Resources

This article describes the manner in which the World Bank is incorporating a participatory approach into its environmental work, including the launch of the Participation Sourcebook. The Bank's Participatory Poverty Asssessment process is also briefly outlined.

This dissertation argues that the Ghana Participatory Poverty Assessment (PPA) was successful methodologically, in terms of obtaining the views of the poor concerning their priorities and strategies to combat poverty. However, in spite of the exercise receiving wide international attention, the results have yet to be accepted as a relevant data source within Ghana itself, owing to a strong preference for statistical data in social policy research.

Report on participatory poverty assessments, highlighting new tendencies in the methodology and their contribution to new insights into African policy. Intensive use is made of both formal poverty assessments, especially in Zambia and Tanzania and other substantive work. The report notes the widespread adoption of principles of PPA (multiple stakeholders and diverse investigative styles) and concludes that the momentum of participatory and combined approaches is best sustained by disseminating as widely as possible the increasing sophistication and evolving agenda of work in this area.

This paper examines the effect of decentralisation on community participation, with particular reference to the channeling of funds to Municipal level in Oaxaca, Mexico.
The study suggests that where local governments are already democratic and responsive to their citizens as was found to be the case in Oaxaca, decentralisation can be a positive force increasing participation. However, the report suggests that devolving project-funding decision making to local governments will not necessarily increase participation and indeed may actually reinforce authoritarian rule at the local level in instances where the necessary institutional change has not taken place.

Evaluation report of the Poorest Household Focus Programme (PHFP) which includes a critical assessment of the use of a participatory approach by the project. Discussion groups with various stakeholders were the main means of evaluation utilised in the study.

This document discusses some of the processes which can be used as indicators of poverty in the South African context.

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.