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This handbook is a guide for ordinary people to understand what is going on in their local economy so that they can be involved in decision-making. The handbook is responding to a need of residents involved in local decision-making to feel comfortable about decisions relating to the local economy. Based on work with communities in the UK, the handbook addresses local involvement in community economic decisions and looks at how local businesses can link to outside investment or strong skill bases that can benefit the wider community. The handbook is divided into four main sections: introduction; theory: understanding the local economy; preparing: a step-by-step guide to plugging the leaks; and action: co-ordinating the program, information gathering, raising awareness and ready to go. The handbook concludes with detailed appendixes about the case studies as well as some worksheets, surveys and ideas.
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This document is the summary for a 36 country-wide study evaluating public access to budget information from the perspective of civil society organisations. The International Budget Project (IBP) developed an open budget questionnaire as a measurement tool that was then completed by civil society researchers in different countries in 2004. The main results include that documents relating to the executive's budget proposed expenditure are routinely released to the public and typically contain significant amounts of information; fewer countries report positive practices in reports that monitor the budget while it is being implemented and/or completed; and very few of the countries surveyed had efforts to facilitate public discourse and understanding of the budget. Likewise, the study found that official avenues for legislative and public input into the budget process tend to be lacking. The study goes on to identify a number of concrete steps that countries can take to improve their budget systems, such as encouraging public and legislative involvement, as well as providing non-technical summaries of the budget to make it accessible to a wider audience. Overall, the information in the report aims to contribute to ongoing efforts to enhance budget transparency and help countries assess and improve their budget systems.
This working paper looks at the MKSS movement as a case study in Rajasthan that has been a key player in the broader movement for the right to information in India. MKSS stands for Mazdoor Kisaan Shakti Sangathan, which literally means æorganisation for the empowerment of workers and peasantsÆ. The movement for the right to information in India has grown dramatically over the last 10 years, and is centred on the main goals of expanding democratic space and empower the ordinary citizen to exercise far greater control over the corrupt and arbitrary exercise of state power. In describing the movement, the author writes talks about rights to information, and how important they are to liberate people from dependence on chance, and officials/political leaders of vastly varying honesty and ability. The working paper concludes with a powerful declaration about hopes for the future: ôIt is difficult to predict whether India is at last on the verge of the passage of a landmark law which would explicitly guarantee the peopleÆs right to information. However, an even greater challenge is to continue to anchor the movement and the application of this right in the struggles for survival and justice of the most dispossessed and wretched of the Indian earth, as an important part of a larger movement for equity and peopleÆs empowermentö.
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This article argues that there are both practical and principled reasons for improving the standards of ægood governanceÆ within international organisations. The author argues that if the IMF and the World Bank are to achieve the same standards of good governance that they have defined for borrowing members, reform of the constitutional rules, decision-making procedures and practices within both institutions is required. The article argues for change in the voting structure, respective roles played by the Executive Board, consensus decision-making, nongovernmental organisations, and the staff, management and research in both organisations. The author suggests that ôwhile both the IMF and World Bank often write of the necessity of including stakeholders in the initiation and design of programs and policies, neither institution has adequately included all present-day stakeholders in its own governance.ö In conclusion the author also makes links with increased participation within member countries as well as an increased recognition and value of ælocal knowledgeÆ by the two institutions.
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This report presents an overview of literature on community approaches to wildlife management. These approaches are analysed in two main groupings: top-down and participatory. The focus is mainly on experiences gained in Africa, with a few illustrative case studies drawn from outside the region. The benefits provided by wildlife management are discussed in terms of use and non-use values. Use values comprise both traditional and non-traditional products harvested for consumptive use, and the various ecological functions provided by species and their habitats; non-use values consist of the value of wildlife as a cultural and heritage asset. It is argued in this report that the costs of wildlife management to different stakeholders vary considerably depending on the approach adopted. The report looks at differences between active and passive participation approaches to involve people in the process of wildlife management, which differ in terms of how involved local people really are in making decisions. Other issues raised include institutional capacity building at the local level, lack of legislation, and inappropriate policy frameworks. In conclusion, the report suggests that community wildlife management is likely to be sustainable ecologically, economically and socially only if wildlife management can be made sufficiently attractive to local people for them to adopt the practice as a long-term livelihood strategy. The Report also offers practical suggestions for project appraisals, project evaluations, and supporting community management of wildlife resources.
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This research report provides an interesting example of participatory tools and approaches applied in the context of a developed country. Responding to local tensions within the Somali community and also the wider community in Lewiston Maine, USA, researchers from Clark University's Department for International Development decided to conduct a pilot participatory needs assessment of 60 Somali households resident in Hillview, a large public housing unit in Lewiston. The overall objective was to enable Hillview Somalis to bring together their different clan, gender, age, class and educational diversities to build unity and to speak with one voice about their needs. In conclusion, the report suggests that participatory approaches were useful, and that three process goals were achieved: good local support, meaningful and probing discussions, and local ownership. In addition, five products were also created: the assessment of achieved consensus, a community action plan, an action committee with strong backing from the community, support and involvement from a local NGO focusing on Somali community services, and partnerships between different stakeholders. Overall, the needs assessment worked because it combined all the ingredients for creating sustainable actionùinclusiveness, public group processes, transparent ranking, listening to others, visual data gathering techniques, building consensus rather than voting, creating a community action plan, organising information, mobilising resources, and building partnerships. As the report concludes, these are æthe qualities that will enable the Hillview Somali community to continue listening to each other as well as to become the managers of their own community.
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This is a short article published by Jal Manthan, a think tank on rural water supply and sanitation. The document provides an overview of the successes of participatory and empowering approaches to promoting community sanitation compared with subsidy-based approaches. Focusing on examples in Bangladesh and India, the article looks at facilitating change through PRA tools, building community institutions, and key questions such as what triggers behaviour change? The document looks particularly at approaches adopted by the Village Education Resource Centre (VERC) in Bangladesh. Standard approaches to sanitation focus on latrine-building that is done in an infinite time frame and is financially driven by a subsidy program. In contrast, the VERC model focused on eliminating open defecation in a short-time frame that was demand driven. Some of they key lessons identified in the VERC Bangladesh case study were the empowerment of communities that accompanies the paradigm shift from technocratic and financial patronage to participatory approaches; the absence of a household-level subsidy but instead a focus on collective efforts (such as the subsidy money for each household to be put instead into a collective village development fund); the public good dimensions of what is often considered a private good; the effect of peer pressure and monitoring systems on enhancing sustainability; and that the abundance of local sanitation technologies indicates that there is a significant demand in the area. The following requirements were identified as important requirements for effective implementation of the governmentÆs Total Sanitation Campaign: build the capacity of local governments and support local organisations; design appropriate models/ strategies for implementation; support pilots and demonstration projects; support policy debate at the Sate-level to scale-up the approach; and facilitate regional exchanges.
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.
Based on a PhD thesis submitted to the University of East Anglia in 2000, this book addresses issues relating to stakeholder participation. It asks and attempts to answer critical questions such as does stakeholder participation live up to the high expectations raised about it in the literature? How can success be measured, and what are suitable criteria and indicators? Other key issues include the roles played by the primary stakeholders themselves and the structural factors that can support or impede stakeholder participation. The author presents an analysis of the intended and unintended outcomes of two community-based Future Search Conferences> These conferences were used to Launch the local 21 Agenda process, which is based on the sustainable development manifesto from the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Jainero 1992. The book is structured around nine key headings: introduction; the future search conference as symptom and catalyst of the global transition to networks of governance; local stakeholder participation in theory and practice; origins and workings of the future search conference; methodology; evaluation of the future search conference in Rushmoor Borough CouncilÆs local agenda 21 process; Evaluation of the future search conference in Gemeinde OlchingÆs Local Agenda 21 process; discussion and conclusions.
This book is a compilation of experiences, reflections and activities put together by five educators working in CanadaÆs labour movement. This book is the product of a collective writing project that builds on the experience of æEducation for ChangeÆ, published in 1991. This book applies the central issues of transformative education specifically to the labour movement, which is one part of the broader movement for economic and social justice. There are six key themes underpinning each element of the book: community, democracy, equity, class-conciousness, organization-building, and the greater good. Overall the authors address three dimensions of union education: the job itself, the craft involved, and the many ways of making its presence felt. Part one describes the job of union education and situates it in union culture. In part two, the authors share what they have learned about the different processes in union education. Part three deals with how education might strengthen democracy and participation across unions, looking at organisational practices rather than individual courses or events. The overarching goal of the book is to support the efforts of working people in promoting learning for economic and social justice.
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This video accompanies the handbook " Teach Yourself Citizens Juries". It comprises two films: one about jurors from Lancashire, UK, talking about their citizens juries on youth, alcohol and illegal drugs; the other is a record of a citizens jury organised by older people in Tyneside exploring the challenges facing those who suffer falls and looking at potential policy changes. The video also covers: choosing a subject, setting the question for the jury, recruiting jurors, jury members questionin the witnesses, and maximising results.
These Plans profile the tsunami-affected village, its political economy and the post-tsunami realities, aspirations and challenges of the communities. They present a community-led pre-tsunami social map, in order to establish a public documents detailing the property ownership that existed before the tsunami.