ABSTRACT
IRMA’s flagship postgraduate programme in rural management has a ten-week fieldwork component that is not very popular with many professors. For IRMA students, mostly city-bred, it was an exciting once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But for professors, fieldwork was a boring yearly ritual, an unwelcome intrusion on their time, to be suffered as an institutional requirement. Some of the ideas closest to Robert’s heart regarding farmer participation, attitudinal change among professionals and bureaucrats, ‘new professionalism’ and ‘putting the last first’, have been hugely influential. In irrigation, for example, getting farmer participation in irrigation management has been perversely used as a pretext by agencies to evade accountability and much-needed structural reform.
