ABSTRACT
Robert John Haylock Chambers is very much a product of particular time and place, of an era that spans the history of development in the post-World War period, from the transition from colonialism to the Washington Consensus and beyond. This chapter traces a story that stretches from his posting as a District Officer in the colonial government of Kenya in the 1950s via work on irrigation management, rural livelihoods and agricultural research and in the promotion of participatory approaches in development, to his most recent engagement with Community-Led Total Sanitation. Robert wrote for the first time about ‘sustainable livelihoods’ in a 1985 note for a strategy review of the International Institute for Environment and Development. ‘Scaling up’ and ‘institutionalization’ became the buzzwords of the latter half of the 1990s as Robert and others sought to mainstream participatory rural appraisal.
