Resources

This paper from the Rockefeller Foundation uses case studies from four states in the United States (Atlanta, New York, California, and Maryland) to discuss the challenges and benefits of community building initiatives. It seeks to demonstrate how community building in poor urban communities can help to strengthen the social fabric of the communities and address the issue of urban poverty. Furthermore, it offers various institutional approaches to community development and describes five pillars of community building: leadership, patience, realistic but high expectations, community-wide capacity building, and courage and candor about race.

Participatory Poverty Assessments (PPAs) in which poor and marginalized people describe their perspectives on poverty have become an integral part of the development process. This report is a review of a number of PPAs, undertaken by ActionAid Nepal, Plan International and New ERA, which took place in eleven districts of Nepal. To begin with, the research sites are described. The report then focuses on participant's understandings of the causes of poverty. The most common responses were; landlessness and dependency; inflation; natural disasters; lack of education; cultural customs; gender discrimination; and seasonal changes. There were wide variations between how poor and rich people within a community described poverty, as well as differences between definitions of urban and rural poverty.

This report presents the findings of a case study on participatory budgeting (PB) for urban governance in Recife, Brazil. It focuses on the political and institutional processes, systems and mechanisms (informal as well as formal) that result in inclusive and pro-poor decisions and outcomes in urban settings. It provides some context and background to PB in Recife, its underlying political and institutional dynamics, and its implementation by sector. Chapter 6 reports citizen feedback on PB, local governance and poverty, and Chapter 7 situates the Recife experience in the wider context of PB in Brazil, especially Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte, and finds that distinct political cultures and institutional designs matter. Chapter 8 concludes that the case of Recife demonstrates that PB can work in administrations not ruled by the Workers' Party, and in municipalities with higher poverty indicators. Participatory 'arrangements' are considered justified on normative democratic grounds, for the sake of efficiency and to improve government responsiveness. Despite the institutional and procedural challenges and bureaucratic resistance it faces, PB increases the capacity of excluded social groups to influence the decision-making process, and the access of the poor to basic services.

Latin America is one of the world's fastest developing regions, yet also a hub area for crime and violence, where the links between social exclusion, inequality, fear and insecurity are clearly visible. This book explores the meaning of violence and insecurity in nine towns and cities in Colombia and Guatemala to create a framework of how and why daily violence takes place at the community level. It uses participatory urban appraisal methods to ask people about their own perceptions of violence as mediated by family, gender, ethnicity, and age. It develops a typology which distinguishes between the political, social, and economic violence that afflicts communities, and which assesses the costs and consequences of violence in terms of community cohesion and social capital. The featured towns and cities in Colombia are: Embudo, 14 de Febrero and Jerico in Bogotß, and Portico, el Arca, Amanecer, Rosario, Cachicamo and Colombia Chiquita; and in Guatemala: Concepcion, Nuevo Horizonte and La Merced in Guatemala City, and San Jorge, Sacuma, Limoncito, Gucumatz, El Carmen and Villa Real. Based on the experiences in these sites, the book examines the following aspects of urban violence: the role of participatory research methodologies in policy planning; the complexity of daily violence; community perceptions of underlying structural factors; the family as a violent institution; linkage to substance abuse; organised violence at the community level; social institutions and social capital; and community perceptions on strategies of dealing with violence.