Resources

The ActionAid Participatory Methodologies Forum 2001, which was hosted by AA Bangladesh, attracted 44 participants from 20 countries. This was an unprecedented gathering of key people working at different levels in different vertical or horizontal functions across ActionAid.  The forum was initially conceived as a space to share experiences around participatory methodologies, adapting them to the new strategic direction of ActionAid. However, it rapidly evolved into a space for the analysis of power relationships, with the recognition that all participatory methods, tools and techniques can easily become manipulative, extractive, distorted or impotent.

This meant looking inwards, at their own personal experiences of power and at power relationships within ActionAid, in order to identify contradictions and develop new “lenses”, sensitive to power, with which to see their work with partners, allies and crucially with the poor and the excluded. 

This is not a traditional workshop report as it does not attempt to offer a simple sequential or chronological overview of proceedings. Rather it aims to present a synthesis of the key ideas and a flavour of the experience. Moreover, this report has been compiled by the core planning team and is very much the planning team’s collective interpretation of the Forum.  They are hence respectful that each participant in the forum experienced the process differently and that no report can ever hope to capture such diversity.

This research report concerns the poverty reduction policy process in Kampala, Uganda. The report describes and analyses, in turn, the actors involved in policy processes at national level, the kinds of knowledge on which the processes draw, and the spaces, formal and informal, in which policy actors engage with each other. It finds that the contemporary poverty reduction policy context in Uganda holds several opportunities and several risks. The risks relate to: " The contradiction between the nature of the national political space and the way the Government of Uganda (GoU) is energetically opening up new policy spaces and ushering in a range of diverse actors; " The disconnection between the international-national alliance operating in Kampala, and the relationship between Kampala and the rest of the country. Opportunities include: " The current state of flux of poverty knowledge in Uganda; " The already considerable experience of blending diverse kinds of knowledge for policy purposes. These opportunities allow for optimism about how the "new poverty experts", sub-national actors and others outside the GoU-donor nexus might affect the course of policy in future. The report concludes that civil society actors, and especially non-governmental organisation poverty advocates, are at a critical juncture in Uganda today. To enhance their impact on policy, they can either remain passive participants in processes into which government invites them, or exercise greater agency and autonomy. The report also calls for non-governmental policy actors to reclaim from government and its donor partners the territory of participation, and to make it more their own again.

This report presents the findings of the programme evaluation on ‘civil society participation’ commissioned by the Dutch co-financing agencies Cordaid, Hivos, Novib/ Oxfam Netherlands and Plan Netherlands. It is the fourth study in a series of programme evaluations organised during the period 2003-2006 by the MBN, the Network of Co- Financing Agencies in the Netherlands.