ABSTRACT
The policy-maker guided by a cultural perspective is more likely to engage in a wide-ranging analysis of probable costs and benefits to intervention in the appropriate local contexts, rather than assuming that what constitutes improvement in one context will be so everywhere or that its human costs can be overlooked. This chapter explores the implications of such an analysis for the most common kinds of programs involved in human resource development, namely those concerned with education, health, child labor, and the position of women. Cultural analysis complicates the planning of policy interventions, exposing dilemmas that may otherwise lay hidden but which are perilous to ignore. Issues of the costs in non-Western contexts are raised about programs designed to expand schools, save lives, abolish child labor and liberate women. The psychosocial costs of educational mobilization can be seen as due to three processes. They are relative deprivation, competitive pressures, and the narrowing of life course values.
