Between Desk and Field: Rethinking the History of Knowledge Production in International Rural Development, 1960s–1970s

This article revisits the history of knowledge production in international rural development during the 1960s and 1970s. It contrasts desk-bound and field-based approaches to show, in historical perspective, how development knowledge was produced, contested, and shaped by shifting institutional and geopolitical contexts. Drawing on archival sources from the International Labor Organization, it traces how forms of knowledge emerging in this period connect with current decolonial and post-development thought. Specifically, the article examines technocratic, comparative surveys of rural organizations on a global scale alongside itinerant fieldwork conducted in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Both approaches faced bureaucratic inertia, political constraints, and the fragility of knowledge in the making. Moving beyond abstract critiques of Western epistemic dominance, the article foregrounds the material, improvised, and uneven character of development knowledge. The later turn of some researchers to what would now be called decolonial critique illustrates how development practitioners themselves began to question the foundations of their work. In doing so, the article offers a more grounded and historically situated account of rural development knowledge, unpacking the abstractions that both practitioners and scholars have often taken for granted.