ABSTRACT
In 1972, Robert Chambers was appointed Deputy Director of Cambridge University’s Green Revolution project. In both Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, large Modern Rice Mills lay in rusty decomposition, or limped along on unforeseen subsidies, producing rice of no better quality or higher outturn than what streamed out of the coffee grinder that Lewis Grant had adapted for paddy in the 1920s. In 1974 Robert had moved to the Institute of Development Studies where other genealogies intertwined. Robert works with what he has called an implicit and emergent theory of change in which institutional dynamism and flux reflects personal and professional behaviour, which is in turn the product of attitudes, motives and principles. Robert has consistently stressed the role of personal self-awareness in taking the part of poor people.
