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This paper focuses primarily on lessons from experiences in mainstreaming and up-scaling participation, which are relevant to the partnership and ownership principles of the World Bank's Comprehensive Development Framework (CDF). The paper explores its various themes in relation to the idea of participation as building ownership and partnership from the bottom up. Lessons learned from applying participatory appraisal methodologies, particularly in participatory poverty assessments, to help national-level policy makers design more appropriate anti-poverty policies, are examined. A summary of lessons from a range of large-scale government programs that have attempted to scale up participation is also presented. The paper then reviews the efforts of four large donor agencies - DFID, GTZ, USAID and the World Bank - in mainstreaming participation. The use of participatory monitoring and evaluation in assessing performance is discussed. The authors also propose the broader enabling environments they believe are necessary for participation to take root. The paper concludes by summarising the lessons considered most pertinent to CDF implementation.

"Voices of the Poor" is a series of three books that collates the experiences, views and aspirations of over 60,000 poor women and men. This first book of the series gathers the voices of over 40,000 poor women and men in 50 countries from the World Bank's participatory poverty assessments. Using participatory and qualitative research methods, the study presents very directly, through poor people's own voices, the realities of their lives; these voices send powerful messages that point the way toward policy change. The book explores the common patterns that emerged from poor people's experiences in many different places. It starts by presenting the conceptual framework, elaborating on participatory poverty assessments and the study's methodology, including its limitations. It then articulates definitions of poverty from the perspective of the poor, stressing its multi-dimensionality. State institutions and civil society institutions are assessed critically, with their impact on reaching the poor deemed ineffective and limited respectively, forcing the poor to depend primarily on informal networks. Gender relations in the household are then analysed, as is how these affect and are affected by larger institutions of society. The issue of social fragmentation is also explored, including a discussion of social cohesion and social exclusion. The book concludes by proposing the way forward, while elaborating the elements of a strategy for change.

Analytical work on poverty in Uganda has been undertaken using both quantitative measures and participatory data collection. This is a report of a consultancy carried out to analyze Participatory Poverty Assessment (PPA) and household survey findings on poverty trends in Uganda, particularly to help clarify the picture on poverty trends, identify areas which require further work and any further findings from the analysis which require policy action. Key findings on the relationship between the PPA and household survey results on poverty trends conclude that the two sets of findings have different strengths and can be used to complement each other. Recommendations for future poverty monitoring are made, particularly in terms of using both data sets in complementary fashion to improve monitoring. Some issues for the future development and refinement of pro-poor policies are also raised.

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.

Understanding the allocation of public resources through national and local budgets has become an increasing focus of development. This has been driven by two principal trends. Donor agencies, on the one hand, are seeking to deliver growing proportions of their financial assistance to partner countries through mainstream government systems - while, at a different level, a vibrant civil society movement has developed which seeks to promote goals of citizen empowerment, gender equity and poverty reduction through the potentials offered by the budget process. Norton and Elson aim to contribute to the evolving understanding of public expenditure management as a political, rather than a purely technical, process. In particular, they explore the ways in which a rights approach can contribute to strengthening voice and pro-poor outcomes in budget processes, and include examples of pro-poor and gender-sensitive budget initiatives from countries such as Brazil and South Africa. The work was commissioned by DFID as part of the programme of work to take forward it's human rights strategy, and identifies issues, partners, tools and methods that may help development actors to support citizen accountability and a pro-poor, gender-equitable, focus in public expenditure management.

This article looks at the experiences of the Social Enterprise Development Foundation of West Africa (SEND Foundation) in building the capacity of civil society groups and local government officials in resource-poor northern Ghana. The article uses these experiences as a case study to explore how the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy (GPRS) engages pro-poor and grassroots civil society organisations in facilitating participatory economic development in their local communities. The article has a two-fold focus on capacity building: increasing knowledge and understanding of the GPRS with civil society, and developing participatory monitoring and evaluation skills. The focus is on the Ghana HIPC Watch, which is a pilot project that aims to be a mechanism through which civil society organisations can engage in policy monitoring and evaluation. The central concerns of equity and accountability, particularly in terms of gender, emerged as important issues.