ABSTRACT
Development and development projects are never devoid of politics, economics, or cultural factors. Development projects in third world countries have always been tied to foreign political interests and economic policy, as well as shaped by both international and local economic trends, and cultural contexts. I argue that the rehabilitation of raised field agriculture in Bolivia was not simply a spontaneous or well-timed discovery by social scientists and researchers, and in fact the raised fields had been known about for at least 20 years (Smith et al. 1968). Further, the enthusiastic reception of raised fields as a development project in the late 1980s was not merely a result of a timely “new discovery” that only needed to be implemented in order for it to succeed.
