Resources

This paper is a case study exploring the process of mobilising citizen action around the right to information. It documents a recent experience with a participatory social audit carried out with marginalized villages in Orissa under a less-than-transparent panchayat (local government). A campaign involving participatory action research, popular education, training and alliances among people's organisations, NGOs, sympathetic government officials and the media, led to exposure and prosecution of corrupt panchayat officials.

This paper is about the creative use of legislative advocacy to protect the rights of civil society organisations. Threatened with a proposed law that would limit their freedoms of association, expression and assembly, a core group of NGOs formed a national coalition to campaign against the law and to draft alternative legislation. The Pakistani NGO Forum (PNF) at present represents over 3500 organisations and plays a role in defining the code of conduct and standards of accountability for NGOs.

This paper discusses meaningful participation in the context of Guatemala's Popular Consultation in 1999. After decades of civil war, violence and military rule the idea was to hold a national consultation to reform the constitution, as a means of implementing the country's recent peace accords. This effort was severely hampered, however, by Guatemala's immense social, economic, cultural and linguistic differences, and by the limited rights of indigenous people. The author describes a flawed process in which the national referendum process was steered by political and economic elites, all in the name of participation. The paper highlights the weakness of a participatory policy process that does not include strong elements of popular education, communication, and consciousness raising, and that fails to create an agenda rooted in public awareness, common demands, and an organised political power.

Although a key advocacy goal is to influence policy processes, it is rare for this to genuinely happen in practice. Deciding when and how to engage with policy processes is not straightforward or simple. This paper highlights some key questions that can help advocates determine whether an opportunity to engage with decision makers is truly a meaningful chance for influence and change.

This paper describes a 15-year battle by a poor rural community to stop industrial pollution of their water supply, and reveals the multiple strategies used by the people of Yellow Creek to hold powerful government and corporate interests accountable. Key elements of success included the uses of participatory research (including scientific research), freedom of information provisions, and the legal system, as well as strategic alliances and genuine partnerships with supportive and respectful NGOs.

This paper outlines Action Aid's work in progress in exploring the monitoring and evaluation issues related to the impact of advocacy work. It contains a framework for looking at these possible outcomes and impacts and explores some of the trade-offs inherent in advocacy and campaigning work. The author urges greater attention to power dynamics within and among civil society groups, in order to safeguard transparency, legitimacy, representation, and participation in decision making

This is the first of four distance learning courses (other courses are: Advocacy, Barangay Administration, and Barangay Development Planning and Enterprise Development) that have been prepared by the Education for Life Foundation as distance learning modules. This first course is organized in four five units as follows: You and Your Barangay (village); Democratic Participation in Local Governance; Power, Engagement and Development through Local Governance; The Progressive Barangay û an Instrument of Development; and Leadership in Barangay Governance. The main material is the workbook for course enrollees which is user-friendly, with helpful illustrations and tables. There is enough space for enrollees to work on for most exercises making it possible for the enrollees to refer back to material that they had already covered.|For each of the five units in this course, the learning objectives are clearly spelled out as well as the total time required to complete the unit. Each unit is further broken up into readings with clear discussion guides, and exercises and assignments that intend to help bring the readings into a more practical understanding of the workings of the barangay. While most of these exercises and assignments are intended to be individually completed by the course enrollee, there are some exercises that will involve group efforts with other course enrollees. These group activities are to be organized and faciliated by a Learning Guide, to be identified by the enrollees themselves. The course workbook also includes very clear reflection guides after exercises and assignments, and at the end of every unit.|Three cassette tapes with accompanying audio material recommended for listening throughout the course come with the course book. Also, there is a Guide to Learning for the course student that explains the distance learning approaches adapted, the structure of the course, and suggestions for effective learning. There is also a Guide for the Learning Guides who are expected to help organize and facilitate the group learning sessions with other students as recommended in the course. The Guide for Learning Guides clearly spells out the roles of the Learning Guide in the distance learning process and includes practical pointers on how the Learning Guides can help facilitate learning. All material is in Pilipino.