ABSTRACT
The spatial perspective emphasizes that what is involved in the development process essentially concerns the land and people of a country in their entirety. The stress here is on ‘entirety’, the importance of appreciating that development is not just about a project area but about a total national territory, not just about a project community but about the whole national society. The various arguments for this reorientation in the conceptualization of the development process have been offered in different parts of this book. Perhaps the most important of these arguments is that the social structural relations which constitute a major object of transformation during the development process cannot be tampered with effectively in a piecemeal fashion. Laws and societal rules which imply new disciplines, new attitudes and new behaviour patterns cannot effectively be introduced into a society if they apply only to a minority who can always evade them by merging back into the antecedent social structures.
