Using Participatory Action Research Methodologies for Engaging and Researching with Religious Minorities in Contexts of Intersecting Inequalities
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This working paper reflects the findings of the first phase of the REJUVENATE project, which set out to understand and map approaches to integrating children, youth, and community participation in child rights initiatives.
In this paper, we:
Grounded in an understanding of child rights as ‘living rights’, we propose building on the 3Ps of the UNCRC (protection, provision and participation) towards the 3Ss – space, support and system change.
We offer a set of field principles (REJUVENATE) to guide substantively participatory work with children and young people, underpinned by our Ndoro Ndoro model, which refers to intergenerational, community-driven approaches that put children and youth at the centre, while being accountable to them.
We recognise that this paper is far from exhaustive, and we intend it to be a springboard for further work that substantively recognises the importance of children’s participation in work to further child rights, and to enrich and rejuvenate the societies of which children are a part.
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The CLTS Knowledge Hub, based at the Institute of Development Studies, convened a regional workshop in Arusha, Tanzania, 16-20 April 2018 with support from SNV Tanzania. The event brought together those engaged in rural WASH programming from eight countries across the region (Burundi, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia) alongside experts working at regional and global levels. Over the course of five days participants shared experiences, innovations, challenges and learning, and mapped gaps in knowledge with the aim of improving capacity and future learning, and building consensus on the way forward. SNV Tanzania also facilitated a field visit to its Sustainable Sanitation and Hygiene for All (SSH4A) project areas in Babati and Karatu districts.
This learning brief presents the common challenges and barriers to achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.2 that the workshop participants identified across the region. It summarises discussions held across the week, highlights promising practices and considers priority actions moving forward.
The brief is available to download in English (to the right) and also in French here.
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The CLTS Knowledge Hub, based at the Institute of Development Studies, WaterAid, WSSCC and UNICEF co-convened a regional workshop in Saly, Senegal, 25th-28th June 2018 with support from AGETIP. The event brought together those engaged in rural WASH programming from 14 countries across the region (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Democratic Republic Congo (DRC), Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Togo) alongside experts working at regional and global levels. Over the course of four days participants shared latest experiences, innovations, challenges and research, mapped knowledge gaps and discussed ways forward with the aim of improving capacity and knowledge.
This learning brief presents the common challenges identified across the region, summarises some of the discussions held, highlights some promising practices and considers priority actions moving forward.
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This blog originally appeared on the Institute of Development Studies website.
Do we really need debiasing, yet another word? Yes, unless anyone can improve on it, because we need a word to describe a rigorous discipline we development professionals need for grounded realism. This has been coming on me slowly. But now explorations and ‘aha!’ moments in India have accumulated and combined into an epiphany. For me, things will never be the same again. Let me explain.
The biases of rural development tourism are old news. These are biases in brief rural visits from urban centres. They were a collective discovery and articulation at IDS in the early 1980s. They have now receded into the mists of history and been largely forgotten. Few in later generations of development professionals have heard of them. But with rapid change, they are now more relevant than ever.
The biases are spatial (main tarmac road, roadside, accessible from an urban centre…) , project (special villages and places where there are projects, good things to show, contacts…..), person (males, elite, adults, government and NGO staff….), seasonal (during the dry season, not the rains…), professional (questions and curiosity limited to specialised professional mindsets and interests) and diplomatic (being tactful, not inquiring about sensitive subjects) and (an addition since the 1980s) security (confined to places considered safe, and limited to those accessible in daylight….).
The biases interlock and reinforce each other to exclude those people who are most remote, powerless, vulnerable, poor, stigmatised, discriminated against – those whom the SDGs are not to leave behind. With the intensifying capital trap – being stuck in a capital city or urban centre by meetings, emails, visitors, demands for accountability, reporting, and the like – the biases combine now more wickedly than ever.
And there is a new distorting influence to add: competitive campaigns. This is high profile campaigns in which districts and organisations compete to achieve, and to be seen to have achieved, more than others. This last bias is striking with the Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin in India, the impressively massive and hugely ambitious campaign driven by political commitment and priority which seeks to make rural India open defecation free by 2 October 2019.
Systemically, with almost every brief rural visit, there is a special reason for where the visitor is taken, who is met, what is said and what is shown. This is most brazen with atypical model communities such as the Millennium villages in African countries. It is also manifest in visits to successful projects, or where the Government or an NGO works or has contacts, somewhere easily accessible and so on. This leads to a scattered archipelago of islands of special cases and contacts that are seen, studied, quoted, and then quoted again and again back and forth by visitors, with the authority of their personal experience of rural, or for that matter urban, reality.
Visiting these islands is better than not visiting at all. But it results not in representative ground truth but in a take-off through repetition into sustainably biased myth. The expanses of sea between the scattered islands are overlooked, unvisited and unexplored, but are many times larger, and more typical, than the islands. Even those who demand representative rigour in statistics are themselves through such visits systemically vulnerable to grossly unrepresentative views of reality. And all this is accentuated when there are competitive target-driven campaigns.
We need a systematic, timely and cost-effective approach offsetting the biases and for finding and exploring the seas between the islands. Here is what, again and again, I have found works astonishingly well, and far better than one might suppose.
Using this approach here is a tiny sample of what I have stumbled on in India. All happened to be in States or Districts that had been declared open defecation free (ODF). Except for one that was affluent and exceptional being on a main road, all were very far from ODF.
The point of these is not to denigrate the programme but to illustrate how the vast sea can differ from the scattered archipelago normally visited.
So let me invite all, yes all, development professionals who see this to look in the mirror and be wary of visits which systemically reinforce misperceptions and generate and sustain myths. Ring fence days for you to ground truth through de-biasing. It is fulfilling, informative, fascinating and fun, to explore, to meet people casually, to wander, observe, ask, listen and gain new insights. Every single de-biasing visit I have done has made me wonder – will it happen again? Will I learn anything new this time? Will there be aha moments? Or will this be a wasted day? And every time, every single time, I have been startled and provoked by unexpected revelations. This has always happened. The insights have been intense and memorable, and the implications for policy, practice and research significant. The use of time has been extraordinarily cost-effective.
So let me challenge all fellow professionals who are engaged with rural or urban development – in government organisations, NGOs, training and research institutes, academics, the media, and funding agencies – all who have the scope to do so – to de-bias. Let me challenge all who can to encourage or require others in their organisations to do likewise. Escape the cognitive trap and help your colleagues to escape theirs. Be a devil. Straight away ring-fence a de-biasing day for yourself. Be systematically rigorous. De-bias, enjoy and tell others what you did and what you learnt.
Inspired to take up the challenge? For a useful reminder, download and print A systematic approach to debiasing, instructions from Robert Chambers
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A team of researchers from the Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) knowledge hub at the Institute of Development Studies, WaterAid and Praxis adopted an Immersive Research Approach (IRA) to try to gain in-depth understanding of ground realities and community perspectives relevant for the Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin (SBM-G). They sought to learn and be open to emerging findings, while keeping a focus on behaviour change.
This note describes what they did, what they learnt, challenges they faced, and lessons and guidance for its use by others.
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In this chapter, Robert Chambers and Nicholas Loubere have a conversation in which they discuss: the nature of Robert's research; his contribution to development; shifts in the methodological mainstream; inherent tensions in development research; the limits of freedom and participation; power verses democracy; ignorance, biases and misconceptions in research; local knowledge and multiple realities; how to move from extraction to co-production; positionality, engagement and dissemination; and pluralism and emergence. The text is based on an audio recording of an interview that took place at IDS in June 2014.
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Despite great strides in improving sanitation in developing countries, some 2.4 billion people worldwide lack access to adequate sanitation facilities and the poorest and most vulnerable members of society are often not reached. Sustainability is one of the key challenges in CLTS and the wider WASH sector. Whether sanitation improvements endure depend on issues of equity and inclusion, social norms, physical infrastructure, sanitation marketing, monitoring and verification, post-ODF follow-up and the roles and responsibilities of governments, NGOs and donors. The achievement of “open defecation-free” status is now recognised as only the first stage in a long process of change and sanitation improvement.
This book examines these challenges, asking questions such as how we ensure that people access sanitation and sustain related behaviours, and how we reach the poorest with toilets that are suitable for their needs. It develops key themes by exploring current experience, innovations and insights, as well as identifying a future research agenda and gaps in current knowledge, and making recommendations and practical suggestions.
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This report aims to provide inspiration and impetus to those making decisions about how to implement and monitor the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It shows how local level experiences and ideas can contribute to greater accountability and ultimately to increasing the impact of policies and initiatives aimed at reaching the SDGs. The work featured here focuses on how to make cities and informal settlements safer and more inclusive, taking as a starting point the extremely high levels of insecurity and violence that characterise daily life for many within townships and informal settings in South Africa.
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Participatory geographic information systems (PGIS) combine a range of feo-spatial information management tools and methods such as sketch maps, participatory 3D models (P3DM) aerial photographs, satellite images, global positioning systems (GPS) and geographic information systems (GIS). CTA has been in the forefront of activities to promote PGIS across African, Caribbean and Pacific countries.
Impact assessments undertaken in six ACP regions have documented how empowering PGIS can be for rural and at times marginalised communities. This publication documents some of the success stories that have emerged as a result of CTA’s initiatives in PGIS in recent years.
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This Reality Check was undertaken by a team of Nepali researchers, and carried out as a contribution to the mixed methods approach to monitoring, evaluation and learning commissioned by DFID Nepal to complement and assist the routine monitoring and evaluation of the Rural Access Programme 3 in Mid and Far West Nepal. It complements a ‘baseline’ RCA that was undertaken for RAP in May 2014.
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The Reality Check Approach is an internationally recognised qualitative research approach that requires the study team to live with people in poverty in their own homes for a period of time and to use this opportunity to have many informal conversations and interactions with all the members of the household, their neighbours and with the service providers with whom they interact.
This study was jointly commissioned by a group of stakeholders including the World Bank, KOMPAK and the Knowledge Sector Initiative. It was designed to understand the nuances of hygiene and nutrition behaviour from the perspective of families living in poverty.
The study was undertaken in three provinces across Indonesia (Central Kalimantan, Maluku, and North Sulawesi), the same districts as those chosen for the Frontline Service Providers RCA study to enable further examination and triangulation of the dynamics between the community and frontline service providers.
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This third edition of the The Sage Handbook of Action Research presents an updated version with new chapters covering emerging areas in healthcare, social work, education and international development, as well as an expanded ‘Skills’ section which includes new consultant-relevant materials. Building on the previous editions, Hilary Bradbury has carefully developed this edition to ensure it follows in their footsteps by mapping the current state of the discipline, as well as looking to the future of the field and exploring the issues at the cutting edge of the action research paradigm today.
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Wealth-ranking is a participatory tool enabling people to group others in their community into wealth bands, and thus identify the very poor. The method has been developed to include the broader aspects of well-being – such as social standing and health – that people value as much as material wealth. It tells the story of the development of these assessment methods since the rise of wealth ranking in the 1980s and looks at the results of well-being ranking exercises and how they help identify important differences within communities and monitor changes in well-being over time. Exploring strengths and weaknesses of methods it suggests that understanding differences within communities is essential for good development aid work. The book goes on to describe the successful use of ranking tools over large populations and the value of using multi-dimensional models of well-being, and briefly explores the ideas used to make assessments of well-being at national levels.
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This paper provides conceptual and methodological guidelines for researchers seeking to undertake an urban participatory climate change adaptation appraisal (PCCAA), illustrated with examples from appraisals in Mombasa (Kenya) and Estelí (Nicaragua). It highlights the importance of hearing local people’s voices regarding incrementally worsening and often unrecorded severe weather. The conceptual framework distinguishes between the analysis of asset vulnerability and the identification of asset-based operational strategies, and sets out a number of methodological principles and practices for undertaking a PCCAA. This PCCAA addressed five main themes: community characteristics; severe weather; vulnerability to severe weather; asset adaptation; and institutions supporting local adaptation. For each of these, it identified potential tools for eliciting information, illustrated by examples from Mombasa and Estelí.