Resources

This paper summarises Save the Children UK's experience in facilitating children and young people's participation in PRSP (Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers) processes, highlighting in particular the experiences of Vietnam and Honduras, and drawing on insights from Lesotho, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the work of a Guyanese NGO. It discusses the effectiveness of a range of approaches, highlights challenges, outlines learning points, and raises questions about the impact and cost-benefit trade-off of children and young people's participation in PRSPs. It explores the difficulties and challenges of involving children, and argues that children and young people can make a significant contribution to developing effective strategies to tackle poverty within PRSP processes. Some lessons learnt include: Children and young people need to be well informed about the opportunities for influencing PRSPs, the challenges, the process, its aims, their role, the time required, the channels of decision-making and the context of PRSPs; Effective participation takes considerable time; Feedback needs to be given to the children involved; The most marginalised children need to be included; Consideration needs to be given to compensating children for the cost of their involvement; Adults should be involved too, such as local decision-makers, family members, teachers etc.; Partnerships need to be developed to share expertise; International organisations should work with indigenous civil society organisations, or local officials, on participatory initiatives to increase their access to PRSP decision-making processes, rather than undercutting their role.

This research report is borne out of CDRN and CAREÆs attempts to strengthen their support to civil society organisations in Uganda. The report takes the widely held belief that the needs and interests of poorer people are directly or indirectly represented through community-based organisations, and that working with CBOs is therefore a route to poverty reduction as its starting point. As more and more initiatives, both government and NGO-led, attempt to use this channel to reach the poor, the research examines the validity of this assumption. The report concludes by suggesting that the assumption: æfind the groups and you have found the poorÆ is only partially correct. It might be more accurate to assume that æin some kinds of groups, you will find some kinds of poor people.Æ
The report is structured into six main sections: introduction; an overview of the research sites, groups and external perspectives on group formation; the strengths and weaknesses of groups in representing the poor; exploring the relationship between a group and external groups/ institutions; an exploration of where the poorer members of a community are if they are not in groups; and conclusions and recommendations.

This resource pack is designed for anyone interested in poverty reduction in a context characterised by inequality and exclusion. DFID has focused on the political dynamics of poverty in Peru in order to address the underlying causes of inequality and exclusion. This has meant engaging with political processes, supporting new spaces for dialogue and participation, and working with and building alliances between state, society and the international community. This resource pack includes a book of reflections from DFID, its partners and other local and international voices highlighting lessons and key issues; a DVD looking at DFIDÆs work to strengthen accountability, build citizenship and institutionalise rights in Peru; and a CD-ROM containing a selection of material on DFIDÆs experience such as the book, a series of papers prepared for DFID on state-society relations, and key corporate documents e.g. DFIDÆs target strategy papers. Some of the main recommendations raised include issues for donors, such as addressing poor people as citizens with rights and responsibilities as a key means of tackling inequality and exclusion; working systematically with both the state and wider society to achieve more inclusive development; investing in alliances between those individuals and institutions that are committed to pro-poor reform; and acting openly, transparently and accountably in tackling this more political agenda.

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.

This CD includes a guide to civil society engagement in advocacy on economic justice and poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSP), which aims to support civil society organisations to build their capacity to engage with economic justice issues and the PRSP process in their country. The guide adopts the PRSP approach as a framework for identifying areas for civil society engagement in advancing economic justice. The first section provides a general orientation to the PRSP process and the entry-points for civil society participation. It also assesses the quality of participation in PRSP processes to date, and provides a critique of the PRSP approach in general. The second section provides a general introduction to Participatory Poverty Assessments (PPAs), examples of methodologies and tools used in PPA fieldwork, highlights PPA findings, and looks at how PPAs can be linked to policy and policy making. Section three looks at the concept, rationale for, and approaches to participatory public expenditure management. It also focuses on budgets, covering issues such as transparency and participation in the budget process and the role of civil society in the budget. Tools and methods of budget analysis and advocacy are provided, as well as examples of budget work carried out by civil society organisations in various developing countries. Participatory budgeting and gender budgets are also examined. Section four provides an overview of the issues involved in the participatory monitoring and evaluation of the PRSP, looks at public expenditure tracking to ensure the effective use of allocated public funds, and the use of citizen report cards for evaluating the provision of public services. Examples are also provided of PRSP monitoring and evaluation initiatives and approaches from various countries (e.g. Uganda, Ghana, Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique).

The manual has its origins in field work conducted by CIAT (International Centre for Tropical Agriculture) in Tanzania between 1989 and 1991. Previous PPAs (Participatory Poverty Assessments) have failed to develop measures of poverty that adequately reflect local concepts of poverty, and the conditions of poverty, so that these can be compared with other sites. This manual presents a method for measuring poverty that seeks to resolve this difficulty by identifying, extrapolating, and quantifying local perceptions of poverty and thus develop a regional measure of poverty. The centre of the methodology is inquiry into local perceptions of poverty, based on the local informantsÆ ability to rank their neighbours in terms of poverty and well-being status. The manual is intended for professionals that are involved in designing, planning, and evaluating research and/or development activities. It requires computer facilities to be fully implemented, and some familiarity with spreadsheet and statistics programmes. The methodology is described in nine steps: site selection; ranking well-being; well-being household grouping; extrapolating well-being rankings; developing indicators of well-being; constructing a well-being index; checking the internal and external logic of the well-being index; defining well-being categories according to the index; and creating and using a regional poverty profile. Throughout the manual it is illustrated how the method worked for a case study conducted in 1997-1998 in the departments of Atlantida, El Paraiso, and Yoro in Honduras.