As development programmes progress in time and space, a number of evaluation studies are commissioned which study how the implementing agency responded to the challenge posed by the ground realities in a given area.  These studies appraise the impact of a social, economic or technology intervention on a given society.  While these bring out the capacity of the implementing agency to respond to challenges of development, it is equally important to examine the capacity of the people it worked with in terms of their strength or inadequacies to meet challenges on their own. 

In this context, Arnold Toynbee’s classic ‘A Study of History’ is a striking analysis of how civilisations are born and how they grow and decline.  The historical debates in the 19^th and 20^th centuries on this theme are of immense relevance when evaluating development programmes and measuring progress have assumed such importance.
 

The Historical Debate: How do civilisations grow ? 

The debate centres around the fact that whether, as propounded by the 19^th century historians, the birth and growth of a civilisation was an outcome of a single act - a creative and successful response to a challenge or an outcome of successful responses to a series of challenges as proposed by 20^th century historians. 

The proponents of the 19^th century contention cited several instances from the physical and human environment to support their argument.  The Nile Civilisation which emerged in Egypt around 3000 B.C. was a successful response to the challenge posed by the physical environment.  The swamps of lower Nile Valley were converted into fertile land through design and maintenance of an intricate irrigation network.  Closer to home, in Sri Lanka, early civilisation flourished in the northern part of the island - the dry zone.  Here too, a remarkable irrigation system was developed by the Sinhalese over many generations.  The human effort involved in both cases cannot be overlooked. 

When we move from the physical to the challenges created for one human group by another, we find the same phenomenon.  A social group which is excluded from the mainstream, responds to the challenge of discrimination by concentrating its energies as outsiders and achieving excellence in various fields of human activities.  For instance, the Jews overcame the discrimination against them by emerging as successful traders and financiers in a variety of human environments.  The Parsis, uprooted from Persia played the same role in India. 

In the 20^th century, subsequent research questioned this premise on two grounds.  One, it was observed that an identical challenge may evoke a creative response in some cases but not in others.  For instance, the physical challenge of swampy North European forests baffled the Paleolithic Man.  Unequipped with implements, he simply avoided the forests and settled on the sand-dunes instead.  On the other hand, his Neolithic Bronze and Iron Age successors were able to make some impressions with the aid of superior tools and techniques. 

Similarly, the same environment may produce different cultures.  The Eurasian Nomads successfully adapted to the hard life on the steppes but similar prairie lands of North America have never given rise to indigenous nomadic civilisation. 

The second ground on which the 19^th century contention is questioned is that a civilisation after birth may not necessarily grow from strength to strength.  For instance, coming back to the case of Eurasian nomads, after adapting to the steppes, they became slaves of their environment and were enable to make any fresh creative advance.  Their energies were completely absorbed in meeting this single great challenge.  This phenomenon is referred to as ‘arrested growth’ by historians. 

All this led the 20^th century historians to conclude that growth of civilisation is not a single act but a continuous process. 

The most striking example of this contention is the Hellenic civilisation which spanned 2000 years.  When the pastures of Attica dried up, the Athenians were not passive viewers but turned to olive cultivation.  To make a living from the produce of the olive trees, the Athenian had to pack the oil into jars, ship it overseas and exchange it for grains.  To get back grains, Attican potteries and merchant navy came into existence.  Drying up of pastures stimulated Athenians to acquire command over the sea. 

Thus, it came to be concluded that “growth of a civilisation is possible only when it is able to make a series of challenges creatively and successfully.  The movement of challenge-response-challenge in this case becomes a continuous self-sustaining series where each successful response provokes a fresh challenge in its turn, converting a single movement into a series.
 

Lessons from the past 

The debate no doubt has important bearings on the present.  Some of the lessons relevant for development programmes are:

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