Resources

Participatory policy analysis questions conventional policy-making procedures, challenges the behaviour and attitudes of policy makers and influences the style and substance of policy itself. This book examines the implications and issues of participatory policy-focused research through case studies and discussions. One section concentrates specifically on participatory poverty assessments as a means of bringing local poverty and policy analysis into the policy process.

Local leaders in south eastern Bolivia identified a rapid decline in the number of traditional healers (payes) and concluded that their indigenous health system was at risk. They commissioned an appraisal of indigenous health knowledge to improve understanding and come up with a plan of action. The article describes the methodology used, including how the people moved from analysis to action plans, and also some of the outcomes of the exercise.

This paper argues that there are ethical problems raised by the current extractive manner in which PRA has been used in PPAs. The authors suggest that action planning needs to be linked to PPAs to resolve these ethical problems and that this will also improve the quality of the information taken out of the community for policy-making purposes. A case study of the PPA conducted in Shinyanga, Tanzania is presented as an example of where an attempt was made to combine these two objectives. However, an inherent bias towards the objective of extracting information was still present. It is argued that there should be a focus on participatory research linked to local action at all stages of planning, resourcing and implementation of a PPA project.

In this short article, an anthropologist discovers that a rigorous search for knowledge is better served by participatory action research in which the researcher takes sides in political disputes rather than participant observation in which the ethnographer attempts to be neutral.

This lengthy and detailed document represents a summarised report of the second Internal Evaluation of an ongoing Fourth phase implementation of the above named project in Bangladesh. The objective of this evaluation was both to assess the progress
of the project and to test some new methodological approaches that had been applied in order to further strengthen grassroots participation. The methods utilised were mostly PRA and they were applied at the beneficiary level. The emphasis was laid on the potentials of the participants to evaluate the present situation and outline realistic future options. The document is split into six major chapters which in turn outline the Terms of Reference, a discussion of the principles of PRA and a short introduction to the methods applied. Chapter three presents the executive summary which leads to a more extensive discussion of the findings in Chapter four. The observers comments and recommendations are used to draw some conclusions applicable for the on-going fourth phase implementation and for the planning of a fifth phase. The last chapter includes some appendices of the basic orientation and
results from the evaluation. A bibliography is added at the back.