3.

Actors, interfaces and development

intervention: meanings, purposes
and powers

Norman Long

This paper argues the case for an actor-oriented analysis of development policy
and intervention. In so doing, I aim to clarify a number of critical issues concern-
ing how social actors, organising practices, cultural repertoires and institu-
tional/structural constraints are conceptualised within this framework of analy-
sis. I also examine the significance of the idea of ‘social interface’ for interpret-
ing policy narratives and planned intervention.3 To give some flesh and bones to
the argument, I have included in the discussion an analysis of the discursive and
practical implications of a Peruvian Land Reform policy.

The actor perspective

The roots of an actor-oriented sociology of development stretch back to Weber’s
characterisation of social action as implying simultaneously both meanings and
practices. Thus, in various ways, it builds upon symbolic interactionist and
phenomenological perspectives of the 1960s, models of social interaction and
exchange developed by social anthropologists in the 1970s, and the mounting
criticism of structural theories of social change and development promoted by
so-called post-structuralist, post-modernist or social constructionist writers of
the mid-1980s onwards. By about 1990, this had congealed into a profound dis-
satisfaction with structural and institutional types of explanations, such as those
offered by modernisation, political economy and neo-Marxist theories; that is,
with grand theories and hegemonic explanations in general. This was marked by
the publication of several, now well-known, papers that diagnosed what came to
be called a theoretical impasse in the understanding and practice of development
(Booth 1985 and 1994; Schuurman 1993).
Already in 1977, in An Introduction to the Sociology of Rural Development, I
had stressed the importance of what I called an actor-oriented analysis of devel-
opment, and in the early 1980s, I set about challenging certain ‘received
wisdoms´ current in development theory and research. The main task, as I saw it,
was to advance a more sophisticated treatment of social change and development

3 For an earlier and shorter version of this text, see Long (2003, 47-61).

14
that emphasised the central significance of ´human agency´ and self-organising
processes, and the mutual determination of so-called ‘internal’ and ‘external’
factors and relationships (Long 1984). This implied a focus on the lifeworlds and
interlocking ´projects´ of actors, and the development of theoretically grounded
methods of social research that allowed for the elucidation of social meanings,
purposes and powers. It also required delving more deeply into the social and
cultural discontinuities and ambiguities inherent in the ‘battlefields of knowl-
edge’ that shaped the relations between local actors, development practitioners
and researchers (Long 1989, Long and Long 1992).
This image of the ‘battlefields of knowledge’was chosen to convey the idea of
contested arenas in which actors´ understandings, interests and values are
pitched against each other. It is here – in the field of intervention primarily,
though not exclusively since knowledge dilemmas and controversies also shape
the writing and analysis of policy documents and reports, as well as research
findings – that struggles over social meanings and practices take place. It is here
too that we see most clearly the emergence of various kinds of negotiated orders,
accommodations, oppositions, separations and contradictions. Such battlefields
arise within and across many different institutional domains and arenas of social
action. They are not confined to the local scene or framed by specific institu-
tional settings such as development projects or broader policy programmes. Nor
do they involve only interactions between so-called ‘beneficiaries’ and ‘imple-
menters’. Indeed they embrace a wide range of social actors committed to differ-
ent livelihood strategies, cultural interests and political trajectories.
Adopting this stance not only provides a more open-ended way of looking at
intervention scenarios and the interlocking of arenas pertinent to development
processes, it also provides fresh insights into the so-called ‘larger questions’ of
poverty, inequality and domination within the evolving global political econ-
omy. It does this by showing how such macro-phenomena and pressing human
problems result (intentionally and unintentionally) from the complex interplay
of specific actors’ strategies, ‘projects’, resource endowments (material/techni-
cal and social/institutional), discourses and meanings. In this way, it explains
how the products of social action, such as policy documents, technologies, com-
modity markets or socio-demographic patterns, are constructed socially and cul-
turally.
The approach implies a clear epistemological standpoint. By acknowledging
the existence of ‘multiple social realities’ (i.e., the coexistence of different un-
derstandings and interpretations of experience), it questions the ontological real-
ism of positivist science (i.e. of a ‘real world’ that is simply ‘out there’ to be dis-
covered). Hence, it conceptualises knowledge as involving ways of construing
and ordering the world, and not as a simple accumulation of facts or as being uni-
fied by some underlying cultural logic, hegemonic order or system of classifica-
tion. Knowledge emerges out of a complex interplay of social, cognitive, cul-
tural, institutional and situational elements. It is, therefore, always essentially
provisional, partial and contextual in nature, and people work with a multiplicity
of understandings, beliefs and commitments (Long and Long 1992, 212-213).

15
 Methodologically this calls for a detailed ethnographic understanding of ev-
eryday life and of the processes by which images, identities and social practices
are shared, contested, negotiated, and sometimes rejected by the various actors
involved. As I show later, the notion of social interface provides a useful heuris-
tic device for identifying and analysing the critical points of intersection be-
tween different fields or levels of social organisation, since it is at these inter-
faces that discrepancies and discontinuities of value, interest, knowledge and
power are clearly revealed.
An actor-oriented approach to these issues requires strong sensitivity to the
processes by which the practitioner (and likewise, the researcher) enters the
lifeworlds of the other social actors (and vice versa), and, therefore, implies a
more reflexive type of understanding is often the case in development research.
In simple terms, the crux of this argument is that practitioners and researchers are
both involved in activities in which their observations and interpretations are
necessarily tacitly shaped by their own biographical and theoretical perspec-
tives. Thus, the trick of ‘good’ development practice and ethnography alike is to
learn how to turn such subjectivities to analytical advantage. The utility of an ac-
tor-oriented approach is that it forces us to inquire into how far specific kinds of
knowledge (our own included) are shaped by the power domains and social rela-
tions in which they are generated and embedded. This helps us to determine the
degree to which specific actors’lifeworlds, organising practices and cultural per-
ceptions are relatively autonomous of, or ‘colonised’by, wider ideological, insti-
tutional and power frames.
In order to examine these interrelations it is useful to work with the concept of
social interface which explores how discrepancies of social interest, cultural in-
terpretation, knowledge and power are mediated and perpetuated or transformed
at critical points of linkage or confrontation. These interfaces need to be identi-
fied ethnographically, not presumed on the basis of predetermined categories.

Peruvian land reform: policy model and

transformations at the interface
I first became aware of the need to develop an interface perspective in the early
1980s when reflecting on ethnographic research I had conducted on the Peruvian
Land Reform Programme of 1969–1975 instigated by the military government
of General Velasco. Although now relegated to the archives of ‘failed’ land re-
forms in Latin America, the example nevertheless remains highly pertinent to is-
sues of policy construction and transformation. The reform was first promulgated on
the 24th June 1969 (The Peruvian ‘Day of the Indian’, later strategically renamed
‘The Day of the Peasant’4), about a year after the military had seized power. The re-

4 This change of name was a symbolic measure designed to stress that the reforms were focused upon modernising the
peasantry rather than dealing with the issues of ethnic rights and identity, usually referred to in official discourse as the
‘Indian problem’.

16
 form was one of the largest and most sweeping of all agrarian reforms to take place
in South America.
During Velasco’s period of office, major research was conducted in the central
highlands of Peru by a team of British and Peruvian anthropologists and sociolo-
gists. The principal focus of the study was an analysis of the changing political econ-
omy of the region (see Long and Roberts, 1979 and 1984). This diverse regional
economy encompassed large-scale hacienda and small-scale peasant production,
complex networks of trade, transport and small-scale enterprise, the urban and
mostly ‘informal’economy of the City of Huancayo, and the scattered but important
mining settlements of the Cerro de Pasco mining company.
Following the announcement of the new Land Reform, three major measures
were taken to re-structure the economy and organisation of the agrarian popula-
tion. The livestock estates were expropriated and placed into the hands of newly
formed, government-run co-operatives; the peasant villages were reorganised to
promote community-based enterprise, and the administration of agrarian exten-
sion and marketing services was centralised through the establishment of new
government agencies.
Let us now, on the basis of the above research, explore two central dimensions of
the Land Reform: first, the social construction of the policy itself; and second, the
types of policy transformations that occurred at the points of implementation. Ac-
tor-oriented ethnographic research provides an essential baseline for analysing these
processes.

The policy model

The Land Reform had two central objectives: the redistribution of land in favour of
peasant producers so as to boost agricultural and livestock production and encourage
increased transfers of capital from agriculture into the wider economy; and the de-
velopment of new, more equitable, forms of political participation. The reform was
envisaged as forming part of a more comprehensive national development plan and
therefore linked to other state initiatives (e.g. in the fields of education, technical as-
sistance, and marketing) aimed at improving the social conditions and livelihoods of
the poorer sectors of the population. Although the reform stated as one of its princi-
pal concerns the encouragement of small-scale agricultural production, the main
emphasis (after an initial period when there was some talk of the parcellation of ha-
cienda land into individual household plots) was on the establishment of production
cooperatives on expropriated hacienda land and the revitalisation of peasant com-
munities. The latter was to be assisted by the introduction of a new Peasant Commu-
nity Statute designed to reinforce ‘traditional’ patterns of communal landholding
and existing forms of mutual aid and inter-household cooperation, leading to the de-
velopment of modern multi-purpose cooperatives.
The Land Reform legislation contained both a diagnosis of the agrarian problems
facing Peru and a programme for solving them. The text drew heavily on the then
popular discourse promoting a dualistic hacienda-smallholder community model,
which stressed how large estates exploited their dependent Indian populations and

17
 how peasant communities, composed of small-scale agricultural producers, were
tied to them through a pattern of economic and political domination.5
According to this interpretation, the hacienda and community were seen as
sharply contrasting social institutions. The opening article of the Land Reform Law
talks about transforming the dual landholding system of latifundio and minifundio.
This dual system was visualised as structured around the control that so-called ‘feu-
dal’ estates had over peasants both within and outside the haciendas. Peasants were
assumed to be poorly integrated into the capitalist economy and dependent upon lo-
cal hacendados for access to basic resources such as land, credit, markets and educa-
tion. But alongside the hacienda was the peasant community (comunidad) which,
despite internal differentiation, preserved certain communitarian and egalitarian in-
stitutions. In the latter case, land, water and basic infrastructure were often commu-
nally controlled and production activities organised through a complex pattern of
inter-household exchanges and forms of collective labour. Hence traditional forms
of reciprocity, systems of mutual aid, and commitment to community-organised
projects continued to play a major role in village life.
At the inter-community or regional level it was the hacendados, through their alli-
ance with town-based merchants and political authorities, who were assumed to
control the marketing of produce and the investment of capital in agriculture and in-
frastructure. This produced, what the Land Reform text designates as, ‘an oppressive
structure’ with the hacendado class acting as part of a regional elite that extracted
surplus from its various peasant satellites. The latter were composed of both the
‘free’ peasants (comuneros) of the communities and the ‘tied’ peasants (feudatarios
or colonos) of the haciendas. Both types of peasants were considered relatively weak
in protecting their own interests: the feudatarios because they owned no land of their
own and depended entirely upon the good disposition and favours of the hacendado
who offered them small plots in return for a range of labour services; and the
comuneros because they looked towards their own localised interests and were rela-
tively unsuccessful in organising themselves on a wider regional basis. According to
some observers, this oppressive structure was underpinned by the ethnic division be-
tween the mestizos or mistis of the hacendado class and the indios or indigenous
peasants.
This interpretation of highland social structure combines a functionalist view of
contrasting but interrelated forms of organisation, represented by the hacienda and
community, with an emphasis on structures of economic and cultural dependency.
Such a model was especially prevalent among social scientists during the late 1960s
and early 1970s and in many ways continues to shape interpretations of the per-
ceived ‘agrarian problems’of highland Peru. In this regard the Land Reform of 1969
simply reproduced and elaborated an existing dominant discourse, both in how it
posed the issues and how it sought solutions.

5 This image of highland Peru was readily available to the military and their advisers, firstly through the writings of con-
temporary social scientists of the dependency and functionalist schools (e.g. José Matos Mar, Julio Cotler and other re-
searchers associated with the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos and the programme of Andean research promoted by
Cornell University), and secondly, through the continuing influence of indigenista writers who extolled the virtues of
Indian community life and abhorred the ‘feudal’ control exercised by the highland hacienda. See Orlove and Custred
(1980) and Yambert (1980) for a stimulating critique of the simplifications implicit in this type of literature. They offer
an alternative approach that focuses upon household agricultural production units, inter-household links and the con-
stitution of corporate groups. They make the important point that ‘Communities and haciendas are the product of peas-
ant social and economic activity, rather than the context which limits such activity’ (Orlove and Custred 1980, 24).

18
A mismatch with empirical evidence
At this point, the validity of the general model of Andean society enshrined in the
Land Reform policy needs serious questioning. Two main issues must be addressed:
the role and dominance of highland haciendas, and the nature of peasant communi-
ties and how they related to the wider socio-economic structure.
A central tenet of the Land Reform was that the hacienda system, through its con-
trol over land and economic and political institutions at regional level, constituted a
major obstacle to agricultural development - particularly in the way it severely lim-
ited peasant production and income - and to social change more generally. Though at
the time a large body of anthropological and populist writings undoubtedly lent sup-
port to such a view, there are significant reasons for querying it.
It was true that at the time of the Land Reform a significant proportion of the high-
lands was under the ownership of haciendas and other properties of over 50 hectares,
but in percentage terms this was outnumbered by agricultural units of less than 5
hectares. Of the irrigated land, large properties controlled some 41%, as against 50%
for units under 5 hectares; and for dry farm land the proportions were 13% as against
42%. This suggests that smallholder peasant producers played a more important role
in agricultural production than the policy assumed. A similar pattern emerges for
livestock. Although haciendas formally controlled about 52% of the natural pas-
tures of the highlands, a breakdown of the ownership shows that peasant producers
controlled over 50% of each type of animal, while the haciendas controlled only
13% of cattle, 26% of sheep, 6% of horses and 31% of cameloids. These data under-
score the important part played by small-scale peasant production.
Government policy also made the assumption that hacendados were in fact able
to effectively control the territory of their estates and subjugate their tied peasants
(colonos) into a state of semi-servitude. And a corollary of this was the assumption
that the local power of hacendados was reinforced by their integration into a regional
elite of merchants and political bosses. Yet, this too, presented a somewhat false pic-
ture of the actual control exercised by highland hacendados. Available ethnographic
evidence indicated – though this clearly varied from region to region and from haci-
enda to hacienda – that many such landowners were in fact unable to control pro-
duction on their own lands. Indeed, in some cases, colonos built up considerable
numbers of livestock surreptitiously using hacienda pastures and marketed them
themselves. For example, some shepherds of the central highlands had accumulated
as many as two or three hundred head of sheep by the time the Land Reform was im-
plemented. Likewise, it was reported that colonos working on arable haciendas of-
ten finished up controlling a considerable proportion of the total land area, such that
their overall production level equalled that of the hacendado.
Reasons for these anomalies were related to the prevalence of poor pasturage, low
quality soils and harsh climatic conditions in the highlands that made large-scale
commercial farming a risky venture with low economic returns. Under these condi-
tions, most hacendados were reluctant to invest in fencing, supervision and infra-
structure. Also, although they could mobilise support from regional political author-
ities to evict peasants who had invaded their land, the situation was not that of a hege-
monic power structure in which peasant populations were subordinated to the haci-
enda system and its regional elite. Power domains were much more fragmented and

19
 at certain critical moments of struggle the crucial loci of economic and political
power were located within the municipality, comunidad, and small town, not the ha-
cienda or provincial capital6.
The Cornell-Peru Vicos Hacienda Project of the late 1950s and 1960s illustrates
the complexity of the situation. This project set out to demonstrate the social and
economic benefits to be gained by replacing the existing authoritarian hacienda
structure and encouraging the hacienda workers gradually to take over the running
of the enterprise. These ideals, however, were constantly thwarted in practice by the
complexity of the regional political economy. The hacienda system in the Vicos area
thrived on a fine balance of interests between the hacienda and the residents of the
nearby valley towns. There had been a relatively wealthy group among the colonos
who rented land from the hacendado, employed other colonos, and acted as brokers
between the poorer peasants and the townsmen and hacienda authorities. These ties
between Vicosinos and the townsmen were later among the most salient limiting
factors with which the Cornell-Peru Project had to cope in its efforts to promote
Vicos autonomy and self-management, since under certain circumstances mestizo
townsmen aided Vicosinos in organising protest movements against the new Cornell
management. Above all else, the Vicos case highlights the importance of peasant
differentiation within the hacienda and the complex network of interdependence
that developed between the haciendas, small towns and peasant villages.7

A warped picture of highland agrarian society

These findings seriously question the reduction of Andean social organisation to a
simple opposition between exploitative haciendas and a dependent peasantry.
Though conditions varied from region to region, few hacendados were strong
enough to control fully the use of lands within their estates or to remove peasant
squatters. Also, although many hacienda peasants marketed only small amounts of
agricultural produce, it was wrong to regard them as a marginalised social group
whose primary contacts with the outside were mediated through the position occu-
pied by the hacendado. Many hacienda peasants were in fact involved in extensive
networks embracing the hacienda, peasant communities, mines, small towns and
the provincial capital. In short, the model of the hacienda system projected by the
Land Reform was a misleading reification that provided policy-makers with a pow-
erful instrument for legitimising the increased presence of government agencies in
provincial areas aimed at curbing growing opposition to central authority.
A similar difficulty arose with the concept of the peasant community or
comunidad. In contrast to the hacienda, its essential characteristics were defined as
solidarity, cooperation and consensus, whose origins could be traced to the pre-Co-

6 See Zendejas’s (2003) recent fine-grained historical ethnography of the dynamics of different politically significant
social spaces associated with village settlements, landholding organisations (such as the hacienda and peasant commu-
nity or ejido) and municipalities in a region of Michoacán, Mexico.
7 There exists a large body of general data (both published and archival) that charts the history and results of the Vicos
experiment in planned intervention. The information was mostly collected by a team of researchers under the direction
of senior anthropologists from Cornell University. William Stein (1985, chapter 5 ‘Townspeople and Countrypeople
in the Callejón de Huaylas’) offers an interesting set of vignettes drawn from this data bank that highlight issues of eth-
nicity, political dominance and town-country relations. He also provides useful bibliographical notes that identify the
key works on Vicos and its region.

20
lumbian ayllu, some kind of corporate kin group. This corporate community model,
stressed in both indigenista writings and functionalist anthropology, depicted com-
munity organisation as predominantly communal with its own politico-administra-
tive functionaries in respect to land ownership, water control and distribution, and
the running of major religious festivals.
This notion of community, of course, runs the risk of over-emphasising elements
of corporateness and homogeneity. While there was – and still is – a degree of com-
munal organisation at community level for allocating land plots and water and for or-
ganising public events of various kinds, these formed only a part of the internal pat-
terns of social organisation. As several contemporaneous studies demonstrated (see,
for example, Orlove and Custred 1980; Smith 1984, 1989), it was the household or
confederation of related households that was crucial for the management of produc-
tive resources and for economic decision-making, not the wider community. A simi-
lar issue arises concerning the interpretation of patterns of mutual aid and reciproc-
ity. Although these were frequently based on a strong ideology of balanced ex-
change between kinsmen, neighbours and community members, many of the rela-
tionships that emerged actually reflected a pattern of enduring relationships between
households possessing unequal resources. Hence it was often the richer peasant
households that benefited most from a series of exchanges set up on the basis of
so-called reciprocity. It is also clear that the better-endowed households tended to
have better access to community land and water, especially if some senior household
member occupied a strategic administrative position.
It is important, then, to take full account of the internally differentiated nature
of peasant communities. A high level of community solidarity is only likely to
manifest itself in the face of some outside threat or at times when critical produc-
tion tasks demand some way of cooperating. The matter was further complicated
in this Peruvian cases by the fact that there existed considerable variation in the
extent to which households depended upon agriculture as their main source of
livelihood. Studies of the peasant economy of highland communities showed
that non-agricultural sources of income from trade, crafts and wage labour (both
inside and outside the community) were crucial components in the struggle to
meet household subsistence and other needs (see, e.g. Figueroa 1981). The sig-
nificance of these non-agricultural activities for peasant communities was ini-
tially completely overlooked in the Land Reform legislation and in the Stature
for Peasant Communities, although modifications were subsequently intro-
duced to allow persons whose principal occupations were non-agricultural to be-
come members of the Peasant Community (Comunidad Campesina).
Thus, this pattern of diversified economic activities at community level chal-
lenged the simple assumption that traditional patterns of cooperation could be revi-
talised to promote community solidarity and local development. On the other hand,
there was good evidence historically that the very survival of community institutions
had depended in part on successive government interventions. The Statute of Indige-
nous Communities in the 1920’s gave legal recognition to community institutions
and later, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s, various attempts (e.g. Belaunde’s

21
 programme of accion popular) were made to promote community development
schemes and self-help projects. As several writers have argued, these various gov-
ernment initiatives – and Velasco’s reforms are no exception - were not so much
aimed at strengthening or restoring Andean patterns of cooperation but were more
related to the State’s concern for extending its control over the provinces by integrat-
ing communities into an official administrative structure and mobilising community
labour for various programmes of infrastructural development (e.g. for the building
of roads, schools and health clinics).
The community model then offered an ideal-typical characterisation of peas-
ant communities that failed to come to grips with the major processes and prob-
lems of socio-economic differentiation and the multifarious nature of peasant
economic life. It therefore provided an unsound analytical and ideological basis
for the intended policy. We can summarise the major shortcomings of the social
model underpinning the Peruvian Land Reform law as follows:
1. It was built upon an exaggerated view of the role and importance of haciendas in
agricultural production and in the wider politico-economic framework.
2. It presented an idealised picture of the peasant community and its potentialities
for developing communal and cooperative modes of organisation geared to lo-
cal development. That is, it ignored class differentiation and the complex pat-
terns of control and patronage.
3. It failed to appreciate that differences in the organisation of household produc-
tion between so-called ‘tied’ peasants and peasants living in independent com-
munities were differences of degree rather than kind.
4. Linked to these deficiencies, was the failure to understand the mobility of indi-
viduals and households between haciendas and communities or the networks of
relationships that existed between households living in different urban and rural
locations.
5. There was also no adequate understanding of the commoditisation of produc-
tion and labour, nor of the necessary interdependency of commoditised and
non-commoditised relations and values.
6. It neglected the relationship between agricultural and non-agricultural activities
and sources of income.
7. It failed to identify and analyse the functioning of the different units of produc-
tion found in the highlands (e.g. the peasant household, the small-scale farming
enterprise, the livestock and arable estates, and cooperative modes of produc-
tion).
8. It failed to understand the crucial role played by small-scale peasant producers
throughout the highlands, whether they lived in haciendas, peasant communi-
ties, or were independent of both.
9. It relied too heavily on a dualistic dependency model for understanding the eco-
nomic and political organisation of the highland regions.

22
Transformation of Land Reform policy at the interface:
a critical area of research
Having provided a profile of the Land Reform policy and identified its more general
shortcomings, I now discuss how it was renegotiated during the course of implemen-
tation.
Modifications of the policy took place several times that required the passing of
additional legislation in response to specific problems and loopholes that arose dur-
ing its application8. As implied earlier in the discussion, government implementers
encountered many different socio-economic and political circumstances in the dif-
ferent regions and localities of the country. Hence the programme was introduced
unevenly and according to different criteria. A large number of legal anomalies
arose: for example, some large landowners managed to hold on to their estates by
nominally dividing up their land among relatives and favoured peasants so that their
land areas fell below the stipulated legal landholding limit per owner. One particu-
larly ironical case was that of a group of community peasants, who had (before the
Land Reform) siphoned off capital derived from a government-supervised credit
scheme to purchase a small hacienda of their own, having their land expropriated
because its land area was deemed above the legal limit. Another strange case was
that of several peasant production cooperatives, that had a few years earlier received
land under the reform, advertising in the regional newspaper for the return of ‘their
landlord and patron, ‘ whom they apparently held in much higher esteem than the
government tecnicos who had been assigned to guide the work of the cooperative. A
further interesting dimension was that in some regions of the highlands peasants re-
pelled the Land Reform officials by force and thus prevented the Land Reform from
being imposed upon.
Each of these Land Reform scenarios shows a different interface situation reflect-
ing different types of local power relations and different patterns of negotiation be-
tween peasants, landlords and government officials. The government Land Reform
agency was responsible for the operation of the legislation (for example, with respect
to expropriation criteria, the eligibility of beneficiaries, and the criteria for member-
ship of the new committees of the cooperatives and so forth). In this they had consid-
erable flexibility and discretion. But they were also at the mercy of peasants and
other locally knowledgeable persons who were in a position to distort or conceal in-
formation or who could break agreements without immediate or easy detection. The
process of implementation was further complicated by decisions taken by the agrar-
ian judges who were appointed to adjudicate over appeals lodged against the Land
Reform.
Here I do not have space enough to elaborate on the many interesting but com-
plex interface problems that arose. Nor to document how they worked them-
selves out. But clearly a close-up ethnographic study of the pattern of interac-
tions, manoeuvres and symbolic exchanges that took place between the person-
nel of the implementing agency and the various other stakeholders would offer
penetrating insights into the nature and outcomes of the Land Reform policy. De-

8 McClintock (1980) traces changes in the legislation and implementation procedures, and connects these with ongoing
power struggles within government agencies and between ministries. See also Cleaves and Scurrah (1980).

23
 velopment interfaces contain within them many levels and forms of social link-
age and discontinuity, as well as a multiplicity of different and potentially con-
flicting value positions, worldviews and rationalities. It is here – at the interface –
that policy is put into action, reshaped or radically transformed. Also, as any en-
lightened planner or frontline development worker will readily acknowledge, it
is impossible to separate policy, implementation and outcomes into watertight
compartments. There is considerable seepage between each and therefore a mix-
ing of elements such that it is often difficult to say where one stops and the other
begins.
A further implication is that implementation processes must be looked at dia-
chronically so that the changing nature of the transactions and negotiations be-
tween different actors and organisational levels can be analysed. One would also
need to examine how particular development project personnel attempt to deal
with environmental diversity and uncertainty where a clash of social interests is
inevitable. Frontline workers such as project implementers have a considerable
degree of discretion in the performance of their tasks, and too do their so-called
‘target’ groups. The latter always have the possibilities to manoeuvre, reject,
modify, or accept a particular programme. This, then, is why development inter-
face is a critical issue in the design, implementation and analysis of policy. The
often large gap between the rhetoric of national policy and planning and what
happens ‘on the ground’- so clearly evident from the above appraisal of the Peru-
vian reform - calls for close-up analysis of the types of interactions, power rela-
tions, negotiating resources, and legitimating norms and values of interface ac-
tors and organisations. Such studies reveal concretely the nature of State-peasant
relations in particular localities and regions, and thus indirectly facilitate a fuller
understanding of the character and significance of particular State formations.
However, unlike general theories of the State – that operate at a high level of ab-
straction, tending towards the reification of State institutions and action – the
concern for interface forces one to look closely at State activity as it affects, and
is in turn affected by, the actions of its constituent populations.

Some concluding remarks about the Peruvian case

The Peruvian example is rich in lessons from an actor-oriented perspective. Al-
though I have not been able to lay out in detail the ethnographic basis for this discus-
sion and critique of the Land Reform policy, it should be clear that the analysis leans
heavily on original field data collected using an actor-oriented methodology.
Bearing mind the range of issues raised earlier concerning actor perspectives on
policy and intervention processes, this case brings to light the following dimensions:
1. It captures the main features of the policy in terms of the images, typifications
and discourse used to characterise the essential problems of the agrarian situa-
tion in highland Peru, and identifies the sources of this diagnosis. One particu-
larly interesting aspect of this was the fact that the Velasco government did not
invent its vision of Andean society but rather it drew upon existing social scien-
tific and populist texts that constituted part of a long-term ongoing debate about
the nature Peru and the need for change.

24
 2. It exposes the simplifications and reifications of government and academic
thinking about Peruvian society and counterposes these with the everyday life
circumstances and strategies of the principal actors in the scenarios depicted in
the Land Reform policy.
3. It brings out the ways in which labelling processes can close off serious inquiry
into the multifarious and strategic nature of Andean society, thereby legitimis-
ing the design and application of standardised solutions.
4. It indicates briefly how central government and frontline development prac-
titioners adjust to on-the-ground circumstances and attempt to ‘correct’, ‘in-
corporate’ or ‘nilify’ anomalies and strategic manoeuvres by local and re-
gional interest groups.
5. It emphasises the internal dynamics of intervention and points to how policy for-
mulation and implementation set up social and political ripples which pol-
icy-makers and politicians must, in the end, take cognisance of.
6. It provides a snapshot how policy models generate their own answers to prob-
lems: that is, how ‘failure’ invites adaptations targeted to succeed next time
round.
7. It demonstrates how thorough ethnographic research can play an important role
in questioning and possibly redirecting policy choices.
8. It suggests the need for research on the dynamics of interface situations that
gives weight to knowledge encounters, the clash of images and interpretative
models of ‘social reality’ and of ‘what might be’, and the working out of
power relations between the contestants.

Deconstructing planned intervention

As the foregoing discussion implies, an actor-oriented perspective has a number
of implications for the study (and the design) of processes of intervention,
whether in the fields of development or organisational change.
In the first place, we need to get behind the myths, models and pretensions of
development policy and institutions to uncover the particulars of people’s
‘lived-in worlds’ and their strategies for steering themselves through difficult
scenarios and turning ‘bad’into ‘less bad’circumstances. Despite the many criti-
cal analyses now available, development intervention is still often visualised as a
discrete set of activities that takes place within a defined time-space setting in-
volving the interaction between so-called `intervening’ parties and `target’ or
`recipient’groups. Such an image isolates intervention from the continuous flow
of social life and ongoing relations that evolve between the various social actors,
including of course, though not exclusively, the manifold ways in which local ac-
tors (both on- and off-stage) interact with implementing officials and organisa-
tions. Development interventions are always part of a chain or flow of events lo-
cated within the broader framework of the activities of the state, international
bodies and the actions of the different interest groups operative in civil society.
They are also linked to previous interventions, have consequences for future
ones, and more often than not are a focus for intra- and inter-institutional strug-

25
 gles over perceived goals, administrative competencies, resource allocation, and
institutional boundaries.
Consequently, intervention processes cannot be not confined to specific
spaces and functions delimited by official policies and plans. Nor should we as-
sume that so-called beneficiaries reduce or limit their perceptions of reality and
its problems simply to those defined for them by the intervening agency as con-
stituting the `project’ or `programme’. People process their own experiences of
‘projects’and ‘interventions’, alongside their many other experiences and liveli-
hood concerns. They construct their own memory of these experiences, as well
as taking into account the experiences of other groups and actors within their
socio-spatial networks. That is, they may learn from the differential responses,
strategies and experiences of others outside the target population or specific ac-
tion programme. And the same holds true for those who work as implementers or
facilitators. Thus, for many of the social actors involved, interventions have no
clear beginning marked by the formal definition of goals and means, nor any fi-
nal cut-off point or `end-date’ as identified by the writing of final reports or eval-
uations.
This boxing in of space and time (and therefore also of strategies and options)
characteristic of development practice is underpinned by various kinds of inter-
ventionist discourse that are essentially ‘diagnostic and prescriptive’ (Apthorpe
1984, 128). Such discourse promotes the idea that problems are best tackled by
dividing up the empirical complexity into ‘a series of independently given reali-
ties’ based mostly on ‘sectoral’ criteria (such as agriculture, health, housing, and
poverty alleviation) and designing appropriate policy solutions. According to
Schaffer (1984, 143), such policy discourse encourages the misconception that
policy comprises verbal and voluntaristic decisions and authoritative docu-
ments, after which something quite different, called ‘implementation’, takes
place.
This image of the administrative discreteness of policy and intervention pro-
cesses is reinforced by the notion of the `project cycle’ that frames sequentially
the various activities that take place (such as setting the policy agenda, defining
the problem, formulating alternatives, designing the policy, implementing it, and
evaluating the results) in a linear and logical order (see Clay & Schaffer 1984,
3-5; and Palumbo 1987, 38-41). This encourages the view that project prepara-
tion and implementation takes the form of a `rational’ problem-solving process
which involves experts (either alone or in consultation with their clients) ‘in be-
coming aware of symptoms, in formulating the problem, in identifying the
causes (diagnosis), in generating alternative solutions and in choosing and im-
plementing an appropriate one ... [and] finally, help[ing] evaluate the results’
(Röling 1988, 57). But, as any experienced practitioner will readily acknowl-
edge, these processes are a lot more messy and often overlap. Each and every one
of them is entangled in complex sets of evolving social practices, negotiations,
and political and epistemological struggles that involve a multiplicity of actors
with divergent and sometimes contradictory agendas.

26
 Thus, in order to distance ourselves from ideal-typical conceptions of planned
intervention, we must concentrate upon understanding planned intervention as
composed of complex sets of historically-unfolding social encounters and strug-
gles over meanings and resources, in which certain spatial and temporal dimen-
sions play a role in linking events and processes. There is, as I suggested earlier,
on the side of the ‘intervened’, the accumulated knowledge of previous experi-
ences of interventions of various sorts, and not only those organised by the state.
These experiences constitute a kind of historical imprint and template which is
both ‘collective’, in the sense that it is shared as a legacy by a particular group of
people, and ‘individual’, in that the biographies of particular persons contain
within them ‘memory banks’ of various intervention experiences. And the same
holds for those groups and institutions depicted as the ‘intervening’ parties, such
as government development agencies or individual bureaucrats. Intervention
processes are thus shaped by both collective and personal memories of
state-civic society relations, local initiatives and inter-institutional struggles.
Intervention, then, implies the confrontation or inter-penetration of different
lifeworlds and socio-political experiences. Looked at from this point of view, the
‘unreal’ time-space and policy-cycle conceptions contained within orthodox in-
tervention models may become strategic weapons in the hands of intervening
agencies who, wittingly or otherwise, make superfluous the significance of
memory and learning from the past.9 This attitude is reinforced by the assump-
tion that, whatever the difficulties of the past and however entrenched the pat-
terns of underdevelopment, a well-designed and well-targeted programme of in-
tervention can make the break with the dead-weight of `traditional’ modes of ex-
istence, thus stimulating or inaugurating `development’, whatever its specific
features.
These considerations lead to the conclusion that we need to demythologise the
idea of intervention so that it is recognised for what it fundamentally is, namely,
an ongoing, socially-constructed and negotiated process, not simply the execu-
tion of an already-specified plan or framework for action with expected out-
comes. It is normally assumed ‘that decision makers, before they act, identify
goals, specify alternative ways of getting there, assess the alternatives against a
standard such as costs and benefits, and then select the best alternative’. How-
ever, as Palumbo and Nachmias (1983, 9-11) go on to point out, policy makers
often ‘are not looking for the best way or most efficient alternative for solving a
problem. They are instead searching for support for action already taken, and for
support that serves the interests of various components of the policy shaping
community.’It is not enough therefore to modify or seek refinements of orthodox
views on planned intervention. Instead, one must break with conventional mod-
els, images and reasoning, and open up the issues to interface analysis.

9 Hence I do not exclude the possibility that intervention practices may significantly affect the social organisation of
time and space of those involved. This is illustrated by irrigation projects in the Andes which, in order to cope with their
own institutional goals, introduce wage labour for the construction of canals and other infrastructure, when such work
is normally organised by communities through the mobilisation of faenas (co-operative labour groups). Since the latter
mode of organisation often entails longer time spans than the typical project cycle of five years, the organisation of
time, space, labour and material resources are forced into a new and much shorter time frame, with major social impli-
cations. For a general discussion of this problem, see van der Ploeg 1987, 155-8.

27
The relevance of interface for development
10
research and policy
The notion of social interface offers a way of exploring and understanding ques-
tions of diversity and conflict inherent in processes of external intervention. In-
terfaces typically occur at points where different, and often conflicting,
lifeworlds or social fields intersect; or, more concretely, in social situations or
arenas in which interactions become oriented around problems of bridging, ac-
commodating, segregating or contesting social, evaluative and cognitive stand-
points. Social interface analysis aims to elucidate the types and sources of social
discontinuity and linkage present in such situations and to identify the organisa-
tional and cultural means of reproducing or transforming them. Exploring these
dimensions provides a more adequate analysis of policy transformation pro-
cesses, and enables us to understand more fully the differential responses of local
groups (including both ‘target’ and ‘non-target’ populations) to planned inter-
ventions. That is, it forges a theoretical middle ground between so-called micro
and macro theories of change by showing how interactions between ‘interven-
ing’ parties and ‘local’ actors shape the outcomes of particular intervention poli-
cies, often with significant repercussions on patterns of change at regional, na-
tional and even international levels.
Although the term ‘interface’ tends to convey the image of some kind of
two-sided articulation or face-to-face confrontation, social interface situations
are more complex and multiple in nature, containing within them many different
interests, relationships and modes of rationality and power. While analysis fo-
cuses on points of confrontation and social difference, these must be situated in
broader institutional and knowledge/power domains. In addition, it requires a
methodology that counterpoises the voices, experiences and practices of all the
relevant social actors involved, including the experiential ‘learning curves’ of
policy practitioners and researchers.
In the final section of this paper I wish to extrapolate further the central issues
and components of the notion of social interface. This necessarily remains an in-
complete vision since in the end the value of the idea and its methodology can
only be fully judged through practical application by researchers and practitio-
ners alike.

10 For an account of the precursors of interface analysis and a fuller explication of it in relation to actor-oriented/social
constructionist theoretical perspectives, see N. Long, Encounters at the Interface, 1989, Wageningen; (with Ann
Long) Battlefields of Knowledge, 1992, Routledge; and my book Development Sociology: Actor Perspectives, 2001,
Routledge.

28
Key elements of an interface perspective
Interface as an organised entity of interlocking relationships
and intentionalities
Interface analysis focuses on the linkages and networks that develop between in-
dividuals or parties rather than on individual or group strategies. Continued in-
teraction encourages the development of boundaries and shared expectations
that shape the interaction of the participants so that over time the interface itself
becomes an organised entity of interlocking relationships and intentionalities.

Interface as a site for conflict, incompatibility and negotiation

Although interface interactions presuppose some degree of common interest,
they also have a propensity to generate conflict due to contradictory interests and
objectives or to unequal power relations. Negotiations at the interface are some-
times carried out by individuals who represent particular constituencies, groups
or organisations. Their position is inevitably ambivalent since they must respond
to the demands of their own groups as well as to the expectations of those with
whom they must negotiate.
In analysing the sources and dynamics of contradiction and ambivalence in
interface situations, it is important not to prejudge the case by assuming that cer-
tain divisions or loyalties (such as those based on class, ethnicity or gender) are
more fundamental than others. One should also not assume that because a partic-
ular person ‘represents’ a specific group or institution, that he or she necessarily
acts in the interests or on behalf of his/her fellows. The link between representa-
tives and constituencies (with their differentiated memberships) must be empiri-
cally established, not taken for granted.

Interface and the clash of cultural paradigms

The concept of interface helps us to focus on the production and transformation
of differences in worldviews or cultural paradigms. Interface situations often
provide the means by which individuals or groups come to define their own cul-
tural or ideological positions vis-à-vis those espousing or typifying opposing
views. For example, opinions on agricultural development expressed by techni-
cal experts, extension workers and farmers seldom completely coincide; and the
same is true for those working for a single government department with a defined
policy mandate. Hence agronomists, community development workers, credit
officers, irrigation engineers, and the like, often disagree on the problems and
priorities of agricultural development. These differences cannot be reduced to
personal idiosyncrasies but reflect differences laid down by differential patterns
of socialisation and professionalisation, which often lead to miscommunication
or a clash of rationalities. The process is further compounded by the coexistence
of several different cultural models or organising principles within a single pop-

29
 ulation or administrative organisation which creates room for manoeuvre in the
interpretation and utilisation of these cultural values or standpoints.
It becomes necessary, therefore, to identify the conditions under which partic-
ular definitions of reality and visions of the future are upheld, to analyse the in-
terplay of cultural and ideological oppositions, and to map out the ways in which
bridging or distancing actions and ideologies make it possible for certain types of
interface to reproduce or transform themselves.

The centrality of knowledge processes

Linked to the last point is the importance of knowledge processes. Knowledge is
a cognitive and social construction that results from and is constantly shaped by
the experiences, encounters and discontinuities that emerge at the points of inter-
section between different actors’lifeworlds. Various types of knowledge, includ-
ing ideas about oneself, other people, and the context and social institutions, are
important in understanding social interfaces. Knowledge is present in all social
situations and is often entangled with power relations and the distribution of re-
sources. But in intervention situations it assumes special significance since it en-
tails the interplay or confrontation of ‘expert’ versus ‘lay’ forms of knowledge,
belief and value, and struggles over their legitimation, segregation and commu-
nication.
An interface approach then depicts knowledge as arising from ‘an encounter
of horizons’. The incorporation of new information and new discursive or cul-
tural frames can only take place on the basis of already existing knowledge
frames and evaluative modes, which are themselves re-shaped through the com-
municative process. Hence knowledge emerges as a product of interaction, dia-
logue, reflexivity, and contests of meaning, and involves aspects of control, au-
thority and power.

Power as the outcome of struggles over meanings and

strategic relationships
Like knowledge, power is not simply possessed, accumulated and
unproblematically exercised. Power implies much more than how hierarchies
and hegemonic control demarcate social positions and opportunities, and restrict
access to resources. It is the outcome of complex struggles and negotiations over
authority, status, reputation and resources, and necessitates the enrolment of net-
works of actors and constituencies. Such struggles are founded upon the extent
to which specific actors perceive themselves capable of manoeuvring within par-
ticular situations and developing effective strategies for doing so. Creating room
for manoeuvre implies a degree of consent, a degree of negotiation and thus a de-
gree of power, as manifested in the possibility of exerting some control, preroga-
tive, authority and capacity for action, be it front- or backstage, for brief mo-
ments or for more sustained periods. Thus power inevitably generates resistance,
accommodation and strategic compliance as regular components of the politics
of everyday life.

30
Interface as composed of multiple discourses
Interface analysis enables us to comprehend how ‘dominant’ discourses are en-
dorsed, transformed or challenged. Dominant discourses are characteristically
replete with reifications (often of a ‘naturalistic’ kind) that assume the existence
and significance of certain social traits and groupings, pertaining, for example,
to ‘communities’, hierarchical or egalitarian structures, and cultural construc-
tions of ethnicity, gender, and class. Such discourses serve to promote particular
political, cultural or moral standpoints, and they are often mobilised in struggles
over social meanings and strategic resources. Yet, while some actors ‘vernacu-
larise’ dominant discourses in order to legitimate their claims upon the state and
other authoritative bodies, others choose to reject them by deploying and defend-
ing countervailing or ‘demotic’(lit. ‘of the people’) discourses that offer alterna-
tive, more locally-rooted points of view.11
A major task of interface analysis is to spell out the knowledge and power im-
plications of this interplay and the blending or segregation of opposing dis-
courses. Discursive practices and competencies develop primarily within the cir-
cumstances of everyday social life and become especially salient at critical
points of discontinuity between actors’ lifeworlds. It is through the lens of inter-
face that these processes can best be captured conceptually.

The paradox of ‘participatory development’

Intervention processes are embedded in, and generate, social processes that im-
ply aspects of power, authority and legitimation; and they are more likely to re-
flect and exacerbate cultural differences and conflict between social groups than
they are to lead to the establishment of common perceptions and shared values.
And, if this is the normal state of affairs, then it becomes unreal and foolhardy to
imagine that facilitators can gently nudge or induce people and organisations to-
wards more ‘participatory’ and equitable modes of integration and co-ordina-
tion. This is the paradox of neo-populist discourses and participatory methods
aimed at empowering local people.
Although such neo-populist measures emphasise ‘listening to the people’, un-
derstanding the ‘reasoning behind local knowledge’, strengthening ‘local or-
ganisational capacity’ and promoting ‘alternative development strategies’, they
nevertheless carry with them the connotation of power being injected from out-
side in order to shift the balance of forces towards forms of local self-determina-
tion. In other words, they imply the idea of empowering people through strategic
intervention by ‘enlightened experts’ who make use of ‘people’s science’ and
‘local intermediate organisations’ to promote development ‘from below’. While
acknowledging the need to take serious account of local people’s solutions to the
problems they face, the issues are often presented as involving the substitution of
‘blueprint’by ‘learning’approaches to the planning and management of projects

11 See Baumann 1996, for further insight into these processes in a multi-ethnic area of London, also Arce and Long 2000.

31
 or in terms of ‘new’ for ‘old’ style professionalism geared to promoting partici-
patory management and participatory research and evaluation methods.
Such formulations, however, do not escape the managerialist and interven-
tionist undertones inherent in the idea of ‘development’. That is, they tend to
evoke the image of more knowledgeable and powerful outsiders helping the
powerless and less discerning local folk. Of course, many field practitioners fac-
ing the everyday problems of project implementation show an acute awareness
of this paradox of participatory strategies. But, no matter how firm the commit-
ment to good intentions, the notion of ‘powerful outsiders’ assisting ‘powerless
insiders’ is constantly smuggled in. This is the central dilemma of planning and
designing the means for engineering change in the first place. It is not removed
by stressing the goals of participation and empowerment.

A final comment on the contribution of

an interface approach
The struggle for space or room for manoeuvre – at once a battle over images, re-
lationships and resources – and the social transformations and ramifications it
entails, can, I believe, be captured best through an interface perspective. Such an
approach provides a heuristic device for identifying the sites of social disconti-
nuity, ambiguity and cultural difference, and sensitises the researcher and practi-
tioner to the importance of exploring how discrepancies of social interest, cul-
tural interpretation, knowledge and power are mediated and perpetuated or
transformed at critical points of confrontation and linkage.
In order to get to grips with these contradictory and discontinuous processes,
the researcher and practitioner needs to access and learn lessons from the ‘auton-
omous’ settings in which people cope with their own problems, irrespective of
whether or not the foci of concern or parameters of action can be linked with out-
side intervention. This requires the adoption of a rigorous ethnographic stance.
One must go to where people are already engaged in interactions, problem-solv-
ing activities or routine social practice and negotiate a role or combination of
roles for oneself, as participant observer, active collaborator, adviser, etc. A fun-
damental principle of actor-oriented research is that it must based on actor-de-
fined issues or problematic situations, whether defined by policy makers, re-
searchers, intervening private or public agents or local actors, and whatever the
spatial, cultural, institutional and power arenas involved. Such issues or situa-
tions are often, of course, perceived, and their implications interpreted, very dif-
ferently by the various parties or actors involved. Hence, from the outset one
faces the dilemma of how to represent problematic situations when confronted
with multiple voices and contested ‘realities’. Specific social arenas are of
course discursively constructed and delimited practically by the language use
and strategic actions of the actors involved. How far consensus is achieved over
the definition of any one situation requires empirical evidence. One should not

32
assume a shared vision or common negotiating platform. Actors must work to-
wards such joint commitments and there are always possibilities for opting out or
‘free riding’.
All actors operate - mostly implicitly rather than explicitly - with beliefs about
agency, that is, they articulate notions about relevant acting units and the kinds of
knowledgeability and capability they have vis-à-vis other social entities. This
raises the question of how people’s perceptions of the actions and agency of oth-
ers shape their own behaviour. For example, local farmers may have reified
views about ‘the state’or ‘the market’as actors, which, irrespective of their deal-
ings with individual government officials or market traders, can influence their
expectations of the outcomes of particular interventions. The same applies to the
attribution of motives to authoritative local actors, such as political bosses and
village leaders. The central issue here is how actors struggle to give meaning to
their experiences through an array of representations, images, cognitive under-
standings, and emotional responses. Though the repertoire of ‘sense-making’fil-
ters and antennae will vary considerably, such processes are to a degree framed
by ‘shared’ cultural perceptions, which are subject to reconstitution or transfor-
mation. Local cultures are always, as it were, ‘put to the test’ as they encounter
the less familiar or the strange. Analysis must therefore address itself to the intri-
cacies and dynamics of relations between differing lifeworlds, and to processes
of cultural construction. In this way, one aims, as it were, to map out what we
might describe as cartography of cultural difference, power and authority.
Such interface analysis has a direct bearing on how one looks at policy pro-
cesses. Policy debates, including policy formulation, implementation and evalu-
ation, are permeated by interface discontinuities and struggles. Indeed the whole
process consists of an intricate series of socially-constructed and negotiated
transformations relating to different institutional domains and differentially af-
fecting a variety of actors. Hence an awareness of the dynamics of interface en-
counters and how they shape events and actor interests and identities is critical.
Whatever the precise policy issues and implementing structures, it is essential
to avoid framing problems and looking for solutions from within a framework of
formal-logical models and rationalistic procedures. Such approaches accord far
too much weight to external expert systems and undervalue the practical knowl-
edge and organising capacities that develop among field level practitioners and
local actors. After all it is the day-to-day decisions, routines, and strategies de-
vised for coping with uncertainties, conflicts of interest and cultural difference
that make or break policy. Indeed it has been persuasively argued that it is pre-
cisely at such implementation interfaces that de facto policy is created.
In order to understand these ‘autonomous’ fields of action and the pressures
impinging on them, researchers must devise ways of entering the everyday
lifeworlds of the variety of actors represented in order to learn how each attempts
to deal with the complexities of implementer/client relationships. This requires
field strategies based not only on observing and teasing out the meanings of other
people’s lifeworlds but also on the willingness of field practitioners and policy
makers to share their experiences and to put them to the test. Hence we must de-

33
 velop types of reflexive ethnography that explore the relationship between ac-
tors’practical-everyday and researchers’theoretical understandings of problem-
atic situations. The added value of this approach is that it enables us to consider
the practitioner (both researcher and field officer) as part of the web of powers,
constraints, opportunities and potentialities of specific intervention situations.
Interface analysis offers a useful conceptual framework for achieving this.

A word of warning
In building a picture of everyday encounters and modes of organisation and
knowledge, we must be careful not to reify cultural phenomena, even if local
people and policy makers do so themselves by using labelling or classificatory
devices. The latter create simplifications or black boxes, like the idea of society
being neatly divided into ‘ethnic communities’or ‘class categories’, or planners’
visions of needy ‘target groups’ or ‘stakeholder categories’, that obscure rather
than throw light on the diversity and complexity of social and cultural arrange-
ments. Moreover such reifications enter into the very process of defining prob-
lems for solution, and in this way they may perpetuate existing ideal-typical
models of what are ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ conditions. Instead we must give
close attention to the heterogeneity of social practice by focusing on the differen-
tial social responses to apparently similar structural conditions: for only in this
way can we explain the significance of certain types of strategic agency and
knowledge/power constructions. Examples of interface encounters should not
then be cited merely to illustrate general principles of cultural polarity, organisa-
tional dualism or hierarchy. Rather, they should be visualised as providing a
methodological entry point for examining the dynamics and transformation of
inter-cultural and inter-institutional relationships and values.
The multiplicity of interfaces associated with development intervention pro-
vide a rich field for exploring these issues, since they throw into sharp relief all
the ambivalences and complexities of cultural diversity and conflict. They also
reveal the paradoxical nature of planned intervention of all kinds – even those
promoting ‘participatory’ programmes – which simultaneously opens up space
for negotiation and initiative for some groups, while blocking the interests, am-
bitions and political agency of others. What we now urgently need is to convince
policy makers and development practitioners, in search of better project designs
and management techniques, to reflect upon and share with us their firsthand ex-
periences of ‘struggling at the interface’. In this way the actor-oriented frame-
work could be further developed in relation to specific policy practices.

34
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