Resources

This is the third annual report of Hull Community Development Company Limited. It describes the various projects and achievements of this community development organisation.

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.

Recent policy initiatives focusing on local government modernisation and neighbourhood management seek to reinvigorate local democracy and ensure that government is more responsive to local needs. Such policies could mark profound changes in the way our communities are governed, but what are the practical implications? Drawing upon research findings of current practice and the authors' direct experience, this report presents an overview of the issues faced by public, private and voluntary organisations, community groups and residents engaged in neighbourhood renewal and management. The analysis suggests that more attention needs to be given to issues of organisational and cultural change, capacity building and the hidden costs of implementing these new agendas.

The Disabling Menstrual Barriers research aims to investigate and address the barriers to menstrual health and hygiene that adolescents and young people with disabilities face in the Kavre district in Nepal.

It is a collaboration between WaterAid and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. During September 2017, qualitative data was collected using participatory methods, including PhotoVoice.

This Learning Note presents the research questions, timeline, data collection methods and ethics. It also captures the preliminary findings from PhotoVoice and highlights the emerging research themes from this.

The contents of this manual trace the roots, principles and practices of four well known participatory research approaches:

À Participatory Research (PR)
À Participatory Action Research (PAR)
À Action Research (AR)
À Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA)

Each section includes a description of the approach and a case study designed to be used in training situations. The manual is user friendly, contains basic definitions, case studies, reading lists and is well illustrated. It provides discussion points and questions, as well as exercises related to conducting participatory research in the field.

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.