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(Mathur and Inayatullah, p. 20). In practice there is blurring at the edges; monitoring overlaps with on-going evaluation.

The F A 0 volume concentrates on monitoring systems in ten countries and includes four general papers. The aim is to provide training material for monitoring units. The case studies demonstrate different objectives, scale of projects, and types of management. It is not possible therefore to specify the type of monitoring system or of data to be collected. There is some stress on simplicity, cost effectiveness, and timeliness in data use but the design of a system will depend greatly on particular circumstances.

The definition of monitoring takes project objectives as given and the design of any system will reinforce the way in which management perceives various issues. For example, basic needs are discussed by Voelkner in terms of their distribution between villages and a monitoring scheme based on this will obscure differentiation within villages. How far does monitoring conflict with evaluation where such a view of the distribution of basic needs might be questioned? This volume cannot deal with such issues.

The volume edited by Mathur and Inayatullah mentions this kind of problem. Unfortunately the tension in the relationship between monitoring and evaluation in Inayatullah’s paper is lost in Mathur’s synthesis and in the case studies. This derives from a worthy objective-to show that monitoring ought to go beyond financial assessment and consider the achievement of objectives. The case studies indicate a number of reasons why this has not been achieved, including lack of trained manpower and meagre budgetary allocations.

Mathur points out that monitoring and evaluation accounts for less than 5 per cent of project budgets, yet cost is often mentioned as a factor in not undertaking these activities. Neither volume explains why this should be. The conceptual issues discussed above indicate an answer: there is a fundamental contradiction in the operation of the activities- monitoring is on behalf of management, evaluation in so far as it questions project objectives can seem to be opposed to it. Evaluation units attached to management suffer from a loss of effectiveness.

Although neither volume thoroughly confronts these problems of design, they both highlight many of the issues (conceptual, organizational, and methodological) which arise. The F A 0 volume provides a wide range of experience for training and is the more useful generally but the Mathur and Inayatullah volume provides insights into Asian organizations.

SEAN CONLIN Social Development Adviser, Overseas Development Administration

BASIC NEEDS PERFORMANCE Glen Sheehan and Mike Hopkins International Labour Office, Geneva, 138 pp.

The ILO’s first-ever Tripartite World Conference on Employment was held at Geneva in June 1976. The principal working paper prepared in advance for the conference was entitled ‘Employment Growth and Basic Needs’ and the ‘basic needs’ approach adopted by the conference evolved therefrom. There has been a considerable follow-up. Inter alios, Rondinelli and Mandell prepared their two-part progress report, published in 1980, on Asian performance towards achieving ‘Basic Needs’ and how this might be improved. With its focus on a single region each of the two volumes provides a sound and constructive commentary. In contrast Sheehan and Hopkins try to cover far too great a field . . . the world! and all in the space of a short 138 page double-spaced monograph. The result is inevitably a mass of rather indigestible statistics based (as the authors point out) on inadequate and variable data, much of which is already out of date and far too much relates to the past, e.g. Table 4.2 is largely concerned with the decade 1960-70, with the latest reference one of 1973. Events, natural and man made disasters and wars have changed the situation of many countries so radically that this volume has little relevance: Somalia and its refugees, Uganda and the chaos created by Amin and his aftermath: the natural disasters in

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Bangladesh (to say nothing of the widespread corruption): the Sahel famines: the Russian military occupation of Afghanistan. All these are examples of the changing scene which make a nonsense of the authors attempt to generalize on ‘performance’, for in practice this can of course alter overnight. Besides, there are far too great differences within countries and regions (e.g. over water supplies) to make general statistics thereabout of any real value; to know the number of doctors to a country, means little without knowledge of how great is the geographical area each doctor must cover. All in all this collation of information would have been best retained as an ILO internal working document rather than issued for sale to the general public.

PETER JOHNSTON

URBANISATION, HOUSING AND THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS David Drakakii-Smith Croom Helm, London, 1981, 234 pp.

This book, as stated in the opening paragraph of the preface, is intended to be a course text and, although its price (f 15.95) makes it an expensive proposition for students, it is a very useful text indeed for teaching and learning. It is concise, well organized, fair in judgement, polemical yet factual, and, with rare exceptions, free of unnecessary jargon.

The book is about housing in the Third World, public and private, conventional and non-conventional, legal and illegal. However, housing, as the book’s title suggests, is not examined in isolation and a brave attempt is made to discuss it in the broader context of development and urbanization. This is done in the opening and closing chapters, but also permeates the remaining chapters, which are devoted to the four main modes of housing provision for the urban poor: squatter settlement, slum creation, government programmes, and private sector construction on a commercial basis. Each chapter examines the positive and negative aspects or the successes and failures of each mode. This examination is supported with material from case studies, drawn mainly from Malaysia, Hong Kong, Thailand, the Philippines and Turkey. The case study material is excellently presented and illustrated with plans and house drawings, a fact which helps the reader to appreciate better the relationship between, on the one hand, actual physical development, planned or unplanned, and, on the other hand, socio-economic factors at work, including government action or inaction.

The message of the book is radical in inspiration and quite sharp in its exposition of the extent of exploitation and manipulation of the urban poor, by politicians and officials, who see in housing a convenient instrument for furthering a variety of objectives. The author does not hesitate to admit that even solutions now widely supported by governments and international organizations alike, e.g. self-help and site and services schemes, may in fact be generating more benefits for the privileged urban classes. Yet, and this is a healthy feature of his work, he seems genuinely concerned with pointing out the potentially positive aspects of some experiments in the field. The book is violently critical at times of the cynicism of the ruling establishment, but is also optimistic and positive in its approach.

A great deal of emphasis is placed on classification of types of policy or approaches to housing, an effort which culminates in a heroic attempt to relate the allocation of housing resources to political regimes and stages of development. Although this leads to some sweeping assumptions, the end-result is still valuable for the student of the subject, who is thus invited to appreciate the ideological foundations of urban policy and of what the author calls ‘policies towards housing’, as opposed to ‘policiesfor housing’ or micro-policies. But the most instructive part of the book remains the intelligent weaving of empirical material into a broad-brush presentation of the major theoretical debates on the subject of urban development policy. For both these qualities this is no doubt a necessary addition to university reading lists on urban affairs in less developed countries.

LOUIS WASSENHOVEN Development Planning Unit, University College London