He won a scholarship to Marlborough College boarding school from 1945 to 1950, and another to Cambridge University, which was interrupted by National Service.

He joined and led the Gough Island Scientific Survey for the British government in 1956, before attending the University of Pennsylvania where he failed to complete a PhD in history.

[2] Some time later he was infamously turned down for a Professorship at IDS on the grounds of insufficient publications in academic journals, despite his world renown exceeding those on the panel, achieving this only in 1995 at the age of 63, not long before retirement.

In 2020 he suffered an amputation below the knee, describing the immersion of over 10 weeks as a patient and participant-observer in an NHS hospital and then in a private sector care home.

Chambers has been one of the leading advocates for putting the poor, destitute and marginalised at the centre of the processes of development policy.

In his later career, there were criticisms of their use, and he questioned whether his unabashed populism had ignored tokenistic manipulation of participatory methods: his experience with larger organisations like the World Bank were not positive.