ABSTRACT
Development planners and academics have wondered why co-operative organizations set up to serve the rural poor fail to elicit their co-operation. In view of the role co-operatives can play in providing patient and peaceful alternatives to more violent revolutionary alternatives in developing countries, the answer to this question seems central to the developmental debate. Drawing upon the principles for co-operation in traditional organizations, the author identifies lessons for modern organizations. The chapter concludes by demonstrating the politics of policy analysis by taking the example of a recent Indian programme of dairy development through co-operatives. The values of academics who question the ethics of organizational designers are made central to the argument. The importance of involving the poor in generating alternatives for their own development is emphasized. Social scientists, it is stressed, must be accountable to those dis advantaged people whose cause they espouse, lest the solutions become worse than the problem.
