War Zones: a participatory study of urban poverty and violence in Jamaica
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This paper outlines how PRA can be of value to the policy making process by drawing on practical examples from around the world. The paper argues that not only is PRA important in providing poor people with a voice but that it can also challenge the perceptions, behaviours and attitudes of those in authority. The paper warns of the dangers of rapid scaling up of PRA.
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This paper reviews the available literature on participatory monitoring and evaluation, focusing on how and where it is being used, the underlying concepts and issues involved and also, challenges for its use in the field. In addition, an annotated list of manuals and resources on the 'tools' and methods used in participatory monitoring and evaluation is included in the appendices.
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Development organisations need to know how effective their efforts have been. But who should make these judgements, and on what basis? Usually it is outside experts who take charge. Participatory monitoring and evaluation (PM&E) is a different approach which involves local people, development agencies and policy makers deciding together how progress should be measured, and results acted upon. It can reveal valuable lessons and improve accountability. However, it is a challenging process for all concerned since it encourages people to examine their assumptions about what constitutes progress, and to face up to the contradictions and conflicts that can emerge. This paper briefly outlines what Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation (PM & E) is, provides examples of where it has been practically applied and examines some of the challenges faced.
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In a new approach announced by the World Bank and IMF, civil society is being offered a part in shaping and implementing national anti-poverty strategies. In order to trigger debt relief, countries are being asked to produce a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) drawing on inputs from all sections of society. This Policy Briefing details what a PRSP actually is, who should be involved, how to build participation into the process, what can be learnt from previous efforts to build participation into policy, where problems lie and how to monitor the process. It argues that learning from previous experience is vital if this new approach is to live up to its ambitious rhetoric.
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This synthesis offers a review of experiences in applying participatory approaches to macro-level policy formulation, implementation and monitoring in poverty reduction. The participatory experiences are drawn from research initiatives, donors' country strategies, aid coordination processes, policy advocacy campaigns, institutional change processes, budgetary analysis and formulation and citizens' monitoring mechanisms. The review highlights significant challenges that must be overcome in order to establish participatory, sustainable, country-owned poverty reduction strategies.
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Amidst the rhetoric of participation, evidence from some contexts suggests that the very projects and processes that appear inclusive and transformative may support a status quo that is highly inequitable for women. This paper attempts to address some of the questions and challenges surrounding participatory development, in terms of who participates, in what and on what basis, who benefits and who loses out. Highlighting some of the tensions that run through 'gender-aware' participatory development, it draws on empirical material from Africa and Asia to explore the gender dimensions of participation in projects, planning and policy processes. In doing so, it reflects on strategies and tactics that have been used in efforts to make participatory development more gender sensitive. Much depends, the paper suggests, on how 'gender' is interpreted and deployed in development settings. The pervasive slippage between 'involving women' and 'addressing gender' may be tactically expedient, but it provokes a series of questions about the extent to which current understandings of 'gender' in development mask other inequalities and forms of exclusion. Making a difference, the paper suggests, requires rethinking 'gender' and addressing more directly the issues of power and powerlessness that lie at the heart of both Gender and Development (GAD) and participatory development.
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There is a growing recognition that citizens should play a role in informing and shaping environmental policy. But how should this be done? This paper explores one route, where opportunities 'from above' are created, often, but not exclusively so, by the state, often through local government policy and planning processes. A set of approaches - known collectively as Deliberative Inclusionary Processes (DIPs) - are explored in different settings through 35 case studies from both the north and south. These experiments in more inclusive, participatory forms of policy deliberation have been prompted by a number of factors. These include wider political shifts towards new forms of citizenship and democracy; concerns about policy effectiveness and implementation success; the emerging recognition of the complexity and uncertainty inherent in environmental problems; growing levels of distrust in policy processes and expert institutions; and the increasingly recognised importance of accepting that values, ethics and issues of justice are key to environmental policy problems. Through an examination of lessons emerging from the case studies, practical issues, such as time and resource constraints, are considered alongside methodological questions emerging from asking: who convenes the process, who defines the questions, and how are multiple forms of expertise accommodated? The paper shows how power relations and institutional contexts critically affect the outcomes of DIPs processes. Without linking such processes to broader processes of policy change - including connections to conventional forms of democratic representation - DIPs may simply be one-off events, and so their considerable potentials for transforming environmental policy processes will go unrealised.
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En un nuevo enfoque anunciado por el Banco Mundial y el FMI, se ofrece a la sociedad civil un papel en la definición y puesta en práctica de las estrategias nacionales en contra de la pobreza. Con el fin de tener acceso a reducciones en sus deudas, se pide a los países que prepaen un documento de Estrategia de Reducción de la Pobreza, fundamentado en contribuciones de todos los sectores de la sociedad. Si bien las experiencias previas muestran que es mucho lo que se puede hacer para que los procesos de diseño de políticas respondan más a las necesidades de los pobres, esas experiencias también indican que esto implica muchos retos y dificultades. Es esencial tomar en cuenta estas lecciones para que el nuevo enfoque esté a la altura de su ambiciosa retórica.
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This paper aims to make facilitation and the role of the facilitator more transparent. It is based on the authors own experience in facilitation along with some theoretical concepts. They highlight three different aspects of participatory interventions: the reasons for the intervention; the range of stakeholders involved; and the style of facilitation.
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Why do field workers use participatory approaches as they do? This paper uses a case study of fieldworkers' use of Participatory Rural Appraisal in ActionAid The Gambia to address the question. Original empirical material that focuses on fieldworkers' perceptions of the factors that influence them is examined through the conceptual framework of structuration theory. The dissertation argues that the practice of a participatory approach emerges from a complex process of negotiation where fieldworkers are subject to unique combinations of competing influences from the organisation they work for, the communities they work with and their own personal characteristics. It suggests that fieldworkers can actively pursue personal agendas and can also be involved in changing the structures that condition their actions. However the dissertation concludes that elements of the organisational structure can leave little room for fieldworkers to use their agency positively. Managers need to change this structure if the gap between the policy and practice of participatory approaches is to be reduced. A deeper understanding of fieldworker's use of participatory approaches will make it possible to establish what changes are required to improve the implementation and institutionalisation of these approaches.
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How do ordinary people, especially poor people, affect the social policies that in turn affect their well-being? What is the role of citizen participation in social policy formation and implementation? How do changing contexts and conditions affect the entry points through which actors in civil society, especially the poor, can exercise their voice and influence in critical social policy arenas? State centred conceptions of social policy often view citizens as recipients of programmes, whilst market led versions focus on the clients of social welfare as consumers who participate through choice of services. This paper explores a view that argues for an approach to social policy that sees citizens not only as users or choosers, but as active participants who engage in making and shaping social policy and social provisioning. The authors suggest that changing concepts and conditions, such as demographic change, the privatisation of provisioning and globalisation, challenge traditional approaches to participation in social policy. These concepts are discussed within a broader historical review of the ways that ordinary people have participated in policy, and it is argued that participation must be repositioned in the light of current reality which offers new spaces, as well as new constraints, for citizen engagement.
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This paper synthesises the critical reflections on PRA of a small group of Nepali PRA practitioners, as part of the 'Pathways to Participation' Project. It summarises some contextual factors, including the historical moment in which PRA has spread in Nepal, and the issues that have arisen in association with this expansion. The paper reviews some of the widely varied views of practitioners - about what PRA is, what it should be and what it is for. It also compiles some of the challenges for PRA practice - raised by the practitioners - for the future, including innovation, training and continuing to learn through critical reflection on PRA.
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This IDS working paper is one of a series arising from the Pathways to Participation project which was initiated in Jan 1999 by the Participation Group, with the aim of taking stock of the first 10 years of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). There is a tendency to call any development practice that in some way involves local people 'participatory', and a huge diversity of meanings and practices can be hidden under this umbrella term. Additionally, the term 'participation' has become uncritically associated with 'empowerment'. Such oversimplified representations ignore the fact that participatory practice will vary greatly according to the context within which it operates. The paper analyses one particular approach to participatory development developed by SPEECH, an NGO working in Tamil Nadu, India, focusing specifically on gender relations. The paper draws on fieldwork from two communities - Kottam and Maniyampatti - in which SPEECH have been working for a lengthy period. The authors suggest that SPEECH's participatory practices are shaped by how both the staff and the local actors understand participation. As a result, the two communities have developed different participatory processes. The paper describes the notion that empowerment through participation is a relational and varied process occurring in spaces where people are able to interact according to an 'unusual' set of rules (i.e. during PRA workshops). The authors contend that such a process can have wider effects on social relations in everyday life, although, in this particular case study, certain aspects of gender relations have remained unchanged.
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This IDS working paper examines the role of knowledge in the process of making and implementing poverty reduction policy. It focuses on the production of poverty knowledge through measurement and assessment, providing an overview of contemporary poverty assessment approaches, and the issues and dilemmas involved in applying them in the context of poverty reduction policy processes. The first section examines the policy process in order to understand the relationship between poverty knowledge and policy change. It looks at how legitimate knowledge is traditionally framed in the policy process as the domain of technical experts who reduce complex phenomena to measurable variables, and how this frame changes if policy is understood as a more chaotic process with multiple actors involved. Section Two discusses the broad questions of what poverty actually is and how it can be measured, focusing on the fact that a consensus appears to have emerged which then obscures the many debates centred around poverty measurement. Three policy events are examined in order to show how different objectives shape the methodological choices policy actors make. The third section focuses on a range of methodologies available for poverty assessments, with a focus on household surveys and participatory poverty assessments (PPAs). Lastly, the World Bank and Oxfam are examined in order to understand how two international development actors with different objectives made use of acquired poverty knowledge in constructing policy messages. The argument is proposed that the agency and objectives of the policy actors themselves are most important in shaping policy narratives.