. Some people call this “incremental change”, a change that happened one at a time until we finally change the entire system. I remember our work with the pastoralist education in Africa or the “cattle camps” of our South Sudan area — examples of different ways of doing things, resulting from our huge respect to tradition and people’s experiences and understanding of their unique contexts as basis for capacity development towards self-reliance.
So how do we “change and build” at the same time?
1. Start with the most basic needs. Development work has become a very complicated area of study in the past 20 years with several concepts, theories and tools developed. For rural reconstruction, the focus is on the most basic problems of the rural poor. Anywhere in the world, people need a minimum of livelihood to survive, a minimum of education, a minimum of health, and meaningful democratic self-rule. These needs are also inter-connected — quality education opens opportunities for better livelihoods, better livelihoods also improve the ability to access better health care and democratic rule leads to the sustainability of services. The implication is while the 4 basic needs are inter-connected, rural reconstruction programs need to be integrated as well. As rural reconstruction workers, we focus on the development outcomes that matter to the people. Rural people give no concern on how we make logframes and complex theories of change. For rural people — the bottom line are the 4 basic needs to achieve meaningful lives.
2. Focus on people and their communities. Dr. Yen once said that “when we say a better world, we mean we want better people.” People in rural communities have existing knowledge, skills, and experiences that allowed them to survive and persists despite the myriad of challenges they are facing. To be transformative is to “lead from behind”, creating the space that allows local people and communities to take control of their development. We should strive to find and promote solutions that are a mix of “technical know-how” of experts and “practical do-how” of the people. In modern terms, one calls this a user-centered, design thinking in program development.
3. Agents of change vs. agents of learning. The final line in the rural reconstruction credo is “not relief but release” is not an argument against disaster relief programs. This line is about temporary aid versus long term change. While temporary aid is important but it should lead to lasting systems change. This is about unleashing, releasing people’s maximum potential to help themselves. People will only achieve this with sustained capacity development of the people. As rural reconstruction workers, we are not agents of change or people who go to the villages and change communities. Instead, we are agents of learning, our role is teaching, training, and capacitating people for them to realize their full potential, to inspire people to act in changing their situation.
I admit that explaining what rural reconstruction means in today’s development challenges is difficult that we are tempted to just drop the terminology and move on. Perhaps dropping the term as part of the IIRR’s name might be acceptable but I will continue to support the idea that the brand of work should always be rural reconstruction. The next time someone asks me to explain what rural reconstruction in a few words — I tell them that it’s “changing and building” rural communities at the same time.
