Resources

While change accelerates in rural conditions in the South, professionalism and bureaucracy are buffered against change. In their top-down mode they produce and promote standard programmes, packages and technologies. Rural development programmes in India for agriculture, canal irrigation, watershed development, and poverty alleviation illustrate how there is a mismatch between such standardisation and diverse needs and conditions. This mismatch is underperceived, and status at the cores is sustained, by misleading positive feedback from the peripheries. Falsely favourable impressions and information have five sources: misreporting; selected perception; misleading methods; diplomacy and prudence; and defences against dissonance. Error and myth among the development professions further aggravate the misfit between belief and reality. The costs of the resulting psychosis of the state are colossal. Therapy can be sought through policies and practices which empower poor people: reversals for local diversity; clarifying and communicating peopleÆs rights; and personal choices by the powerful.

This policy briefing paper highlights the absence of effective policies to address the needs of the rural poor within the Honduran and Nicaraguan poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) and calls for genuine pro-rural poor policies within the forthcoming Second Generation PRSPs. The report states that government policies outlined in the PRSPs have had a disappointing impact on reducing levels of rural poverty, because instead of focusing on tackling issues of inequality, for example access to land or public services, they have tended to focus on improved productivity and competitiveness in the agricultural sector in order to increase exports, economic growth and integration into global markets. Alongside the failure of PRSPs to address the key issues affecting the rural poor, the report also notes implementation problems with carrying out PRSP policies because of delays in funding, largely a result of both countries going off-track with the IMF. The report makes the following recommendations: government must adopt a multidimensional approach to measuring poverty and a comprehensive analysis of the specific determinants of rural poverty must be carried out through participatory processes; inequity in land distribution must be addressed in forthcoming PRSPs; Poverty Social Impact Assessments (PSIA) are urgently required to assess the impact of neo-liberal macro-economic and structural adjustment policies on the poor and macro-economic policies must be decided within participatory forum; the role of the IMF in signalling to other donors should be reduced, with countries taking greater control and donors undertaking their own independent analysis of the fiscal situation; and there needs to be greater participation in policy making by the poor with a move from consultation to joint decision-making.

These five briefings explain the Deliberative Mapping (DM) approach, which is designed to help specialists and members of the public weigh up evidence to reach a joint decision on a complex policy issue where there is no obvious way forward. The methodology can be applied to a problem to judge how well different courses of action perform according to a set of economic, social, ethical and scientific criteria. The aim is to use this approach as the basis for more robust, democratic and accountable decision making which better reflects public values. DM integrates two independent but complementary approaches to informing decision making: stakeholder decision analysis (SDA) which is a qualitative group based process; and Multi-Criteria Mapping (MCM) which is a quantitative, computer-assisted interview process. The first briefing, Opportunities and challenges for involving citizens in decision making, gives a background and a rationale for the approach and looks at current developments in citizen participation in governance. The second briefing The Deliberative Mapping approach, describes the technique. Briefing three, Deliberative Mapping in practice: the kidney gap, illustrates the application of DM to a case-study analysing the problem of kidney shortages, and summarises how participants appraised the various options for the way forward. Briefing four, Citizens' panels in Deliberative Mapping: a user guide, describes how citizens' panels are used in DM. It focuses on how to run them, and the issues that facilitators and researchers need to address to ensure that the panels work well. Briefing five, Using the Multi-Criteria Mapping (MCM) Technique, describes Multi-Criteria Mapping (MCM), and considers its role in helping individuals identify and explain their preferred ways forward on complex and uncertain problems.

This guide outlines an approach for monitoring and evaluating participatory research (PR). It is intended to provide support to people involved in research and development projects using a PR methodology, in particular at the community level dealing with natural resource management issues. The guide is not a blue-print, but addresses issues that are at the heart of making an art of monitoring and evaluating PR. Chapter one gives a general introduction to issues that influence PR, focusing on the nature of knowledge and information, types of participation, influences on the results of PA, social issues in natural resource management, attitudes of researchers, community perceptions of the research, and project characteristics. The guide is then organized around six basic, interrelated questions that need to be answered when doing monitoring and evaluation (M&E). It examines the reasons for M&E of PR; who benefits from M&E; what to monitor and evaluate; who should monitor and evaluate; when to monitor and evaluate; and how to monitor and evaluate. Examples of tools for M&E of PR are given in each of the five preceding chapters, and a list of these tools with page references is presented at the beginning of the guide. The guide also contains a selected bibliography for references to more detailed information on the subject.