Western notions of "participation" and "private initiative" are alien concepts in some of the post communist countries. In view of this, this paper discusses the challenges for participatory approaches in such societies.
This document includes, details of the process used to review ActionAids programme in Somaliland and provides both a summary and details of the findings. The review was carried out by a group of both men and women composed of community based organisation members, village elders, staff from government institutions and other professionals. Mapping, interviews and small group discussions were used to elicit data on availability, relevance, accessibility, utilisation, coverage, quality, effort, efficiency and impact indicators.
This document describes the use of PRA methods to map the fertility status of buffaloes in the context of animal owner-specific factors such as feeding, nutrition and animal management as well as factors related to the services provided by the local veterinary hospital.
Wild resources are often of vital importance to rural people's livelihoods but are often overlooked in conventional valuations. This paper provides an over view of the methodological approach used by IIED's Hidden Harvest research programme which undertook inventories and valuation studies with the resource users themselves withnthe aim of revealing more comprehensive and relevant, rather than assumed, economic values of local resources and incentives for their management.
The paper is illustrated throughout by examples from case studies conducted in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Brazil, Nigeria and Papua New Guinea.
The village of Drevdagen, situated in a remote area of Sweden near the Norwegian border had its forest user rights taken away from it by the government in the 1800s and now finds itself squeezed to death between a nature reserve to the south and production forest belonging to an international company to the north. This article describes how PRA has been used in current efforts to secure village management of the forest resources for nature and culture tourism.
A two week PRA method course was undertaken during which social, historical and economic information regarding the village was collected. Information from the PRA exercise was then displayed in the village school and used as a basis for discussing future management options with various stakeholders, including local and regional government and the main forest owners.
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This article reports on research carried out in case study schools from Tanzania, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka and India, to investigate the use of agriculture as a medium for the development of young learners' basic skills of literacy, numeracy and other life skills. The findings were aimed to provide decision-makers at national and international level with information for future planning and implementation of primary education programmes. PRA methods were used to learn more about the formal environments of primary schools, through facilitating the analysis of the school situation by teachers, pupils and parents.
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This article describes the use of Participatory Gender Resource Mapping (PGRM), a combination of resource mapping and labour analysis techniques, to investigate household / farm resources and the differences in men's, women's and children's work in a small rural Honduran community. The mapping exercise was carried out with households from different socio-economic groupings selected using wealth ranking and enabled a comparison between households and an identification of their different needs.
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Introductory article to special edition of PLA notes focusing on methods that can be used to understand market opportunities.