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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.

Based on the author's own experience as head of a bilateral agency country office, the paper tells a story about how the donor community became engaged in a conflict about monitoring the Poverty Reduction Strategy. This experience is used to explore donors' involvement in political processes within aid-recipient countries. Their understanding of the national context and the quality of the relations that donor staff establish in the recipient country only partially explain the nature of their involvement. Because they are sustained over time and are not contingent on the country where a staff member happens to be working for a few years there are two other sets of non local relationships that may be more influential. These are membership of the global development cooperation community, of which the country specific donor community is a sub-set, and the relationships back home to the staff member's own country's history, institutions, values and practices. The interpretation of these sets of relations, and the action resulting from this, are mediated by an individual's own personal history and life experiences. Consciously situating oneself with respect to personal and institutional values and relationships would allow individual staff members in donor agencies to reflect upon and explore taken for granted assumptions about the way the world appears to them. It would help them work more comfortably and sensitively with the ambiguity, paradox and unanticipated outcomes that they encounter on a daily basis in their goal of reducing world poverty. The paper argues that greater reflexivity would help donor staff and their organisations become more skilled at supporting aid recipients in their efforts.

This paper is part of the series Lessons for change about organisational learning, resulting from a collaboration between ActionAid, DFID, Sida and the Participation Group at the Institute of Development Studies to explore understandings of learning and to document innovative approaches. Based on the author's own experience of working for development agencies, most recently as head of a country office in Latin America, this paper also draws on research carried out in 2003 and supported by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) Asia Regional Policy Research Fund. This included interviewing DFID's partners in one country and running workshops for DFID staff in the same and in two other country offices. The first draft also benefited very considerably from the opportunity of sharing ideas and experience at a workshop in Sahy, Sao Paolo on Partnerships and Influencing, described in another paper in this series. The paper summarises the principal theme and poses some questions for readers to consider and discuss, possibly in workshops that they may wish to organise. It briefly reviews and critiques current understandings of influencing in the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and provides examples from Latin America of efforts to take the agenda further. It looks at how these understandings have been applied and developed in parts of Asia. Finally it proposes some fundamental principles for influencing and explores the operational implications of these for teams in country offices of DFID and other international development agencies.

Part 1 (1997): If development means good change, questions arise about what is good, and what sorts of change matter. Answers can be personally defined and redefined. The changing words, meanings and concepts of development discourse both reflect and influence what is done. The realities of the powerful tend to dominate. Drawing on experience with participatory approaches and methods which enable poor and marginalised people to express their realities, responsible well-being is proposed as a central concept for a development agenda. This links with capabilities and livelihoods, and is based on equity and sustainability as principles. The primacy of personal actions and non-actions in development points to the need for a pedagogy for the non- oppressed. This includes self-critical awareness, thinking through the effects of actions, and enabling those with power and wealth to experience being better off with less. Others are invited and encouraged to reflect, improve on this analysis, and write their own agenda.|Part 2 (2004): Since 1997, the polarisation of power and wealth in the world has become even more extreme. The personal dimension is central in mediating every big issue but continues to be relatively neglected. Words and concepts used in development have remained potent. Social capital and sustainable livelihoods have met needs in powerful organisations and have been widely adopted and influential. Responsible well-being, pointing to individual agency, has languished at the same time as the scope for action and impact has been enhanced by growing interconnectedness. The methodologies proposed earlier are needed more than ever. So are new lines of thinking: to complement rights of the poorer and weaker with obligations of the richer and more powerful, worldwide and between all levels; to recognise power and relationships as central issues; to integrate institutional and personal change; to ground pro-poor policies and practice in realism; to think for oneself and take responsibility; to choose words and identify priorities personally; and to seek guidance by reflecting on what a poor person would wish one to do.|Author's summary