Resources

This is a comic-style training booklet detailing a community in the Philippines deciding to change things for themselves following an illness from drinking dirty water. By organising themselves to establish a safe water supply they expose many other community issues and form a core group to tackle them. The booklet details how the group develops using a community information and planning system (CIPS) and eventually set up of a variety of schemes and village committees.

This paper recognises participation as a political issue and discusses how the concept can be abused by the powerful, in order to serve their interests. Who is involved, how, and on whose terms, are questions that need to be asked, as participation may take place for a whole range of unfree reasons. While participation has the potential to challenge patterns of dominance, it may also be the means through which existing power relations are entrenched and reproduced. The author argues the importance of seeing participation as a dynamic process, and to understand that its own form and function can become a focus for struggle. If participation truly gives voice to the voiceless, some conflict should be expected, as the process will challenge power relations.

This article describes the findings and effectiveness of the introduction of the PRA approach and methodology in the German Agency for Technical Co-operation (GTZ).

This report highlights key discussion points that emerged from a workshop on "Strengthening Participation in Local Governance". Conceptual issues around participation, governance, citizenship and decentralisation are discussed. Country presentations highlight various experiences in strengthening participation in local governance: these include looking at the context (particularly with respect to existing legal frameworks), the dynamics of participation, strategies and approaches that are employed to overcome barriers, and the key lessons and proposed ways forward for future research. Lessons and challenges from previous research as well as a summary of action plans for collaboration and future research are also presented.

This manual is for development professionals and residents of local communities in the North and the South who address constraints to equitable, effective and sustainable development. The authors hope that the framework for socio-economic and gender analysis offered will contribute to capacity building and empowerment of communities. The manual is divided into five sections - an overview, outline of conceptual framework, elaboration of participatory strategies and tools, sketching of scenarios and a concluding section on measuring effectiveness. Each section is detailed and a step by step guidance is offered to conduct the analysis.

This paper discusses community exchange programmes as a powerful mechanism for increasing the capacity of community organisations to participate in urban development. By enabling communities to share and explore local knowledge created through livelihood struggles, a powerful process is triggered, whereby community exchanges transform development. Through a cumulative process of learning, sharing and collective action, strong sustained and mobilised networks of communities emerge. Central to this has been the sharing of experiences between communities, first at very local levels, then in the city, then nationally and internationally. The development of this methodology by the National Slum Dwellers Association, SPARC (an NGO) and Mahila Milan (a federation of women's cooperatives) in India is described. Exchanges are located within a broader approach to community learning and people's empowerment. Benefits of the exchange process are examined, and the paper reflects on why exchanges are an effective methodology for supporting a process of people-centred development. The necessary conditions for the exchange process to be fully effective are reviewed, which consequently point to the distinct characteristics of the exchange process vis-Ó-vis other participation methodology. It concludes by drawing together some of the wider implications of this approach.

This article describes participatory action research carried out by Roofless Women's Action Research Mobilization (R-WARM), in investigating homelessness amongst women in Boston, Massachusetts. Researchers themselves had formerly experienced homelessness, and dialogue - rather than standard interviews - was used to discover the shared nature of problems and common grounds for action.