Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development

by Daniel Immerwahr

Thinking Small tells the story of how the United States sought to rescue the world from poverty through small-scale, community-based approaches. And it also sounds a warning: such strategies, now again in vogue, have been tried before, with often disastrous consequences.

It is common for historians to interpret the United States' postwar development campaigns as ill-advised attempts to impose modernity upon poorer nations. The small-scale projects that are popular today mark a retreat from that top-down, heavy-handed approach. But Daniel Immerwahr shows that community-based development is nothing new: it has been present since the origins of international development practice, existing alongside--and sometimes at the heart of--grander schemes to modernize the global South. His transnational study follows a set of strange bedfellows--the Peace Corps and the CIA, Mohandas Gandhi and Ferdinand Marcos, antipoverty activists and Cold Warriors--united by their conviction that development should not be about engineers building dams but about communities shaping their own fates. The programs they designed covered hundreds of millions of people in some sixty countries, eventually making their way back to the United States itself during the War on Poverty.

Yet the hope that small communities might lift themselves up was often disappointed, as self-help gave way to crushing forms of local oppression. Thinking Small challenges those who hope to eradicate poverty to think twice about the risks as well as the benefits of community development.

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction, Economics, The United States Of America, Sociology

272 pages, Hardcover

First published November 17, 2014

About the author

Daniel Immerwahr is an associate professor of history at Northwestern University and the author of Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development, which won the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Award. He has written for Slate, n+1, Dissent, and other publications.

Reviews

[Adam Wasserman · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The problem is not just that communities are rarely up to the task of conquering poverty. It it also that community development’s characteristic focus on the small and local is itself evasive. The power of community development to direct attention away from larger structural problems toward small-scale ones was, in fact, precisely why the CIA found it so promising as a counter to rural communism. Community developers, confronted with poverty, ask what the poor can do, locally, to overcome it. But that is rarely the most productive question to ask, since it implicitly places the responsibility for alleviating poverty on the victims of poverty themselves. In the guise of “empowering” the poor, it drops the rich from the equation. And it is the rich who are both the beneficiaries of a screwed system of resources distribution and far more capable of altering that system.”

[Kyle Dunlap · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well Researched

I read this book as I've been volunteering in the Peace Corps. This book was well researched and worth the read. It forced me to consider the role of community development work.

[Sunjay · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an essential book for anyone interested in international development or ending poverty. It provides much-needed context on the past century of development thought and the things that people got right and wrong throughout it.
I especially want to recommend this to folks who are either considering a career in international development or are passionate about effective altruism.

[Caroline Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Important and necessary read for anyone interested in domestic or global development! Immerwahr unpacks the bleak history of community development and the power structures at play— from the US, to India and the Philippines— highlighting the tactics of inequality and diversion that have allowed community development to continue as a praised model for all these years.

[Teddy Stravin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really thoughtful and interesting critique on community development efforts by the US abroad after WWII. So much research is brought in to provide examples in India, the Philippines, and domestically in the US and how localism has not truly been what it is believed to be. An incredibly worthy read for anyone interested in development and in support of community-level projects to see just where they have gone wrong in the past and how future projects can be restructured to ensure those whose voices are meant to be brought to the table are actually supported, empowered, and listened to.