Resources

The book explores the main issues and concerns of development professionals about adapting PRA from micro to macro organisations. It includes a checklist of practical considerations on training, taking projects from pilots and scaling up, changing institutional cultures and procedures and introducing participatory monitoring and evaluation.

This book presents issues and challenges facing those facilitating children's and young people's participation. The contributors come from a wide range of backgrounds including NGOs in development, children's agencies, academic insitutions and governments and provide case studies from the UK, Eastern Europe, asia, Africa, the Carribean and central and north America. Chapter 1 gives and overview to the main issues and concepts and chapters 2-7 each expand on a particular theme. The main issues discussed and analysed include: the ethical dilemmas facing professionals, the process and methods used in partlicipatory research and planning with children, the inter-relationship between culture and children's participation, considerations for instiutions and the key qualities of a participation programme.

Participation has become a critical concept in development, increasingly employed in the planning and implementation of development programmes. This book takes participation one step further by exploring its use in the monitoring and evaluation of these programmes. Bringing together a broad range of case studies (12 in total) and discussions between practitioners, academics, donors and policy makers, the book explores conceptual, methodological, institutional and policy issues in participatory monitoring and evaluation. It distils the common themes and experiences in participatory monitoring and evaluation to show the challenges - and far-reaching benefits - of the approach. The book starts with a general overview of participatory monitoring and evaluation, followed by a synthesis of case studies and regional reviews of practice and methodological innovations around the globe in Part 1. Part 2 then presents case studies of learning with communities; these illustrate the diverse range of settings and contexts in which participatory monitoring and evaluation is being applied. Part 3 raises the key issues and challenges for participatory monitoring and evaluation, including the need for changing institutions. The book concludes by way of proposing areas for future research and action.

This book focuses on the use of participatory research in poverty reduction policies and presents a series of participants reflections on recent and on going processes. Contributions from researchers and practitioners in the field of poverty reduction examine how participatory research has affected the way poverty is understood and how these understandings have been acted on in policy making for poverty reduction. The critical reflections of the authors feature various aspects of the relationship between participation and policy, spanning different levels from the individual researcher to the global institution. They highlight lessons to be learned from current practice and challenges for the future, including the balancing of knowledge, action and consciousness in participatory research processes which can influence the development of policy that reflects and responds to the needs and priorities of poor people.

Rapid changes are taking place in international development. The past two decades have promoted the ideals of participation and partnership, yet key decisions affecting people's lives continue to be made without sufficient attention to the socio-political realities of the countries in which they live. Embedded working traditions, vested interests and institutional inertia mean that old habits and cultures persist among the development community. On this premise, the authors of this book describe the need to recognise the complex, non-linear nature of development assistance and how bureaucratic procedures and power relations hinder poverty reduction in the new aid environment. The book begins with a conceptual and historical analysis of aid, exposing the challenges and opportunities facing aid professionals today. It argues for greater attention to accountability and the adoption of rights based approaches. In section two, practitioners, policymakers and researchers discuss the realities of power and relationships from their experiences across 16 countries. Their accounts, from government, donors and civil society, expose the highly politicised and dynamic aid environment in which they work. The book then explores ways forward for aid agencies, challenging existing political, institutional and personal ways of working. Breaking the barriers to ensure more inclusive aid will require visionary leadership and a courageous commitment to change. The authors show how translating rhetoric into practice relies on changing the attitudes and behaviours of individual actors. The book aims to present a contribution to the understanding of how development assistance and poverty reduction can be most effectively delivered by the professionals and agencies involved.

In this book, development and other social policy scholars and practitioners seek to address simplistic criticisms of participation, while addressing key problems of power and politics. The authors describe and analyse new experiments in participation from a wide diversity of social contexts that show how participation can, given certain conditions, be linked to genuinely transformative processes and outcomes for marginalised communities and people. The book looks at links between participatory development and participatory governance, and spans the range of institutional actors involved in these approaches including the state, civil society and donor agencies. The book places participatory interventions in political contexts, and links them to issues of popular agency and development theory. The book is grouped under six main themes: from tyranny to transformation?; rethinking participation; participation as popular agency: reconnecting with underlying processes of development; realizing transformative participation in practice: state and civil responses; donors and participation: caught between tyranny and transformation; and broader perspectives on from tyranny to transformation. Chapters include "Towards participation as transformation: critical themes and challenges" by Sam Hickey and Giles Mohan; "Towards participatory governance: assessing the transformative possibilities" by John Gaventa; "Rules of thumb for participatory change agents" by Bill Cooke; "Relocating participation within a radical politics of development: critical modernism and citizenship" by Giles Mohan and Sam Hickey; "Spaces for transformation? Reflections on issues of power and difference in participation in development" by Andrea Cornwall; "Towards a repoliticization of participatory development: political capabilities and spaces of empowerment" by Glyn Williams; "Participation, resistance and problems with the local in Peru: towards a new political contract?" by Susan Vincent; "The transformative unfolding of tyrannical participation: the corvÚe tradition and ongoing local politics in Western Nepal" by Katsuhiko Masaki; "Morality, citizenship and participatory development in an indigenous development association: the case of GPSDO and the Sebat Bet Gurage of Ethiopia" by Leroi Henry; "Relocating participation within a radical politics of development: insights from political action and practice" by Sam Hickey and Giles Mohan; "Securing voice and transforming practice in local government: the role of federating in grassroots development" by Diana Mitlin; "Participatory municipal development plans in Brazil: divergent partners constructing common futures" by Glauco Regis Florisbelo and Irene Guijit; "Confrontations with power: moving beyond the tyranny of safety in participation" by Ute Kelly; "Falling forward: going beyond PRA and imposed forms of participation" by Mark Waddington and Giles Mohan; "Participation in poverty reduction strategies: democracy strengthened or democracy undermined?" by David Brown; "Beyond the technical fix? Participation in donor approaches to rights-based development" by Jeremy Holland, Mary Ann Brocklesby and Charles Aburge; "The social embeddedness of agency and decision-making" by Frances Cleaver; and "Theorizing participation and institutional change: ethnography and political economy" by Anthony Bebbington.