I.

The United Nations programme of technical assistance to underdeveloped nations and the Colombo plan programmes have now been in operation for some three years. The Point-4 programme of the United States Department of State has been functioning for a somewhat longer period. The international programmes of the specialised agencies, where these have been financed from ordinary budgets, have been in operation for several years longer. Practically all these action-programmes have been originally conceived in terms of a technical assistance that has had as its aims the improvement of the material welfare of underdeveloped countries through increasing agricultural and livestock production, through attacks on disease, attacks on illiteracy, and through improvements in operation of the economic institutions of a country (banking, credit, exchange). Agriculturists, live stock experts, experts in malaria, economists, farm extension workers, irrigation technicians, fisheries experts, sanitation engineers, experts in arts and crafts, have visited countries in all parts of the world, have drawn up excellent technical plans, have exhorted, persuaded, cajoled, threatened, advised, experimented, constructed. Some have returned to their own country, frustrated. Others have remained to carry on work in the recipient country, often also “browned-off”. Still others have begun to wonder what all this business of social change is about, why in effect people who apparently ask for technical help and, equally apparently, genuinely desire such help, have difficulty in doing the things that the experts believe will bring desirable changes.

Or, conversely, technical experts may be at first gratified to find that dependent peoples accept eagerly new technical methods, only to be distressed later on when it is apparent that a “chain reaction” has started in which many things are changed which the experts did not want to change, and perhaps, by changing, nullify the initial beneficial charge. In other words, technical experts (and by this term I mean all experts in doing, or changing animals or plants or things or institutions or administrative procedures) are slowly realising that back of the animals or “things” are human beings organised in complex social networks and that it is these human beings who give meaning to the “things” and who therefore must change (and by changing, change also the social network which enfolds them) before the best use of new resources can be permanently achieved. The publication of studies by Hoselitz, Spicer and Unesco are reflections of these problems. Further studies by the Provisional Social Science Council, now under way, with a view to a critical survey of techniques of evaluation are additional evidence of the dilemma in which technical experts now find themselves.

It would seem therefore that the social sciences—or some of them at least— are being faced with the challenge: how can programmes of technical assistance

Beethoven or Picasso? The fact that we cannot answer these questions does not show their lack of importance. It does indicate that the social scientist cannot avoid completely a consideration of social values. They hover like an unexorcised ghost over all his practical work.

However, social change will go on whether the social scientist can answer questions of value or not. Underdeveloped peoples are caught up in a modern world in which change is almost a god. The social scientist, therefore, from the practical viewpoint, must assume that freedom from pain and disease, freedom from want, are desirable goals, and that to make these goals available to the greatest number of people, and not merely to an elite, in an underdeveloped country is sufficient justification for his concern with practical problems.