This chapter briefly sketches the paradigms that Robert Chambers challenged, and forged anew, in his search for how this ideal might be operationalized. Robert’s work on seasonality, for example, drew attention to how the lives, employment opportunities, well-being, income, diets and farming activities of people living in rural areas dependent on a single rainfall season fluctuated markedly through the year, and between years. Robert was not the only researcher to point out that the ‘green revolution’, focused on new technologies, was passing by the millions of small-scale cultivators and labourers living in risky, remote, resource-poor environments, although he was certainly among the most articulate.