Book Reviews 445

FUNDING COMMUNITY INITIATIVES. THE ROLE OF NGOS AND OTHER

INTERMEDIARY INSTITUTIONS IN SUPPORTING LOW INCOME GROUPS AND
THEIR COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS IN IMPROVING HOUSING AND LIVING
CONDITIONS IN THE THIRD WORLD
Silvina Arrossi, Felix Bombarolo, Jorge Hardoy, Diana Mitlin, Luis Perez Coscio and
David Satterthwaite
(IIED London/IIED-AL Buenos Aires), Earthscan Publications, London, 1994, 190 pp.

This short book focuses on the institutional and ®nancial parameters of community self-help
in developing countries, and constitutes a useful resource both for development practitioners
in government and non-governmental agencies, as well as for researchers, academics and
students. The authors argue that, for anti-poverty initiatives in developing countries to be
more effective in meeting priority needs (as de®ned by the poor), future policy has to be
informed by research, rather than vice versa. If knowledge is to be de®ned simply in terms of
what serves the policy maker's interests, and academic research remains subordinated to
policy needs (as de®ned by local, national and external agencies with minimal appreciation of
local culture or context), then both our understanding of urgent community-wide problems
and our ability to design more appropriate solutions will continue to be sacri®ced on the altar
of political and policy expediency.
In support of this argument, the book assesses the performance of community-based
housing, infrastructure and enterprise initiatives that have been informed by detailed and
committed research. The Overview section is organized thematically: the authors point to the
challenge of poor communities' most urgent investment needs; they lament the failure of
resource-poor and top-down conventional public sector approaches to housing and
infrastructural improvement; and the role of NGOs in upgrading and empowering
communities is outlined and evaluated. The authors urge a wider use of innovative credit
schemes to secure community-led improvement of both physical infrastructure and income
opportunities. The second half of the book, on which much of the preceding analysis is based,
contains Case Studies. These have been synthesized from self-assessments by 18 different
NGOs (in the broadest sense of the term), supported by data from interviews conducted by the
authors with NGO programme managers.
However, in many respects, the authors fail to fully live up to the high expectations
contained in their critique of present policy and their advocacy of research that serves the
community. While chapter 3 aids both analysis and policy design by disaggregating the generic
NGO and providing a useful typology, it barely problematizes the NGO's role. For example,
in championing the innovative use of community-based credit, chapter 4 underestimates the
capacity of NGOs in general, and loan conditionality in particular, to expose communities in a
premature and often divisive manner to the `discipline' of the market, thereby undermining
`community' itself. Equally, the potential for intra-community, sectional and intra-family
con¯ict over priorities in the application of loans is largely ignored. There are also occasional
lapses into technocratism, as in the assertion that the initiation of major social changes in the
community (presumably engineered by committed action-researchers) is a prerequisite to
successful investment at the local level. Finally, critical commentaries on the community
initiatives undertaken by NGOs tend to lie buried in the analytical chapters, often somewhat
sanitized as a result of the authors' understandable desire to draw general conclusions. A more
re¯exive view of researchers and a more critical approach to the role of NGOs in community
initiatives would have brought the case studies to life, and would have allowed the authors not
only to champion the cause of community development of a more autonomous type, but also
to identify some of the roots of the pervasive policy and political subservience of the `expert'
community.

CHRIS GERRY
Departamento de Economia e Sociologia,
Universidade de TraÂs-os-Montes e Alto Douro,
Vila Real, Portugal; and
Centre for Development Studies,
University of Wales, Swansea

& 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND DEVELOPMENT, VOL. 17, 441±448 (1997)