Resources

This paper reviews the available literature on participatory monitoring and evaluation, focusing on how and where it is being used, the underlying concepts and issues involved and also, challenges for its use in the field. In addition, an annotated list of manuals and resources on the 'tools' and methods used in participatory monitoring and evaluation is included in the appendices.

In a new approach announced by the World Bank and IMF, civil society is being offered a part in shaping and implementing national anti-poverty strategies. In order to trigger debt relief, countries are being asked to produce a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) drawing on inputs from all sections of society. This Policy Briefing details what a PRSP actually is, who should be involved, how to build participation into the process, what can be learnt from previous efforts to build participation into policy, where problems lie and how to monitor the process. It argues that learning from previous experience is vital if this new approach is to live up to its ambitious rhetoric.

This synthesis offers a review of experiences in applying participatory approaches to macro-level policy formulation, implementation and monitoring in poverty reduction. The participatory experiences are drawn from research initiatives, donors' country strategies, aid coordination processes, policy advocacy campaigns, institutional change processes, budgetary analysis and formulation and citizens' monitoring mechanisms. The review highlights significant challenges that must be overcome in order to establish participatory, sustainable, country-owned poverty reduction strategies.

Amidst the rhetoric of participation, evidence from some contexts suggests that the very projects and processes that appear inclusive and transformative may support a status quo that is highly inequitable for women. This paper attempts to address some of the questions and challenges surrounding participatory development, in terms of who participates, in what and on what basis, who benefits and who loses out. Highlighting some of the tensions that run through 'gender-aware' participatory development, it draws on empirical material from Africa and Asia to explore the gender dimensions of participation in projects, planning and policy processes. In doing so, it reflects on strategies and tactics that have been used in efforts to make participatory development more gender sensitive. Much depends, the paper suggests, on how 'gender' is interpreted and deployed in development settings. The pervasive slippage between 'involving women' and 'addressing gender' may be tactically expedient, but it provokes a series of questions about the extent to which current understandings of 'gender' in development mask other inequalities and forms of exclusion. Making a difference, the paper suggests, requires rethinking 'gender' and addressing more directly the issues of power and powerlessness that lie at the heart of both Gender and Development (GAD) and participatory development.

There is a growing recognition that citizens should play a role in informing and shaping environmental policy. But how should this be done? This paper explores one route, where opportunities 'from above' are created, often, but not exclusively so, by the state, often through local government policy and planning processes. A set of approaches - known collectively as Deliberative Inclusionary Processes (DIPs) - are explored in different settings through 35 case studies from both the north and south. These experiments in more inclusive, participatory forms of policy deliberation have been prompted by a number of factors. These include wider political shifts towards new forms of citizenship and democracy; concerns about policy effectiveness and implementation success; the emerging recognition of the complexity and uncertainty inherent in environmental problems; growing levels of distrust in policy processes and expert institutions; and the increasingly recognised importance of accepting that values, ethics and issues of justice are key to environmental policy problems. Through an examination of lessons emerging from the case studies, practical issues, such as time and resource constraints, are considered alongside methodological questions emerging from asking: who convenes the process, who defines the questions, and how are multiple forms of expertise accommodated? The paper shows how power relations and institutional contexts critically affect the outcomes of DIPs processes. Without linking such processes to broader processes of policy change - including connections to conventional forms of democratic representation - DIPs may simply be one-off events, and so their considerable potentials for transforming environmental policy processes will go unrealised.

This IDS working paper examines the role of knowledge in the process of making and implementing poverty reduction policy. It focuses on the production of poverty knowledge through measurement and assessment, providing an overview of contemporary poverty assessment approaches, and the issues and dilemmas involved in applying them in the context of poverty reduction policy processes. The first section examines the policy process in order to understand the relationship between poverty knowledge and policy change. It looks at how legitimate knowledge is traditionally framed in the policy process as the domain of technical experts who reduce complex phenomena to measurable variables, and how this frame changes if policy is understood as a more chaotic process with multiple actors involved. Section Two discusses the broad questions of what poverty actually is and how it can be measured, focusing on the fact that a consensus appears to have emerged which then obscures the many debates centred around poverty measurement. Three policy events are examined in order to show how different objectives shape the methodological choices policy actors make. The third section focuses on a range of methodologies available for poverty assessments, with a focus on household surveys and participatory poverty assessments (PPAs). Lastly, the World Bank and Oxfam are examined in order to understand how two international development actors with different objectives made use of acquired poverty knowledge in constructing policy messages. The argument is proposed that the agency and objectives of the policy actors themselves are most important in shaping policy narratives.