Resources

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 article presents a number of contributions from an e-forum debate on issues of accountability and transparency in Deliberative and Inclusionary Processes which grew out of a citizen jury and scenario workshop in southern India. It is based around the questions:|Who decides to whom and for whom citizen jury processes are accountable?|How can such participatory processes by used to hold government departments, donor agencies, and other actors more accountable, and make policies and policy processes more responsive to the needs and priorities of poor people?

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 literature review is intended to complement the English and Spanish literature reviews carried out as part of the Global Study. Many of the issues and points of discussion raised in the English review were also noted or confirmed in the French literature. There are inevitable influences and overlaps between the various literatures, such that to make a clear distinction between the French, Spanish and English literature is, to a certain extent, artificial. However, it cannot be denied that there are some differences in approaches and emphasis, due to the predominance of certain schools of thought or institutional cultures. This paper emphasizes the differences by focusing on elements that were not yet necessarily covered by the other views, or that are addressed from a different angle. The objectives of the review are to clarify the concepts and definitions of terms related to participation and consultation in the French literature on development and humanitarian aid; present and analyse key debates around the concept and practice of participation; review lessons learned, recommendations, and manuals that can be useful for the elaboration of the Global Study Practitioner's Handbook and overview book; and illustrate the issues raised through case studies that are relevant to humanitarian action.

The international NGO, Concern Worldwide, decided to assess whether its Integrated Rural Development Projects (IRDP) are reaching the extreme poor. Dimla was chosen as a site for a participatory research study which asked two questions 1) Who are the extreme poor? and 2) Is Concern's Dimla project reaching the extreme poor effectively through its existing activities? This article presents the process and findings of this research. The research focuses on a category of extreme poor termed the 'helpless poor' and why they have not often been able to participate fully in the project. It concludes with key learnings and suggests a specifically targeted pro-extreme poor strategy is required.

The National Association for NGOs (NANGO) in Zimbabwe has developed, with an external consultant, a method for participatory capacity assessment and planning. In this paper, the authors describe the process, emphasizing that capacity building is a much wider-ranging process than simply training or staff development. Following on from individual organisational processes, network members came together to see whether and how they could support and integrate their capacity building strategies. The article is thorough in its discussion with diagrams to illustrate key points. It concludes with reflections on the participatory capacity building methodology and future developments.