Resources

This guide aims to enable activists, trainers and other involved in development and democracy to promote citizen participation and to democratize decision-making. Drawing on experiences of NGOs from numerous countries, the document contains concepts, tools and step-by-step processes aimed at promoting citizen advocacy. It aims to help activists, practitioners and planners to work with civil society in a way that promotes political change, develops solutions to development problems and policies, creates strong and lasting links and transforms power relations, including gender dynamics.

This book intends to provide participatory development tools that will enable those traditionally excluded - particularly women - from decision-making processes and control over resources to have a voice and to play an active role. The authors contend that the tools described increase the capacities of local communities, NGOs and public sector agencies by integrating applied and analytical methods. To illustrate, examples from field experience in urban, rural and agrarian communities from around the world are described. A brief overview of participatory approaches to development is described, including issues such as power relationships within a community and between local institutions and outsiders. Its explores the opportunities for using multi-media tools to strengthen the impact of other tools in conscious-raising, data-gathering, advocacy, and community decision-making and action.

Indonesia is in a process of moving from authoritarian to democratic rule, and to more decentralised forms of governance. This paper sheds light on efforts to open space for women's participation in politics through the work of PPSW, a Jakarta-based women's NGO which helps women to change the way they think about themselves, and to analyse and understand gender relations at all levels of society from household to national government. It discusses the long-term process required to strengthen women politically; advocacy that involves education, consciousness raising and empowerment at the most basic and individual level.

As development NGOs and official aid agencies embrace the idea of becoming a learning organisation, they are increasingly concerned with some form of knowledge generation and organisational learning. To date, the literature on these issues has tended to come out of the private sector and reflect a Western world view. Development and the Learning Organisation presents contributions from development scholars and practitioners from a range of institutional backgrounds around the world. These contributions are organised under five themes: Power, culture and gender: challenges to organisational learning; Learning together: multi-institutional initiatives; Levels of learning: organisational case studies; Learning from humanitarian action, and Ways and means: tools and methods for learning and change. Some introduce new approaches and models, others offer critical case studies of individual and group learning practice across cultures as well as organisational efforts to put theory into practice. The book ends with a review of resources including books, journals, organisations, websites and publishers.

This paper analyses the role of civil society in advocating for the adoption of the Bill on the Right to Education in India. The author argues that recent successes in civil society mobilisation could form a good basis to implementing the right to education with the active collaboration and participation of the Indian government. Thus she demonstrates how civil societyûgovernment collaborative approaches have been able to tackle child labour and contribute to increasing access to educational opportunities for girls. In doing so, the author recommends: that there be an increase in sensitisation, mentoring, awareness-building, and in developing the participatory governance capacities of rights-unaware communities, while mobilising the masses to achieve reforms through advocacy; that there be a requirement for state bureaucracy to train staff in reforming legal and regulatory frameworks, and implementation systems; that at the local level designing methods of participation that incorporate new bargaining tools e.g. Public Interest Litigation (PIL); and working with women in æpositions of powerÆ as potential agents and champions of change. Some of the observations that have been made in the interim period following the passing of the Right to Education Bill include: a call from representatives from civil society to government to set up a 'National Commission on Education' comprised of experts, which would ensure a participation through involving civil society actors as an integral component in any planning and delivery to ensure implementation of the Constitutional provision; and the formation of state-level networks of civil-society organisations several Indian states to lobby the state governments to implement the principles of the Bill on the ground.

This publication by SEWA (Self employed Womens Association), Ahmedabad, India and North South Dialogue, Germany, that examines poverty in a micro context with the methodology of an Exposure and Dialogue Programme (EDP) that is essentially an attempt to understand poverty first hand and record some of the factors that lead to the overcoming of it. The EDPs are used to assist understanding of the situation of SEWA members, appreciation of the womenÆs strengths, and to find strategies to overcome problems. The first part of the publication My home, my workplace: A life of struggle for security presents the story of Kamlaben Koshti, a bidi worker and SEWA leader in Ahmedabad derived from an EPD on Empowerment through organising in 1999. It examines the process leading up to the EDP, with aims of gather experiences that couldbe used for the World Development Report on Poverty, for designing exposures for politicians, and testing the exposure methods for SEWAÆs own purposes. It goes on to give account for the life history of Kamlaben with lessons to be learnt; analyse the relevance of KamlabenÆs life for SEWAÆs policy, programmes and macro policy; and examining the process of meeting Kmlaben and comprehending her life. The second part of the report Struggling for security illustrates the lives of Savitaben Jivanbhai Valand, a midwife in Vihchiya, and Jetunben Razak Sheik, agarbatti roller in Bapunagar, derived from an EPD in 2001. It looks at the life histories of the two women and reflects on exposure, reflection and dialogue as means to understand vulnerability and to learn about risk management.