Book Info
The author’s nearly 5 decades of association with Bangladesh recalls the dilemmas of being an academic immersed in the processes of development and change through many roles embracing pure research and the arenas of policy making and activism. Its purpose is to convey the complexities of engagement beyond the comfort of the written page. It explores the continuous interaction between his exposure to the lives of the poor across the country and those designing strategies for poverty alleviation, either as powerholders or via mobilisation to challenge such powerholders in terms of governance and respect for the poor. This book reveals how the author was pulled into these challenges and the associated tensions between political management and the freedoms pursued by civil society, entailing reflection upon the deep structures of the society. The author concludes by asking whether the fragility of institutions witnessed in Bangladesh helps his antennae to identify such fragility in his own society.
Geoffrey Wood
Geof Wood is an Emeritus Professor of International Development at the University of Bath, UK. He was the Founder Director of the Institute for International Policy Analysis; Head of Department of Economics and International Development; Dean of Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; University Research Adviser, ex-Chair of Board of INTRAC, Oxford, and ex-President of the UK Development Studies Association. Dr.Wood arrived in Bangladesh in 1974. Since then, he conducted ethnographic and inter-disciplinary research on aspects of agrarian change, poverty, governance, and civil society in Bangladesh and Pakistan, and elsewhere, examining theories of insecurity, Faustian bargains, access, welfare regimes, strategies of de-clientelisation, extreme poverty and resilience, and de-peasantisation. He promotes the understanding of political economy via analysis of deep structures.
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