Resources

This edition of the IDS Bulletin features papers by researchers and practitioners associated with the Development Research Centre on Citizenship, Participation and Accountability (Citizenship DRC), an international research partnership dedicated to exploring the new forms of citizenship which are needed to make rights real for poor people.|The Citizenship DRC brings together over 50 researchers from research institutions and civil society groups based in Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa and the U.K. It encourages collaborative work across national, institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Researchers have formed thematic working groups, and each group has its own website to share experiences.|This issue is split into the following sections:|1. Meanings and Expressions of Rights and Citizenship: - Citizenship, Affiliation and Exclusion: Perspectives from the South - Agendas in Encountering Citizens in the Nigerian Context - Making Rights Real in Bangladesh through Collective Citizen Action - Citizenship, Science and Risk: Conceptualising Relationships across Issues and Settings|2. Concepts and Practices of Participation: - Locating Citizen Participation - Linking Citizenship, Participation and Accountability: A Perspective from PRIA - Deliberative Fora and the Democratisation of Social Policies in Brazil - Citizenship and the 'Right to Education': Perspectives from the Indian Context - Participation of Indigenous and Rural People in the Construction of Developmental and Environmental Public Policies in Mexico|3. Dimensions of Accountability: - From Responsibility to Citizenship? Corporate Accountability for Development - Who speaks for Whom? A look at civil society Accountability in Bioprospecting Debates in Mexico

This collection of lessons from the field brings together the experiences of ActionAid's newly adopted approach to annual reviews: participatory reviews and reflections. These processes allow communities to challenge the organisation over the way money is raised and spent, the ability to demand greater openness and flexibility, and the possibility of raising rights issues. Review and reflection is a key part of ActionAid's 'accountability, learning and planning' system (ALPS), which makes accountability to the poor and marginalised central. The key principles of ALPS are explored through case studies presented of on-going projects in India and Africa, and include: " Strengthening ActionAid's main accountability to the people they target and work with; " Strengthening commitment to gender equity; " Making information relevant and useful to the people who use produce it, receive it, and who need to make decisions; " The information provider must receive feedback; " Making the best use of staff time by cutting down on the amount of written information needed; " Relating financial expenditure to programme quality; " Promoting critical learning that enables the organisation to learn from their successes and failures.

This brochure was written to assist individuals and organisations in the planning and evaluation of interventions in a flexible, comprehensive and participatory manner. Comprehensive planning starts with an assessment of the problems at hand. The assessment of problems is organised around the construction of a causal model, in which individuals identify perceived problems through activities. An overview of the approach is given, along with some of its major characteristics, such as aiming to elicit high levels of participation by all those involved through exercises, workshops, and an emphasis on finding explanations for results during the implementation stage of the project.

This document is an annotated reference list on Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation for Natural Resources Systems Programme (NRSP) Project Managers. The annotated references have been grouped into the following five categories: A: Overview of (P) M&E, B: Indicators, C: Methods, D: Case Studies and E: Generic M&E Websites. For easy access the references have been organised in a table in line with these categories and include details of thematic focus and keywords. Each reference has been coded A-E and then ranked according to relevance to the NRSP audience. The annotations are listed at the end of the document in alphabetical order by author with code.

It is only over the 1990s that local government bodies have started to apply participatory methodologies with any consistency. This is surprising given their mandate to meet the needs and interests of local people. This overview discusses the many issues surrounding participation and local government. These include: the reasons why local government has failed until recently to employ participatory methodologies; how local government officials in both the North and South can learn from each other and how participation can be used to influence new styles of leadership that are more democratic, transparent and accountable.

This article presents a response by DFID-India to the Prajateerpu report and the e-forum which discussed its findings, in which the organisation is implicated as having acted callously in displacing large numbers of poor farmers from their lands and imposed policies and programmes that would adversely affect their livelihoods. It begins by outlining DFID's approach to tackling rural poverty and agricultural development, highlighting that it does not wholly endorse a highly industrialised approach, and that it recognises that complexities and difficulties associated with rural poverty. It then presents DFID's programme strategy and approach, stating the value placed on participation and consultation, and gives examples of interventions in Andrah Pradesh which poor people directly benefited from.

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.