Words and Ideas: Commitment, Continuity and Irreversibility 151and Mtwara Regions in Tanzania (Freling, 1998; Groves, 2004). Finland sup-
ported a programme there for some 20 years, much of it installing water supplies.
By all accounts, these were a substantial failure. Accepting failure and abandoning
the project would have been easy to justify. But the Tanzanian Government and
the Finns did not give up. They hung in and tried again. There was then a continu-
ity of involvement and commitment of key individuals on both the Finnish and
the Tanzanian sides, which fostered a good spirit of long-term trust, understanding
and partnership.^17 In 1993, an Indian trainer, Kamal Kar, introduced participatory
rural appraisal (PRA) through a series of workshops (Johansson, 2000). Participa-
tory approaches gained strong support from the two regional commissioners,
Colonel Nsa Kaisi and Colonel Anatoli Tarimo (and, subsequently, his successor
A. Y. Mgumia). Implications for institutionalization and bureaucratic change were
recognized (Kar et al, 1998; Swantz, 1998). The programme was transformed.
Innovations multiplied (Freling, 1998). To take but one example, participatory
media were developed (de Waal, 2000) through a village radio network and through
participatory video. These enabled people to make claims and supported media-
tion between competing or conflicting stakeholders. Participatory video was used
in reforming a fish market, forcing officials to use the correct procedures and lead-
ing to the person who was ‘eating’ the tax collected being transferred elsewhere
(Nyamachumbe, 2000). It also played a key part in the turbulent process of ending
the dynamiting of coral to catch fish (Swantz et al, 2001). Another innovation was
to introduce PRA with participatory planning and action in most of the commu-
nities in the two regions. The results of this community-level participation were so
successful that, through a sequence of national workshops, it influenced Tanzania-
wide policy. Results included a permanent secretaries’ two-day retreat on participa-
tion (MRALG, 1999) and a later one for regional administrative secretaries.
Throughout the 1990s, the donor agency and the Tanzania government were co-
learners and co-beneficiaries. Had they given up after the earlier 20 years of failure,
the positive lessons from pioneering participation would never have been learnt
and national policies and practices would not have been influenced.
The Sida-supported Mountain Rural Development Programme in Vietnam is
another striking illustration. Sida had a long-standing relationship with Vietnam
as the only Western donor who hung in with support through the 1960s and
1970s. A sequence of projects, initially a pulp mill, then for forestry and farm
forestry, and subsequently rural development, involved long continuities of staff
and relationships. Edwin Shanks and Bui Dinh Toai noted in a paper they wrote
for a conference in 2000 that their combined experience was 16 years, having
worked on the project since 1993 and 1991, respectively. They also observed that
‘due to the relative stability of staffing structures in Viet Nam, many of our col-
leagues still working on the programme at province and district levels were also
involved from the very beginning’ (Shanks and Toai, 2000, p23). It is difficult to
imagine that the slow, patient and successful introduction and co-evolution of
participatory approaches to government agencies in that project could possibly
have been achieved without this continuity and sustained commitment.