Cornwall, Andrea

As part of the special 50th issue of PLA Notes, this article reaffirms the fundamental value of participatory work in supporting people to gain the confidence and capacity to change their realities. The authors explore these issues through the perspective of sexual and reproductive well-being and rights, looking at lessons learnt and exploring ways in which practitioners are addressing the new challenges thrown up in changing environments.

Across the world, as new democratic experiments meet with and transform older forms of governance, political space for public engagement in governance appears to be widening. A renewed concern with rights, power and difference in debates about participation in development has focused greater attention on the institutions at the interface between publics, providers and policy-makers.

This article draws on findings from the Pathways to Participation project. The project brought together practitioners to reflect critically on what PRA means to them and to explore some of the challenges posed by the rapid spread and uptake of PRA for issues of integrity and quality. The articles discusses the problems of trying to define PRA as the project discovered that people's notions of what being participatory is all about is often quite varied and there are a range of opinions about what PRA is or ought to be.

This paper reflects critically on 'participation', tracing its history from the high-level declarations of support for 'popular participation' by international development organisations in the 1970s. Within the shifting landscape of development, the paper suggests, diverse and divergent purposes and intentions came to shape the embrace of 'participation' by mainstream development. Seen as a central pillar of the basic needs approach in the 1970s, 'popular participation' sought to transform development practice by involving people in projects intended to benefit them.

A series of articles focusing on participatory approaches to sexual and reproductive health from around the world. The inititiatives described range from innovative uses of participatory methods to enhance communication and understanding to strategies to amplify the voices of people of people who would otherwise remain unheard in policy and institutional processes.

A brief review of participatory approaches to sexual and reproductive health is offered with a view to capturing shifts in methods and approaches with the conceptual shifts that have occurred from considering women as only reproducers to taking a rights based notion of their reproductive and sexual health. By providing the editorial overview for articles on sexual and reproductive health in this volume, the authors tease out the main issues that need to be considered by participatory development practitioners working in the area of sexual and reproductive health.