Reflecting on observations of participatory budget schemes in the Andean region of South America, this article argues that the statements and behaviour of those who take part in participatory budget meetings should be understood as a form of public performance which often differs significantly from the ‘backstage discourses’ of participants once they are no longer performing in public.

Most importantly, the widespread prioritisation of small-scale infrastructure projects that involve large volumes of cement highlights the ways in which the participants in participatory budget meetings quietly but strategically adapt external schemes and policies to their own goals and strategies.

In 2003, Lutheran World Relief (LWR), an international relief and development NGO, began a peacebuilding initiative in Colombia. They facilitated the formation of a partnership between peace sanctuary churches in Colombia and six communities of faith in the US Midwest, coordinated by LWR staff. This partnership, called Sal y Luz (salt and light) has the goal of education and advocacy both in Colombia and in the USA. Sal y Luz represents a powerful example of transnational solidarity for peace. There are also implications and lessons of this case study for the broader field of NGO peacebuilding work. The Sal y Luz model of peacebuilding brings benefits in terms of NGO accountability and effectiveness in peacebuilding. The key innovation of the model is how LWR effectively helped their US constituency understand and become involved in peacebuilding work.

Lack of working capital hinders collective commercialisation of recyclables. Social exclusion and bureaucratic constraints prevent recyclers from accessing official bank loans. As they continue to depend on intermediaries, the cycle of poverty, dependency, and exclusion is perpetuated. The article discusses collective commercialisation and the micro-credit fund created among 30 recycling groups in the Brazilian city of São Paulo. A committee of eight women recyclers manages this fund. The article contextualises reflections on empowerment and community-based development, applying the theoretical framework of social and solidarity economy. The author finally suggests that inclusive governance structures have the potential to generate greater justice and sustainability.

A workshop was convened in February 2008 to identify the role of civil society organisations (CSOs) in the post-Paris Declaration aid agenda, prior to the High-Level Forum to review progress towards achieving aid harmonisation held in Accra in September 2008. The article highlights the many concerns about the focus on the mechanisms rather than the purpose or impacts of aid; the ways in which donors force through their own agendas; and the continuing gap between rhetoric and practice on issues such as gender equity and local ownership.

This study on the impact of fair trade relies on new field data from coffee and banana cooperatives in Peru and Costa Rica, including a detailed assessment of its welfare effects by comparing FT farmers with non-FT farmers as a benchmark. Attention is focused on three major effects: (a) direct tangible impact of FT arrangements on the income, welfare, and livelihoods of rural households; (b) indirect effects of fair trade for improving credit access, capital stocks, investments, and attitudes to risk; and (c) institutional implications of fair trade for farmers’ organisations and externalities for local and regional employment, bargaining, and trading conditions. Although direct net income effects remain fairly modest, important benefits are found to include capitalising farmers and strengthening their organisations.

The effects of counter-terrorism legislation on civil society organisations (CSOs) based in the South have received little attention in the wider literature. This article reports on the findings of a series of international workshops to examine the effects of such legislation held in Lebanon, the Kyrgyz Republic, India, the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA. The evidence presented at these workshops suggests that counter-terror legislation is undermining the work of civil society in complex and interrelated ways.

Communication and its role in development and social change is still poorly understood and supported by large development players, despite decades of innovative practice and positive outcomes. Gaps between discourse and action, outdated evaluation methods, short timeframes, red tape, and power relations, combined with vertical and externally-driven communication models, and confusion between information and communication, all prevent development donors from giving support to participatory and community owned and managed communication initiatives. On the basis of decades of experience and observation, four key recommendations are made for transforming the communication profession both in higher education and in donor and development agencies.

This article makes a case for using participatory communication in research. It introduces participatory communication as a citizen-led approach to both creating and expressing knowledge; within research this means that researchers are not simply responsible for generating information and communicating about it, neither are they acting alone. From this perspective the emphasis of participatory communication is on communicating rather than extracting or delivering information. Participatory methods can communicate research findings in new ways and add depth and meaning to articulations of knowledge. This knowledge can easily get ‘lost in translation’ when findings are synthesised or communicated though conventional research outputs alone.

Social movements have generated interest in development circles since the mid-1990s as relatively independent expressions of civil society, mobilising people to set their own development priorities and agendas for issues as diverse as water privatisation, neo-liberal trade policies, the rights of women and indigenous peoples, and access to HIV anti-retroviral treatment. In the case of HIV and AIDS, independent civil-society initiative has been key to successful responses. Social movements of people living with HIV and AIDS, gay men, women, sex workers, and people who inject drugs have developed innovative institutions and responses to HIV and AIDS, and organised against stigma and discrimination. By bringing people together and advocating effectively, social movements have amplified voices of people most affected by HIV, enabling them to influence governments and decision makers.

This paper seeks to understand the restrictions media actors face in their day-to-day work in Acholiland, northern Uganda, and identify the strategies they adopt to maintain a space for dialogue and debate. Two case studies reveal that it is difficult to see how media actors in this conflict environment can play a significant role in holding the ruling government to account and promoting peace building when they are facing repressive media laws, intimidation, a lack of information, and weak managerial support. This paper calls for policies to support the daily struggles of media actors, such as the adoption of the African Peer Review Mechanism – an instrument used for self-monitoring by participant countries of New Partnership for Africa’s Development. Thus, the investigation turns away from questions of censorship to investigating what can be done to support the daily struggles of media actors who are constantly negotiating their way through a labyrinth of restrictions.

Mobile cellular phones have already been used widely around the world for activism, social and economic development, and new cultural and communicative forms. Despite this widespread use of mobile phones, they remain a relatively un-theorised and un-discussed phenomenon in community and citizen’s media. This paper considers how mobile phones have been taken up by citizens to create new forms of expression and power. The specific focus is the use of mobile phones in community development, with examples including the Grameenphone, agriculture and markets, the Filipino diasporic community, HIV/AIDS healthcare, and mobile phones in activism and as media. It is argued that mobile phones form a contact zone between traditional concepts of community and citizen media, on the one hand, and emerging movements in citizenship, democracy, governance, and development, on the other hand

The synergies created through the careful application of both organic and symbolic communication demonstrably reach those most vulnerable to the spread and impact of HIV and AIDS. The Clown Project uses labour-intensive face-to-face street theatre and dialogue, participatory workshops, and symbolic communication such as print-based materials. Some lessons learned in selected communities in Guatemala and other countries in Central America are shared. The paper puts forward an argument in favour of careful and critical analysis of culture in formulating communication strategies with and for specific groups. This analysis takes into account relations of power within and between vulnerable groups, examining the centre–periphery dynamic between classes, genders, ethnicities, age groups, and other social identities. Both appropriately supported insider perspectives and appropriately processed outsider knowledge are recommended, along with ways of bridging science and the field, theory and practice.

Given the centrality of communication to society, who ‘owns’ the media, who gets to speak on behalf of whom, and to what end are critical issues. The regression of ‘mainstream’ media from ‘watchdogs’ of democracies to business ventures resulting in Habermasian ‘refeudalisation of the public sphere’ is worrying. Community media re-engage communities on the periphery, opening possibilities for social change. The dominance of mainstream players in media governance, complicated by sustainability concerns of grassroots enterprises, result in legislation that impedes the potentiality of community media access and participation – as mapped in this paper with the case of community radio struggle in India.

The radio can help to stimulate better governance. However, state-run broadcasting organisations in the South are usually ill-prepared for their public-service role in new democracies. They are often poorly funded compared to their new, commercial rivals and often still bound by the same ‘rules of the game’ that governed them prior to the democratic era. Broadcasters typically remain accountable to government and not to their listeners, and promote the interests and agendas of the political elite. This paper focuses on the experiences of DFID support to a radio programme in northern Nigeria that sought to improve communication and debate between the government and the electorate. It argues that there are legitimate circumstances for development partners to engage with state-controlled media outlets, not least in rural areas where commercial broadcasters lack the financial incentive to establish stations and provide programming that has relevance to the poor. The authors critically examine the lessons learned from DFID’s support and identify measures that could assist similar initiatives in the future

An Action Learning process integrated with Sen’s Capability Approach can support development agencies to formulate interventions that enhance freedom. The authors show that putting this approach into practice has important implications for the manner in which ‘development’ is undertaken as an ideological project. It may help to examine and challenge those who hold power in development—the guardians. This finding is the result of an emergent Action Learning process that was initiated by applying Sen’s principles to focus-group interviews with women who care for people affected by HIV and AIDS. One of the findings of these focus groups was that the participants valued the process because it opened a space for them to influence the work of the implementing NGO. Essentially, they could hold the implementing agency to account. Reflection on this outcome by the agency led to important shifts in processes that are more supportive of freedom.

This article presents results of a quantitative/qualitative enquiry into ‘transformative learning’ and ‘mind-change’ dynamics among rural community representatives participating in the Government of Afghanistan’s National Solidarity Programme [NSP]: a community-driven, nationwide initiative to rehabilitate the country’s infrastructure. Drawing on frameworks for ‘transformative learning’ proposed by Mezirow (1990) and Freire (1993), and ‘mind-change’ proposed by Gardner (2004), it is argued that NSP catalysed transformative development learning through (1) its responsiveness to the expressed needs and interests of project participants; (2) engagement of community representatives as active development partners; (3) delegation of project management responsibility throughout all stages; (4) provision of social space for reflection and critical analysis; (5) opportunities to achieve project outcomes that are meaningful, attractive, and profitable; and (6) programme features compatible with the social and cultural realities of rural Afghanistan.

This ethnographic case study addresses the question of how women in Jopadhola patriarchal society in Eastern Uganda remember three decades of civil war and violence and survived its aftermath. When the war ended, little changed for these women, who are still exposed to a continuum of gender-based violence and continue to use the same tactics that, during the war, enabled them to somehow live with their suffering. The Mifumi Project, an indigenous NGO founded by one of the women whose life history was recorded for this article, has started to assist Jopadhola women to improve the quality of their present-day lives. By rebuilding their human and social capital, this NGO is also creating the space for women to heal their war memories.

This article highlights lessons learned from field research and related analysis, to address three fundamental aspects of development that are often overlooked: culture and governance, inclusive development, and market-based approaches. All three cases address issues of poverty and inequality. In addition, the critical role of institutions in governance and development is also highlighted. Finally, by bridging the gap between culture, economy, and society through these approaches, better and more effective development policies and programmes can be formulated and implemented.

This article outlines a comprehensive approach to facilitating the transfer of research into practice. It encompasses three main issues of importance: activities should be seen as part of a long-term endeavour rather than isolated one-off events; there are many audiences which may make use of the research findings in various ways; and there are many modes in which the process can be facilitated.

The Tibet Poverty Alleviation Fund (TPAF) has been working in the Tibet Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China since 1998 to increase the income and assets of rural Tibetans. From the beginning TPAF recognised that high morbidity and mortality were a constraint on efforts of rural Tibetans to improve livelihoods. Early interventions to train township doctors and midwives were not sustainable. In 2005, in partnership with local health authorities, TPAF launched a Behaviour Change Communication (BCC) strategy to build villagers’ capacity to improve health and hygiene practices and to make informed choices about using Government primary and preventive health services. Results from counties and townships in three Prefectures are preliminary but show significant changes in health knowledge and practice and growing links between village needs and Government services. Next steps include strengthening implementation and institutionalising Government support to extending and supporting the approach.

Huge amounts are being invested in information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as mobile phones and their telecommunications infrastructure. Development agencies provide a conventional view on the ‘climate’ needed to encourage such investment; particularly that good governance and security are required. We question this conventional view with a study of mobile telecommunications in three insecure states that score very badly in the Worldwide Governance Indicators. Data are limited but suggest insecurity and ‘bad governance’ may not be the barriers to investment that are normally supposed. Indeed, it is possible—at least for this type of digital technology—that they may encourage investment.

This article reports on the tenth anniversary conference of the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), drawing attention to the irony that just as progress is being made on the situation of home workers (among the least protected of all working people) the two organisations that have done so much to raise awareness of these issues themselves face closure for lack of funding.

This article examines the semantic evolution of the term Community Development (CD) in the latter twentieth century. It is argued that CD has acquired different meanings, theoretical grounding, and practical application starting with a focus on traditional societies up to the 1960s, social and/or civil rights movements up to 1980s, and the modern middle class from the 1990s. The thrust of argument is that the concept is not cohesive and unified but represents a repertoire of meanings that encompass many shades of CD that are not necessarily mutually compatible but reflect the particular political and social practices in the contexts in which they occur.

This article discusses the process of transforming partnership from a conceptual framework into a practical, operational framework for field-level interaction among humanitarian organisations. The authors approach this transformation from the perspective of the core values of the partnership concept and the ability of field workers to behave in ways that are consistent with these core values, illustrated by an empirical study of the relationships between the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and NGOs in a refuge-assistance programme in northern Uganda. The authors connect inter-organisational structures with the role of people charged with making partnership work, concluding that the structures and context in which individuals operate make it impossible for them to ‘act out’ the core values of partnership. By identifying the major challenges to creating field-level, operational partnerships, the authors offer lessons for current and future partnership-building initiatives, such as the Global Humanitarian Platform.

Crop genetic diversity and poverty are linked: first, resource-poor farmers often maintain genetic diversity; and second, crop diversity, when properly valued by the market, has the potential to alleviate poverty. This article examines this supposition based on three case studies of the intersection of the market with poverty and maize diversity in Mexico. These cases suggest that the bulk market for maize offers little room for maize landraces (local maize varieties known as criollo maize), in that it does not reward qualitative variation in maize grain, and instead presents incentives that make planting ‘improved’ maize germplasm the rational economic choice for small-scale farmers. Meanwhile, attempts to add value to maize landraces via market differentiation have had varying success. Although there is potential for differentiated markets to contribute to successful business models and poverty alleviation, these cases exhibit tradeoffs between product consistency, investment of labour and resources, and genetic diversity conservation.

A variety of interventions to mitigate the increasing impact of the HIV and AIDS epidemic on smallholder agricultural production and food security are currently implemented in sub-Saharan Africa. However, documentation and dissemination of such interventions is limited and patchy. Building on emerging experiences from the field, this article seeks to move beyond charting the impacts of HIV and AIDS on rural livelihoods and to review existing mitigation policies and programmes, identify the challenges to mitigation, and provide suggestions for future mitigation strategies and policy priorities. The experiences cited in the article are mainly drawn from the hardest hit Southern and Eastern African regions, but these provide useful lessons for AIDS-affected rural communities in other contexts. The main conclusion is that, as current initiatives are to a large extent ad hoc and localised, there is a need for documentation, dissemination, and scaling up of existing interventions, as well as greater coherence and coordination in policies and programmes to extend their reach and make the most of limited resources.

Adequate pricing of environmental goods is essential for the sustainable management of natural resources. It is not easy, however, to place a value on natural resources as the excludability problem makes it difficult to protect natural resources from unpaid use and to exercise property rights over them. This article discusses the achievements and limitations of current natural resource policies from the perspective of view of efficiency and equity. It argues that a trust fund operating via market-based transactions is a promising approach to help achieve simultaneously the goals of efficiency, sustainability, and poverty reduction, provided that property rights over the environmental resources are distributed fairly within current generations as well as between present and future generations.

The development of a cadastral system for the Republic of Guatemala was one of the priorities of the 1997 Peace Accord that ended 30 years of civil war. While uncertainty of land ownership and land title are contentious issues, the development of a national cadastre, equitable land distribution, and land tenancy are viewed as key to maintaining peace in Guatemala. This article addresses the most significant barriers to developing a National Land Information System used to support cadastral reform. Findings from interviews with government agencies indicate that while technical improvements can be readily implemented, social factors associated with NGO and government interaction, diffusion of equitable government policy towards land rights, and the costs of the land-registration process seriously hinder the completion of the cadastral process. These findings are discussed in light of international aid and development policy.

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All over Gaya District in Bihar, irrespective of a person's caste or economic status, irrigation is the overriding topic of concern on public platforms and in private conversations. In the absence of adequate government action, different kinds of community endeavour are emerging to answer the need, some supported by radical political movements, others by organisations of a religious persuasion, and still others primarily by prominent local citizens.

This article analyses in detail the impact and effectiveness of peer-education projects implemented in Cambodia under the Reproductive Health Initiative for Asia (RHI), in an attempt to provide important lessons for the design and implementation of such interventions and to contribute to the development of best practice. Under RHI, which was the first programme in Cambodia designed specifically to address the sexual and reproductive health needs of young people, peer education was implemented as if it were a directly transferable method, rather than a process to be rooted in specific social and political contexts. Consequently, peer-education concepts of empowerment and participation conflicted with hierarchical traditions and local power relations concerning gender and poverty; peer educators were trained to deliver messages developed by adults; and interventions were not designed to reflect the social dynamics of youth peer groups.

The World Bank and IMF have proposed the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) framework for all poor countries as a condition of receiving unconditional debt relief under the HIPC Initiative. The PRSPs will also be the key vehicle for the World Bank and IMF and other donors for various assistance packages, including loans. Like its predecessors, the PRSP framework promotes the ideas of 'participation' and 'ownership'. This article argues that ownership of such a grand framework cannot possibly rest with the poor countries or their people if the whole idea is the product of World Bank and IMF think-tanks. It discusses participation in the development of Bangladesh's PRSP and argues that neither participation nor ownership was the target in preparing a national poverty-reduction strategy: they were merely necessary components of a document required for the continuation of debt and lending relationships with the World Bank and IMF.

Good governance is essential for sustaining economic transformation in developing countries. However, many developing countries currently lack the capacity, as opposed to the will, to achieve and then sustain a climate of good governance. This article addresses, from a practitioner's field perspective, the fundamental objectives, principles, and key areas that need to be addressed for developing capacity for good governance. These frameworks are now beginning to be recognised, as both governments and donor institutions attempt to take advantage of the current demand and opportunities for addressing governance deficits. In pursuing capacity development for good governance, developing countries must ensure that such initiatives are comprehensively designed to be simultaneously related to change and transformation at the individual, institutional, and societal levels and to be owned and controlled locally.

An approach to establishing improved private extension-service provision for smallholder horticultural producers in Kenya was developed between 2003 and 2005 by the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology and Natural Resources Institute in the UK, in collaboration with EurepGAP FoodPLUS GmbH and the House of Quality-South Africa, international NGOs, export companies, and out-grower farmer groups. The approach focused on good agricultural practices, food safety, EU regulations on maximum pesticide-residue limits, and the EurepGAP Standard. The approach is not a blueprint, but the lessons learned are applicable to similar smallholder production systems in other African countries.

Recognising that the stance of investigators could make a major impact on the quality and/or interpretation of development-study findings, a small investigation to explore researcher positions and roles was implemented. This was a subsidiary component of a larger health-development study which aimed to explore the evidence base for psychosocial and mental-health policy formulation and implementation in two conflict-affected, low-resourced countries. Five of the research team were interviewed by a sixth member in an open, semi-structured interview format, and the data were analysed thematically. The primary learning for the team, with wider implications for others in development research and practice, is that if the aim is to produce credible findings from investigations of this nature, it is important to exhibit a high degree of transparency regarding the role and position of each researcher, and an explicit attempt to be reflexive in relation to the associated challenges.

Development research has responded to a number of charges over the past few decades. For example, when traditional research was accused of being 'top-down', the response was participatory research, linking the 'receptors' to the generators of research. As participatory processes were recognised as producing limited outcomes, the demand-led agenda was born. In response to the alleged failure of research to deliver its products, the 'joined-up' model, which links research with the private sector, has become popular. However, using examples from animal-health research, this article demonstrates that all the aforementioned approaches are seriously limited in their attempts to generate outputs to address the multi-faceted problems facing the poor. The article outlines a new approach to research: the Mosaic Model. By combining different knowledge forms, and focusing on existing gaps, the model aims to bridge basic and applied findings to enhance the efficiency and value of research, past, present, and future.

Starting from an analysis of social and environmental injustice, the author argues that the concept of environmental racism is integral to the hegemonic model of capitalist development. She reveals how the financial mega-conglomerates, helped by the media, exploit such prejudices, and highlights the relevance of environmental racism in the struggle to overcome inequalities, to value the importance of diversity, and to build full citizenship for all.

Advocates and activists for human rights are currently facing a paradox: the coexistence of profound challenges in familiar territory (civil liberties) alongside expansion into new areas. Rights-based approaches (RBAs) are a part of this latter expansionary stream. This article argues that four kinds of potential value-added can be claimed. First, value-added can be sought through direct, indirect, and strategic uses of the law. Second, value can also be added by re-centring the state and (re)asking the question about its appropriate role in development (delivery, oversight), and strategising engagement with the state. Third, in relation to accountability, RBAs add value by calling the state to account; building capacities of rights holders and duty bearers; and encouraging a new kind of ownership of human rights among NGOs. Fourth, the article explores claims that RBAs re-politicise development, redefining it as rights-based rather than based on benevolence; reclaiming or re-politicising the key (process) terms of development; addressing the root, structural causes of poverty and conflict, rather than the symptoms; and speaking truth to power. Not all of these contributions are unique to RBAs, however, and on all counts it remains to be seen if RBAs will deliver on their promise.

Over the past 10-15 years there has been an expansion of interest in the subject of Development Studies (DS). There are now significantly more taught courses focused on DS, and research funds are booming. However, over the same period, DS has faced sustained critiques about its essential nature. This has led us to ask: what is Development Studies? And what could or should it be?

The quality of NGO work is hugely dependent on the quality of critical thinking and analysis of poverty among all levels of staff. In particular, the quality of the work in the field - at partner and community levels - depends on an understanding of development processes and on strong facilitation skills, both of which rely on strong levels of critical thinking. While these are innately present in almost everyone, rote learning in education systems and patriarchal and top-down power structures often impede their development. This article suggests some practical means by which development agencies can develop strong analytical thinking and strong facilitation skills among their staff. While the article is mainly aimed at frontline staff, the implication is that such mechanisms are required at all levels if organisations are going to develop their own capacities.

Much has been researched and said about the impacts of international trade liberalisation at the country level; but little is known about its social and environmental local-level impacts. Since national averages can mask the existence of winners and losers, national-level studies may be a poor guide to addressing the plight of the rural poor and the environment that are at the core of the agenda of the social and conservation movement. This article compares the international trade-liberalisation debate with the findings of local rural-based case studies in seven countries, co-ordinated by WWF and the World Bank during 2004-2007. It discusses some actions that the conservation and social movement could take to improve the discussion and the practice of trade liberalisation, poverty alleviation, and environmental conservation.

This case study from Búzi district, Mozambique investigated whether gender equality, in terms of male and female participation in groups, leads to gender equity in sharing of benefits from the social capital created through the group. Exploring the complex connection between gender, groups, and social capital, we found that gender equity is not necessarily achieved by guaranteeing men and women equal rights through established by-laws, or dealing with groups as a collective entity. While there were no significant differences in the investment patterns of men and women in terms of participation in group activities and contribution of communal work, access to leadership positions and benefits from social capital were unequally distributed. Compared with men, women further found it difficult to transform social relations into improved access to information, access to markets, or help in case of need. pp 650-657

Evaluations involving stakeholders include collaborative evaluation, participatory evaluation, development evaluation, and empowerment evaluation - distinguished by the degree and depth of involvement of local stakeholders or programme participants in the evaluation process. In community participatory monitoring and evaluation (PM&E), communities agree programme objectives and develop local indicators for tracking and evaluating change. PM&E is not without limitations, one being that community indicators are highly specific and localised, which limits wide application of common community indicators for evaluating programmes that span social and geographic space. We developed community indicators with six farming communities in Malawi to evaluate a community development project. To apply the indicators across the six communities, we aggregated them and used a Likert scale and scores to assess communities' perceptions of the extent to which the project had achieved its objectives. We analysed the data using a comparison of means to compare indicators across communities and by gender. pp 633-642

PETRRA was an agricultural research-management project which used a values-based approach in project design, planning, and implementation. Through an experiential learning process, agricultural research and development (R&D) institutes, NGOs, private agencies, and community-based organisations rediscovered and improved the understanding of their strengths in meeting development commitments. The project successfully showed how values-based research can meaningfully be implemented and a sustainable pro-poor impact achieved. pp 619-626

The real experts on poverty are poor people, yet the incidence and trends in poverty are usually measured by the use of official economic indicators assumed by researchers to be relevant. Poor householders themselves distinguish between subsistence and cash income. In a 'self-assessed poverty' exercise, poor villagers in rural China specified and weighted key poverty indicators. Eight key indicators describing three basic types of poverty were isolated and used to construct a participatory poverty index (PPI), the components of which provide insights into core causes of poverty. Moreover, the PPI allows direct comparison of the incidence of poverty between villages - differences in social, cultural, and environmental characteristics of each village notwithstanding. As a result, the PPI offers an objective method of conducting poverty monitoring independently of physical and social features. This article provides a brief description of the PPI and the data needed to construct a village-specific PPI. pp 599-610

Until recently, participatory and conventional approaches to agricultural research have been regarded as more or less antagonistic. This article presents evidence from three sub-projects of a Thai-Vietnamese-German collaborative research programme on 'Sustainable Land Use and Rural Development in Mountainous Regions of Southeast Asia', in which participatory elements were successfully integrated into conventional agricultural research as add-on activities. In all three sub-projects the costs of studying local knowledge or enhancing farmers' experimentation consisted of additional local personnel, opportunity costs of participating farmers' time, and travel costs. However, these participatory elements of the research projects constituted only a small fraction of the total costs. It may be concluded that conventional agricultural research can be complemented by participatory components in a cost-effective way, while producing meaningful benefits in terms of creating synergies by blending scientific and local knowledge, scaling up micro-level data, and highlighting farmers' constraints affecting technology adoption. pp 576-589

This study explores the intra-household impact of improved dual-purpose cowpea (IDPC) from a gender perspective, in terms of productivity and food, fodder, and income availability, the impact of which is linked to the income thus placed in the women's hands. Surplus income is important in providing food and nutritional benefits to the home, particularly during periods of risk. More importantly, income generated through the adoption of improved cowpea varieties has entered a largely female domain, where transfers of income reserves were passed on between women of different ages, with significant impact in terms of social and economic development. However, the technology has strengthened the separation of working spheres between men and women. Future technologies should, from the outset, explore provisions existing within the local rubric, to focus on women with the aim of expanding their participation in agriculture with the associated benefits to their families. pp 551-563

The debate on empowerment encompasses an older discourse about the intrinsic value of empowerment, and a newer discourse about the instrumental benefits of empowerment; the concept of agency is useful in understanding this distinction. In agricultural development, empowerment efforts are often instrumentalist, viewed as an advanced form of participation that will improve project effectiveness, with adoption rates that promote compliance rather than intrinsic empowerment. Nevertheless, it is possible for projects to enhance the means for - and facilitate the process of - intrinsic empowerment. With regard to process, research and extension can make use of a constructivist rather than the behaviourist approach to support changes in knowledge, behaviour, and social relationships. In assessing empowerment, both developers and 'developees' need to look for evidence that people are taking control of their lives. Case studies - such as those used by the Indonesian Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Programme - will help to capture context and chronology, with unplanned behaviours being particularly useful indicators. pp 524-538

This article traces a history of agricultural participatory research, largely from the author's personal experience. Participatory research in the 1970s was mostly led by disciplinary scientists, and characterised by innovative activities and open academic debate, with some recognition that policy and development practice was a political process. The 1980s saw a shift to learning from past experience, and a participatory mainstream developed, seeking methods for scaling up. Meanwhile, others sought to understand and influence policy and institutional change in their political and cultural contexts, and to keep open the academic debates. The author considers the 1990s as 'lost years', during which mainstream participatory practitioners became inward-looking development generalists, not so interested in learning from others outside their paradigm. The late 2000s provide a chance to re-recognise the political and cultural embeddedness of science and technology; re-introduce strong, widely based disciplines; and learn from past activities that resulted in positive development outcomes (planned or unplanned). pp 489-505

Participatory research approaches are increasingly popular with scientists working for poverty alleviation, sustainable rural development, and social change. This introduction offers an overview of the special issue of Development in Practice journal on the theme of 'operationalising participatory research and gender analysis'. The purpose of the special issue is to add value to the discussion of methodological, practical, philosophical, political, and institutional issues involved in using gender-sensitive participatory methods. Drawing on 16 articles, we place some of the main issues, empirical experiences, and debates in participatory research and participatory technology development in the context of implementation, evaluation, and institutionalisation of participatory research and evaluation approaches. pp 467-478

In attempting to rebuild post-conflict failed states, the international community has drawn heavily on neo-liberal development paradigms. However, neo-liberal state building has proved ineffectual in stimulating economic development in post-conflict states, undermining prospects for state consolidation. This article offers the developmental state as an alternative model for international state building, better suited to overcoming the developmental challenges that face post-conflict states. Drawing on the East Asian experience, developmental state building would seek to build state capacity to intervene in the economy to guide development, compensating for the failure of growth led by the private sector to materialise in many post-conflict states. The article concludes that such an approach would, in the first instance, require the international community to accept more honestly its developmental responsibilities when it decides to intervene to rebuild failed states. pp307-318

This article offers strategies for women’s empowerment in conservative, tribal, and religious environments, based on an innovative programme in Pakistan. Mainstreaming Gender and Development (MGD) encouraged participants to build on their communities’ strengths, minimised resistance among families and communities by including them in the development process, and succeeded in building a cadre of women activists. Drawing on its experience, the author questions the importance of collective action, suggests that the selection of participants should be based on aptitude rather than socio-economic status, and highlights the potential for women’s empowerment in challenging environments. pp333-344

This article discusses the history and evolution of international volunteer-sending agencies and volunteers as a response not only to symptoms but also to causes of global poverty and inequality. It considers how international volunteers might be defined, what makes their role different from other forms of overseas development assistance (particularly their contribution to capacity development), and the positives and negatives that may accompany those differences. It also reflects on international volunteers’ suitability as contributors in the transition to a globally more ecologically sustainable state, presenting some insights from volunteers and other stakeholders. pp357-370

While it is internationally agreed that the worst forms of child labour should be eliminated in order to promote children’s welfare, the consensus breaks down when trying to define what constitutes ‘light work’. This article seeks to show why it is difficult to get everyone to agree on this issue, focusing on the definition of child labour proposed by the International Labour Organization (ILO). pp385-394

The world is at a critical point as humanity contemplates how our own activity is contributing to changes in the earth and atmosphere. Formidable challenges require raising fundamental questions and learning from unlikely sources. Drawing on field research conducted on the Zambian Copperbelt, this article explores how public conversations concerning differing views of reality can inform development-related thinking about the environment. Enumerating practical examples where words and images both conveyed and shaped conflicting viewpoints in the industrial mine setting, the article asserts that much can be learned from the experiential viewpoints of underground miners. Policy making could benefit, for instance, from lessening its dependence on dominant economic thinking and increasingly drawing upon historical, cultural, philosophical, and theological insights when devising policies, projects, and procedures. Questions of power, control, and humanity’s self-conception in relation to the physical world are also explored. pp403-411

Though less than expected, resources are available for simple, cheap interventions that can accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. Results-based management has been the key to increasing access to education and health care, but it does little to change the political, social, and economic conditions that make people poor. Unless there is a better balance between the drive to achieve measurable impact, investments in long-term poverty-eradication measures, and the creation of space where poor people can discuss and develop strategies for achieving equality and social justice, it will not be as easy to make poverty history as many people think. pp420-423

Development brings about changes in people’s lives and their ways of understanding and dealing with their world. It is possible to distinguish between two types of development intervention: (a) improvements in the external situation, chiefly through the provision of public goods; and (b) strengthening people’s inner capacities, an endeavour which depends on cognitive processes. The article links basic concepts from cognitive theory to development practice and proposes avenues for further research to study the way in which people develop their capacities and to find ways of supporting such processes. A fuller understanding of cognitive change as a key factor could greatly enhance the sustainability of development projects. pp430-436

The boom in the construction industry in South Africa has drawn attention to the need for skills development. This article reports on an evaluation of the ‘People at the Gate’ training programme initiated by Group Five in Gauteng and Mpumalanga Provinces. The programme aims to empower unemployed local community members in areas where the company operates. The programme targets women and men who come to the company’s sites looking for possible employment and are unable to be accommodated due to their lack of skills. The study evaluated the difficulties that trainees are faced with during and after the project; employment opportunities that are created; and the skills most needed in different trades and provinces. pp446-449

Governments in developing countries need effective programmes to advance public policies and improve social welfare. NGOs often have well-tested programmes and research outcomes that are relevant to such needs, yet the scaling up of pilot programmes to national level is difficult to achieve and frequently unsuccessful. This article presents a case of successful scaling up for an adolescent sexual-health and psychosocial-competencies programme in Mexico, through an NGO–government partnership involving IMIFAP, a Mexican NGO. The case illustrates how an NGO can create a successful partnership with government to scale up effective programmes, in ways that meet key needs of the target population while protecting the NGO’s core values. pp164-175

This article analyses the international humanitarian response to the earthquake in Jogjakarta, Indonesia in May 2006. It also compares it with a small but very successful local initiative. It identifies inherent weaknesses in the international system, and argues for the possibility of scaling up lessons learned from the local example. pp190-200

NGOs in Asian countries often experience fluctuations in funding because of the constantly shifting priorities of their international donors. Without domestic sources, Asian NGOs are forced to re-align their priorities with donor interests in order to compete for funding. In the case of advocacy NGOs, the resulting asymmetry in donor–grantee relations often leads to a crisis of legitimacy and deteriorating effectiveness for the NGO. Because of the political nature of advocacy work, these NGOs must maintain a reputation for independence and legitimacy if they are to be influential in the political process. This article analyses the impact of fluctuating international donor assistance to advocacy NGOs in Cambodia, the Philippines, and Thailand, and offers recommendations for donors. While donors have spent significant resources building the capacity of advocacy NGOs in South-East Asia, funding trends usually undermine the effectiveness of their grantees long before funding is ended. pp213-222

This article investigates the interaction between the processes of building development theory and development practice, arguing that theory must start with practice – and should not be top–down, starting with the ‘outside gaze’ of a supposedly detached academic or policy maker. The questions posed point to critiques of mainstream development narratives and notions of innovation through the diffusion of new technologies. The authors suggest that the assumptions embedded in mainstream development processes lead to unequal access to global and local markets, and that when they are imposed from the outside without a real understanding of the context, the development project is bound to fail. Parameters for assessing and evaluating outcomes also need to be based upon a close understanding of context – and this often comes through active involvement within it and not through being ‘detached’ and outside it. The assumption that an outside gaze is ‘objective’ is based in an implicitly colonial discourse, while building theory by being involved in the practice produces better methodologies for action and development. pp235-244

The article explores knowledge and practices of family planning among the tribal population of south Gujarat. The authors examine the reasons for discontinuation and non-use of various modern contraceptive methods by tribals and draw contrasts with practices in the urban population. They consider the roles of women, family members, local leaders, and effective communication, along with NGOs and the private sector, and make recommendations for increasing access to and usage of various family-planning methods by the tribals. pp258-266

With a rapidly growing population and limited resources, accountability has taken on increased importance, especially in the area of public management. To assess the effectiveness of public spending on education in the Caribbean, this article compares performance in five Caribbean nations, looking at input indicators such as the teacher–pupil ratio, expenditure per pupil, the number of adequately trained teachers as a proportion of total teaching staff, and public commitment to education. It analyses their impact on output indicators, including performance in English and mathematics, the repetition rate, and survival rate to the final grade in school. The article concludes that the levels of efficiency in the development of human capital in the Caribbean are very uneven, and that serious challenges face Caribbean countries as they seek to maximise the returns on their investment in education. pp273-279

Values are an important theme in discussions in international NGOs (INGOs), helping to create the conditions for solidarity among staff. But at the same time they are also frequently a source of demoralisation and destructive conflict. This is because the prevailing perceptions of values as instruments of management or as elements in some inchoate mystical whole render the power relationship between staff and managers undiscussable. Values need not be thought of as an instrument of management, and they are above all idealisations. An alternative theory of values is that they are emergent and intensely social phenomena that arise daily between people engaged in a collective enterprise. They are idealisations, but they must be discussed in the everyday context. Conflict is inevitable, but the exploration of the nature of this conflict in daily practice is the only way of ensuring that the discussion about values is an enlivening process. pp 5-16

Only in English

For the purposes of accountability and uniformity, and as a way of giving insight into their intellectual capital regarding development practices, NGOs in Southern Africa are required by donor agencies to describe their intended activities in very clear, unambiguous terms. These requirements may include the expression of theoretical approaches, the development of logical frameworks, clear objectives, indicators for success, criteria for sustainable development, and relationships to government policies. However, the interface between reality and these planning measures and tools, most often completed without the input and contributions of the communities whom they are to serve/service, produces a much more messy, dynamic, and involved picture of the development process. None the less, the NGOs are still required to be accountable on the basis of their original proposal and planning. The author presents examples of this phenomenon and discusses the challenges facing an evaluator when dealing with competing principles of accountability, autonomy, and authenticity. pp 40-52

How do we move from identifying ethical principles to enhancing development practice? How can donors and NGOs move beyond the reporting of technical outputs to explore less tangible aspects of their health projects: contributions to rebuilding trust, promoting social cohesion, and enhancing good governance at community level? This article considers these questions in relation to health and peace-building activities in conflicted settings. It describes difficulties facing practitioners and donors seeking to undertake health and peace work, in particular focusing on the lack of appropriate tools for screening, monitoring, and evaluating projects. It critiques the logical framework, a tool commonly used in project planning, monitoring, and evaluation, and considers it alongside a new tool, the Health and Peace Building Filter, which has been designed to reflect on health programming in fragile or conflicted settings. The authors argue that such tools can help to move us beyond focusing on inputs and outputs to examining processes, relationships, and the indirect consequences of aid programmes. pp 66-81

Recent interest in migrant remittances as a development resource calls attention to a deeper issue: the relationship between migration and development. Remittances may be a significant source of economic inflows to poor countries and regions, but their actual development impact (positive or negative) is tied to the migration processes that generate them. Attention to migration in turn creates an opportunity to think about the broader context of development policy and practice, and to re-think the boundaries that we put around our work. pp 94-99

News about Norway’s plans to establish a ‘doomsday vault’ for seeds in the permafrost of the Artic archipelago of Svalbard as a back-up for conventional gene banks reached the world press in 2006. The idea of a Global Seed Vault, which today is considered a ‘Noah’s Ark’ for seeds, was previously regarded with suspicion and considered to be unrealistic. In 1989/90 the Norwegian government offered to construct an international depository for seeds in permafrost, but the initiative was sidelined in the agitated debates between developed and developing countries over access to and control of plant genetic resources. The realisation of the FAO International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (2004) resolved some of the most difficult issues and made possible the launching of a new Norwegian initiative to safeguard some of the world’s most important plant genetic resources for the future. pp 110-116

Patronato de Nutrición introduced a range of 18 optional agricultural technologies in the indigenous community of Chalite, Panama. Three of the technologies were adopted by more than half of the farmers surveyed, while an additional eight technologies were adopted by between 20 per cent and 50 per cent of the farmers. Farmers were more likely to adopt technologies associated with familiar crops, previously promoted by other groups, or requiring limited labour or financial resources. The article shows how development groups can quickly reduce the number of technologies promoted in order to deliver services more effectively. pp 125-130

Only in English

From an analysis of recent empirical research in the Dominican Republic, this article addresses the ways in which racism underpins elements of governance and explores organisational and individual responses to racialised discrimination initiated by the state. The context is timely, given the steady rise in reported racist and violent attacks against people presumed to be of Haitian origin in the Dominican Republic over the past five years. The government has intensified formal military and police round-ups of migrants and settlers suspected to be of Haitian origin, and this article assesses the group and individual responses to these state-led actions, analysing formal and informal interventions, their evolution, maintenance, and impact. pp 725-738

A progressive piece of legislation in 1993 granted collective land rights to Colombia’s black communities living in the rural areas of the Pacific coast region. This measure aimed partly to support sustainable development strategies in the region through territorial empowering of local communities. Yet 14 years later, the escalation of the country’s internal conflict into the Pacific region has created unprecedented levels of forced displacement among rural black communities. Once referred to as a ‘peace haven’, the Colombian Pacific coast is now characterised by new spaces of violence and terror, imposed by warring guerrilla and paramilitary groups, as well as the armed forces. This article examines the nature of the externally induced violence in the region and shows how specific economic interests, in particular in the African Palm sector, are colluding with illegal groups that are used to spread fear and terror among local residents, to make them comply with the requirements of these economic actors. pp752-764

The article considers international advocacy concerning the exploitation of gas reserves in an area inhabited by an isolated indigenous group in Peru, the Machigengua. Considerable international advocacy activity was centred mainly in Washington, DC. Poor communication between those directly affected and international environmental NGOs illustrated very different and not always compatible agendas. The article concludes that this failure to adapt the international lobby both to the views of the indigenous population and to political realities in Peru severely weakened the impact of the international advocacy work. pp 775-783

National frontiers with ecosystems experiencing rapid changes pose difficult challenges for scientific contributions to democratic processes for environmental governance. We describe an innovative outreach model, the ‘knowledge exchange train’, which combines educational outreach with capacity-building mechanisms to broaden public participation in planning for sustainable development. This involved an international team of scientists and practitioners from conservation and development organisations who travelled across a tri-national frontier area of the south-western Amazon to share recent findings with local leaders and stakeholder constituencies of several municipalities. The knowledge exchange train quickly increased public awareness in many places and provided a means of broadening participation in planning and governance. This model supports planning for sustainable development and can be adapted to other geographic contexts and topics. pp 791-799

This review essay focuses on the most crucial points in the evolution of Celso Furtado’s contribution to economic and political thought in relation to development, in the hope that a wider readership will appreciate the importance of his ideas to Latin America’s ‘development’ during the 1960s and 1970s, and perhaps even see value in reviving them. It opens with a description of the background to the rise of development economics, highlighting aspects of the discipline that this remarkable Brazilian economist confronted and transformed. This is followed by a description of his period as a development theorist or ‘reform monger’ (Hirschman 1963) and his subsequent exile (1964–1975). The article concludes with a discussion of some of the work produced on his return to Brazil. pp 807-819

In English only

A word analysis of six UK government White Paper policy statements on aid (selected between 1960 and 2006) compares the top 20 words and key word pairs used in each document. Characteristic sentences are composed of the top 20s to represent the spirit of each paper. Results illuminate changes in the content of White Papers on aid, and point to trends in the history of the UK’s approach to international development. A characteristic sentence to illustrate the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness is contrasted with a sentence of words that did not appear in that document. Readers are invited and challenged to identify words they would like to be used and acted on more in development.

The term ‘social protection’ has been widely used around the world and is often treated as synonymous with ‘social security’, which is misleading. This article considers the numerous terms that have become part of the language of social protection, indicating that the image conveyed by the term is rather different from what is meant by it.

This article questions the growing use of the term ‘faith-based’ in development policy and practice. It is argued that it homogenises people in minority migrant and developing-country contexts and excludes many who are working for human rights and social justice from secular perspectives, thus providing an unsound analytical base for policy. Against the background of the ‘war on terror’, the author also examines the differences in US and British development policy arising out of the term ‘faith-based’.

This article discusses the different meanings that citizenship has assumed in Latin America in the past few decades. Its main argument is that, in the perverse confluence between neo-liberal and democratic participatory projects, the common reference to citizenship, used by different political actors, projects an apparent homogeneity, obscuring differences and diluting the conflict between those projects.

In parallel with, and as complement to, globalisation, ‘social capital’ has enjoyed a meteoric rise across the social sciences over the last two decades. Not surprisingly, it has been particularly prominent across development studies, not least through heavy promotion by the World Bank. As a concept, though, as has been argued persistently by a minority critical literature, social capital is fundamentally flawed. Although capable of addressing almost anything designated as social, it has tended to neglect the state, class, power, and conflict. As a buzzword, it has heavily constrained the currently progressive departure from the extremes of neo-liberalism and post-modernism at a time of extremely aggressive assault by economics imperialism. Social capital should not be ignored but contested – and rejected.

This article reflects on the vocabulary commonly used within development organisations to communicate about ‘gender and development’. It argues that the relevant terminology, though frequently used, remains problematic. Some terms are almost entirely absent, while others are used loosely and inappropriately – with the subtleties of carefully developed and much-debated concepts often lost. Terms such as ‘empowerment’, ‘gender’, and ‘gender mainstreaming’ which originated in feminist thinking and activism have lost their moorings and become depoliticised. Despite these problems, there are indications that debates and language may be taking a more radical turn with the acknowledgement of the shortcomings of the practices of gender mainstreaming, the deepening of interest in the notion of empowerment, and the explicit adoption of a human-rights language.

This article offers an intellectual genealogy of how the concept of human rights has entered the development discourse—from the formulation of a ‘right to development’ to the rhetorical incorporation of rights within prevailing discourse, to the articulation of a ‘rights-based approach’ to development. It concludes with some propositions about the important role that a focus on rights might play in the practice of international development.

Public and people-centred advocacy are shaped by the political culture, social systems, and constitutional framework of the country in which they are practised. It is the practice of advocacy that determines the theory, and not vice versa. If advocacy is not rooted in grassroots realities and is practised only at the macro level, the voice of the marginalised is increasingly likely to be appropriated by professional elites. However, the very credibility of advocacy practitioners depends on their relationship with mass-based movements and grassroots perceptions of what constitutes desirable social change.

This article focuses on the role that development NGOs play in capacity building, arguing that many conventional NGO practices are ultimately about retaining power, rather than empowering their partners. This leads to tunnel vision and to upward rather than downward or horizontal accountability, based on the assumption that the transfer of resources is a one-way process. At worst, this undermines rather than strengthens the capacities of the organisations that NGOs are attempting to assist. Sharing responsibilities and risks, mutual accountability, and committing to the long term rather than to short-term projects are more likely to create partnerships that can withstand vicissitudes and contribute to lasting change.

The term ‘country ownership’ refers to a property of the conditionality attached to programmes, processes, plans, or strategies involving both a ‘domestic’ party (generally a nation state) and a foreign party (generally the IMF, the World Bank, the Regional Development Banks, and other multilateral and bilateral institutions). Under what circumstances and how can the concept of country ownership be relevant to a country with a myriad heterogeneous and often conflicting views and interests? Or to a country whose government’s representational legitimacy or democratic credentials are in question? The author argues that the term has been abused to such an extent that it is at best unhelpful and at worst pernicious: a term whose time has gone.

The concept of peacebuilding is a buzzword of the development policy and practice mainstream. The recent introduction of managerial tools and the focus on measuring the ‘effectiveness’ of peacebuilding have marginalised and depoliticised critical questions about the causes of violent conflict, and have replaced them with comforting notions for donors that peace can be built and measured without challenging Western understanding of economy, governance, and social aspirations of people.

This article engages with the ways in which corruption has taken centre stage in much development policy making and rhetoric. It argues that there is a need to destablilise ‘taken for granted’ assumptions about what corruption is and how it operates. This means generating an understanding of how meanings of corruption vary, and how this variation is determined by the social characteristics of those engaged in corruption talk. It also means examination of how discourses of corruption and anti-corruption are translated from international to national and local stages – from the anti-corruption ‘establishment’ to the realities of bureaucratic encounters in diverse contexts.

This article examines the links between development and ‘security’, situating these concepts within their philosophical and political contexts, particularly in relation to contemporary wars, including the ‘war on terror’, and the so-called ‘securitisation’ of development. The security of states does not necessarily ensure the security of their citizens, and the very concept of security is both complex and contested. The author provides a succinct summary of various interpretations of security – of states, collectivities, and individuals – showing how each is double edged and ambivalent.

This article looks at ‘knowledge management’, using a case study of the World Bank’s research department, located in the Bank’s Development Economics Vice-Presidency (DEC). Despite the Bank's presentation of its research arm as conducting 'rigorous and objective’ work, the author finds that the Bank’s ‘knowledge management’ involves research that has tended to reinforce the dominant neo-liberal globalisation policy agenda. The article examines some of the mechanisms by which the Bank's research department comes to play a central role in what Robert Wade has termed 'paradigm maintenance', including incentives in hiring, promotion, and publishing, as well as selective enforcement of rules, discouragement of dissonant views, and manipulation of data. The author's analysis is based both on in-depth interviews with current and former World Bank professionals and on examination of the relevant literature.

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the concept of civil society in development and governance circles. Broadly understood as the space in society where collective citizen action takes place, civil society has, in fact, proved an extremely difficult concept to define and operationalise. This article proposes a framework and methodology for measuring and comparing the state of different civil societies around the world. It concludes with a discussion of outstanding questions and challenges, drawing on preliminary insights from current efforts to apply the approach in more than 50 countries.

This article proposes a theoretical framework, the Capacity-building Paradox, which defines individual relationship work as the basis for capacity building. It explains why capacity building has hitherto been largely unsuccessful. ‘Relationship work’ is central to the functions of practitioners. It consists of both ‘dependent work’ and ‘friendship work’, the latter synonymous with capacity building. To do relationship work, practitioners require power, in order to overcome environmental obstacles. Financial resources emerge as the predominant environmental influence, often prompting practitioners to use dependent work rather than friendship work. This results in a reduction in capacity and does not contribute to sustainable development. Most of the current literature provides organisational and institutional tools for capacity building. While there is an increasing recognition of the centrality of personal relationships in this work, there is as yet no theoretical framework within which to locate it. The article presents original research into people’s experiences of capacity-building work in a development context and proposes a conceptual model that may have important implications for capacity-building practice.

This article draws preliminary lessons from the experience of engaging village elites in support of a BRAC programme for ultra-poor women in rural Bangladesh. It describes the origins, aims, and operation of this programme, which provides comprehensive livelihood support and productive assets to the extreme poor. Based on field research in the rural north-west, the article examines the conditions under which elites can support interventions for the ultra-poor, and the risks and benefits of such engagement. It describes the impact of committees mandated to support ultra-poor programme participants, and attempts to understand the somewhat paradoxical success of this intervention. Conclusions and lessons from the experience involve revisiting assumptions that dominate scholarship and programmes relating to the politics of poverty in rural Bangladesh.

Cambodia has embarked on a process of decentralisation and democratisation, including the establishment of elected Commune Councils in early 2002. Given the lack of a tradition of encouraging civic participation in public affairs, however, there was initially little general awareness of how to engage with these Councils. The authors describe a project supported by the Ministry of Rural Development and the German bilateral agency, GTZ, and undertaken with local no-government organisations, to identify and support active community groups and improve their capacity to interact with the Commune Councils, while at the same time seeking ways for the Commune Councils to support the different groups.

This article describes Learning Platforms, a structured effort by the Dutch-based agency SNV to encourage its expert advisers to engage in reading and analysing academic research related to the context in which they work, and to undertake research of their own. Although the practitioners’ ability to apply their research to their daily practice, and the organisation’s ability to absorb the findings of the research as part of its ways of working, have been partial or limited, the approach has the potential to bring academic and practice-based endeavour together in ways that are mutually beneficial.

The article identifies challenges and opportunities for the Ugandan robusta coffee industry in the context of the global coffee crisis. It presents a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of development strategies through which Uganda might promote its largest export commodity. It is suggested that Uganda would benefit from moderately increasing robusta production, while a further decline in output could undermine its current price premium in the market. There may also be important benefits associated with increasing the value of Ugandan robusta through improvements in quality.

This article is based on research that explored and analysed the potential role of diasporas in development aid in the Netherlands. The research adopted the hypothesis that development agencies could benefit from the knowledge, skills, and views of diasporas as ‘agents of development’ and thereby make aid more effective and sustainable. Data were derived from semi-structured interviews with representatives of diasporas residing in the Netherlands; Dutch NGOs selected by the Dutch government for their capacity-building programmes; official donors, namely the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken); and international organisations, such as the International Organization of Migration (IOM). Secondary data were derived from a literature review.

This article describes the exploratory and preparatory phase of a research project designed to use cooperative enquiry as a method for transformative and participatory action research into relations between donors and recipients in two developing countries, Bolivia and Bangladesh. It describes the origins of our idea, the conceptual challenges that we faced in seeking funding, and what we learnt from this first phase. We analyse why the researchers, as well as the potential subjects of the research, were uncomfortable with the proposed methodology, including the challenges arising from our own positions and the highly sensitive nature of the topic. We explain why we decided to abandon the project and reach some tentative conclusions concerning the options for participatory action learning and research in development practice.

Natural chewing gum or chicle represents just 3.5 per cent of the total chewing-gum market, which is dominated by synthetic chewing gum made from hydrocarbons. However, recent interest in sustainable livelihood strategies has opened up opportunities for enlarging chicle commercialisation for what is still a small, niche market. The production of chicle can serve to strengthen forest conservation, and provide regular employment to those dependent on forest products, as part of a range of sustainable forest activities. However, the production and marketing of natural chewing gum has faced several serious problems: producers in Mexico have been organised in ways that enabled them to be exploited both by intermediaries and state institutions, and the processes of certification for organics and fair trade are unwieldy and expensive. This paper suggests a number of ways of addressing these problems.

The paper reviews current methodologies for the design of development projects and identifies foundational reasons for conflict between design approaches and participatory methods. A number of alternative approaches to the design of interventions in social systems are examined, and the potential application of some of these new ideas within a visioning process that is based on communicative rationality is explored. We conclude that there are many problems to be overcome before describing a complete design methodology that moves away from the objectivist basis of existing design systems, and that the new approach will need to address power relationships and the consequent and interrelated problems of accountability and trust.

Andries Du Toit (2004) argues that the concept of social exclusion has limited use in the field of development studies since chronic poverty is often the result of incorporation on particularly disadvantageous terms (adverse incorporation) rather than any process of exclusion. Du Toit therefore calls for going beyond seeing ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’ in binary terms and looking more closely at how different kinds of power are formed and maintained. This papers argues that thinking about social exclusion has already moved beyond a simple included /excluded dichotomy, and that use of Sen’s analytical framework assists researchers to tease out the complex, interconnected factors underlying chronic poverty, such as that experienced by agricultural workers in South Africa’s Western Cape district of Ceres.

International networks for social change are growing in number and influence. While they need to be able to assess the extent to which they achieve their purpose and determine ways in which to be more effective, conventional evaluation methods are not designed for such complex organisational forms, or for the diverse kinds of activity to which they are characteristically dedicated. Building on an earlier version of the paper, the authors present a set of principles and participatory approaches that are more appropriate to the task of evaluating such networks.

AIDS-related morbidity and mortality affects not only individuals and their families, but is rapidly undermining the struggling capacity to develop of African states. Stemming the impacts of the pandemic has therefore become a major concern. This calls for addressing the issues of care and support for those affected, and increasing the access of persons living with HIV/AIDS to effective treatment. Provision of such complex medication in resource-limited settings is a fairly recent phenomenon. In this context, the paper builds on emerging experiences from the field in identifying issues and challenges that need to be addressed in order to facilitate the scaling-up of HIV/AIDS treatment in Africa.

This report summarises a project of participatory action-research combining concepts from the field of development management with practice in international mental health. The research was conducted in Estonia, Kyrgyzstan, and Romania. The policy-as-process model is central to understandings of development management but is unfamiliar to organisations working in mental health, even those working from a community level, bottom-up perspective to influence mental-health policy. At the same time practice and learning from the field of mental health and radical user-empowerment models have received little attention from development managers. The research reported here found that the policy-as-process model was useful to mental-health activists and that it provided a competing framework to more traditional, top-down and prescriptive policy concepts, and made it possible to make sense of the multiple perspectives, value-based conflicts, and power dynamics that characterise understandings and practice in mental health. Among the recommendations is a call for closer links between mental-health activism and development management, and a transfer of knowledge, understanding, and experience between the two disciplines.

It is virtually undisputed that poverty is multi-dimensional. However, 'economic' or income/expenditure/monetary measures of poverty still maintain a higher status in key development indicators and policy: The number one Millennium Development Goal (MDG) is the dollar-a-day; the Human Development Index (HDI) and Gender Development Index (GDI) of UNDP both use weightings that very strongly favour GDP per capita; and the income poverty headcount is generally the main focus in Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. This article is concerned with this apparent contradiction between the consensus over the meaning of poverty and the choice of methods with which to measure poverty in practice. A brief history of the meaning and measurement of poverty is given and it is argued that while 'economic' determinism has gradually retreated from centrality in the meaning of poverty it has continued to dominate the measurement of poverty. This is followed by a section that contrasts the relative merits of 'economic' and 'non-economic' measures of poverty. The question is posed: why do 'economic' measures of poverty still have a higher status than non-economic measures?

Poverty and the way in which it is researched are major preoccupations for many social scientists. This article presents different ways of researching urban poverty in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), focusing on qualitative methods and the different ways in which these can be used to collect data. Examples are drawn from field research carried out in urban areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaïre) to illustrate the ways that different research methods and techniques are used in the field and how a researcher might organise data collection.

This paper reviews prevention strategies initiated and implemented by NGOs across the globe to address female sex trafficking. It sets out the conceptual bases for anti-trafficking measures in general and prevention measures in particular before presenting a representative cross-section of programmes and approaches currently underway. The authors identify some of the gaps apparent in these responses, and offer recommendations to improve the implementation of prevention strategies. The paper concludes that anti-trafficking prevention measures must be skilfully integrated into current community-development practices and that for this reason, local and global development planners must become more aware of this issue and the strategic actions necessary to address it.

This article discusses the role NGOs play, not in their traditional role as service providers, but as employers in the Egyptian labour market. Over the last two decades, NGOs have been offering attractive job opportunities to middle-class professionals who are disillusioned with the private sector and no longer interested in joining the state bureaucracy. The working conditions of the growing number of NGO employees and how NGOs fare as employers has not been investigated in the substantial academic and policy literature on NGOs, which so far has been almost exclusively concerned with NGOs’ relationships with their ‘beneficiaries’ rather with than with their position as active players in a changing labour market.

The political project of gender equality in Africa has gained momentum and made many achievements. However, these have been largely confined to the ‘big’ women working in the public and private bureaucratic contexts in which there is a greater commitment to gender equality. It is argued that in the context of Cameroon, until these ‘bigger’ women renew their commitment to their grassroots sisters, the experience of gender equality among will remain largely unequal. Only strong linkages between white-collar workers and less privileged women will span this chasm.

This paper offers a case study of a secondment of staff from a Northern NGO (Trócaire) to a Southern partner, the Catholic Development Commission (CADECOM) of Malawi, as a possible model for capacity building. The approach described was tried in the context of an emergency programme but could also be used in a development context. The paper analyses the appropriateness of the model in terms of its administrative structure, focus, and impact, and attempts to draw lessons for practitioners for its successful application.

Harriet Matsaert, Zahir Ahmed, and Shah Abdus Salam This paper describes the experiences of a small Bangladeshi NGO in using actor-oriented tools to focus on key people and partnerships in project planning, monitoring, and evaluation. The approach has helped to identify interventions that are context-specific, building on key local actors and indigenous networks, and sensitive to the constraints experienced by the poorest. As a result, the NGO has away from an externally driven agenda and to become a more thoughtful and responsive organisation. In developing the approach, the NGO encountered some problems due to the political sensitivity concerning the representation of linkages. This underlines the importance of using these tools in a politically-aware, positive, and reflective way.

Based on the contemporary interest in developing new adult literacy learning programmes based on ‘literacy for livelihoods’, this paper examines some case studies from New Zealand, Bangladesh, and Egypt of literacy being used in livelihoods, and relates these to the kind of literacy being taught in many adult literacy programmes today. It points out that people often change their livelihoods and that each livelihood has literacy practices embedded within it. The paper suggests that the use of these literacy practices embedded within the livelihood activities might be a better starting point for adult literacy learning than a school-based textbook.

This article focuses on the development of African Studies, principally in post-1945 Europe and North America, and its counterpart in post-independence Africa. African Studies enjoys an increasingly close connection with bilateral and multilateral development cooperation, providing research and researchers (along with their own conceptual frameworks and concerns) to assist in defining and providing direction for aid and related policies. This is leading to unhealthy practices, whereby African research is ignored in the formulation of international policies towards the continent; while external Africanists assume the function of interpreting the world to Africa and vice versa. This dynamic reinforces existing asymmetries in capacity and influence, especially given the crisis of higher education in most African countries. It also undermines Africa’s research community, in particular the scope for cross-national and international exchange and the engagement in broader development debates, with the result that those social scientists who have not succumbed to the consultancy market or sought career opportunities elsewhere, are encouraged to focus on narrow empirical studies. This political division of intellectual labour needs to be replaced with one that allows for the free expression and exchange of ideas not only by Africans on Africa, but with the wider international community who share the same broad thematic and/or theoretical preoccupations as the African scholars with whom they are in contact.

This paper argues that those keen to characterise and harness the empowering potential of Information and Communications Technology [ICT] for development projects have to understand that the very existence of this technology opens up alternative models of cooperation and collaboration. These models themselves necessitate breaking away from ‘traditional’ command-and-control models of management. One alternative is to persuade participants, or potential participants, to coordinate their efforts along the lines exemplified by the open-source software movement and the contributors to Wikipedia: models of coordination that ought not to work, but appear to do so. The paper offers an outline of this argument, and then suggests ways in which NGOs in particular might try to incorporate these insights into their strategies. This is particularly critical for organisations with a reliance on increasingly pressurised funding opportunities, and which also seek to develop and engender participation and determination from within and among specific target groupings.

In this article, the authors reflect on the establishment and rapid evolution of an African electronic newsletter, Pambazuka News, an initiative that is rooted in the relationship between information and communication technologies (ICTs) on the one hand, and the struggle against impoverishment and injustices, on the other. Among the main learning points are that electronic publishing is a long-term commitment because of the trust established between the organisation providing the service and those using it. The immediacy of the medium enables information to move around in a range of different ways, and exerts new forms of mutual accountability. There remains, however, the critical issue of how to guarantee the resources to maintain such a service without compromising the content or diluting the purpose.

This article explores the motivation for, traces the development of, and details the distinctive strategy shaping The Communication Initiative (The CI), a network of those using communication to foster economic and social change in communities around the world. Network members access information and collaborate with each other through any of three knowledge websites - one with a worldwide overview and focus, one with a worldwide overview and focus on Latin America, and one with a focus on Africa - and their associated electronic newsletters. These online spaces are components in a broader process that the author terms ‘horizontal communication’, which is central to providing a non-judgmental, level platform for accessing the information and interactions that are important to those actually practising communication for development. Drawing on this approach, The CI has engaged 50,000-plus people from 184 countries over the past seven years; the author outlines the elements that have been central to this success.

We suggest that PhD and post-doctoral researchers are a strong, untapped resource with the potential to make a real contribution to global health research (GHR). However, we raise some ethical, institutional, and funding issues that either discourage new researchers from entering the field or diminish their capacity to contribute. We offer a number of recommendations to Canadian academic and non-academic institutions and funders, and aim to generate discussion among them about how to overcome these constraints. We need changes in the way graduate research is organised and funded, so there are opportunities to work collaboratively within established low- and middle-income countries (LMIC)/Canadian research partnerships. We urge changes in the way institutions fund, recognise, value, and support GHR, so established researchers are encouraged to develop long-term LMIC relationships and mentor new Canadian/LMIC researchers. We ask funders to reconsider additional GHR activities for support, including strategic training initiatives and dissemination of research results. We also encourage the development of alternative institutions that can provide training and mentoring opportunities. GHR per se faces many challenges. If we address those that reduce our potential to contribute, we can become real partners in GHR, working towards equitable global health and solutions to priority health issues.

This review essay surveys the theoretical insights emerging from within the Global Justice and Solidarity Movement, also known as the Anti-Globalisation Movement, or the Movement of the Movements, and also reviews the literature focused on this phenomenon from those closely involved as well as from other observers. The central concern is to understand the nature and significance of the movement of the movements as it operates across local, national, and global boundaries, and to consider its capacity to represent and mobilise the many millions worldwide who stand to gain little or nothing, but may lose a great deal, from neo-liberal globalisation.

In English only

The central argument of this paper is that many of the tools developed to strengthen for-profit businesses can be applied to NGOs to make them more effective and accountable. The paper addresses a gap in the development literature by defining and describing how business tools can be effectively transferred to NGOs. It examines the implementation of ISO 9000 Quality Standard by one NGO, the Cambodia Trust. The experiences of the Cambodia Trust demonstrate that business tools have a place in NGO management. The paper also questions the extent to which the Cambodian experience can be seen as best practice for NGOs.

Fair-trade activities in the South have tended to be studied in relation to the internal aims of the fair-trade organisations themselves. This paper argues that it is also critical to consider the wider fair-trade ‘arena’ or set of interactions. The authors focus on the fair-trade coffee ‘arenas’ of Tanzania and Nicaragua and study the role of four key actors - small-scale producers, cooperatives, development partners, and public authorities. Using comparative data from field studies conducted in 2002-2003, the paper draws out key national and international issues affecting local producers. Illustrating how fair trade evolves differently according to context, the paper examines how the cooperative movement in Nicaragua has been strengthened by fair-trade production, in contrast to the situation in Tanzania. It concludes by looking at some of the challenges faced by fair trade, including how to reconcile the demands of the market with building solidarity.

The interchangeable use of the terms microcredit and microfinance creates serious confusions and misunderstandings in both academic and policy discourses. Microcredit programmes provide mainly one kind of service, namely loan distribution and collection, while microfinance programmes provide several financial and organisational services including credit, savings, insurance, and community development. From the functional perspective, differences appear more semantic than substantive. However, the conceptual differences are fundamental because they involve both the underlying motives and the ways in which the two types of venture operate in practice. Microcredit is essentially a non-profit approach to development and depends on external support, while microfinance programmes seek to return enough profit to be self-financing. Thus, the two programs need to be treated separately in relation to their role in the alleviation of Third World poverty.

Through an analysis of practical examples and key literature, this article considers what will enhance learning in and between NGOs and other development partners. The authors explore how the types and qualities of relationship currently evolving in the development sector affect learning, drawing predominantly on experiences of relationships between Northern and Southern NGOs. The article identifies those aspects of relationships that foster learning and those that inhibit it, and offers recommendations to strengthen learning. The authors highlight the relevance of, the challenges posed by, and the potential of partnership work, as well as the impact of accountability demands, procedures, and processes, on organisational relationships and on learning.

Summary: Microcredit is a means of providing financial services to people who lack access to conventional credit sources. New programmes in the North are endeavour to emulate successful experiences in the South. But such programmes have their own characteristics that differentiate them from those in the South, as illustrated in a case study of experience in Spain.

Reporting on AccountAbility’s 2005 Annual Conference, Hyatt observes that the Northern-driven ‘accountability industry’ is more concerned about predicting outcomes and controlling resources, and is thus largely missing the moral, political nature of accountability in terms of promoting equity and integrity, and is little concerned with the failure to learn and to encourage learning.

This article discusses humanitarian advocacy in the contemporary world within the wider crisis of political vision. Humanitarian advocacy over the last 15 years has drawn attention to how crises have been precipitated by state policies and has sought international intervention to protect people. It has consequently become associated with challenging the national sovereignty of the developing state. This article contends that the weak state is the problem, and suggests that the existing paradigm of humanitarian advocacy helps to legitimise the erosion of equality among sovereign states and the reassertion of international inequalities.

This paper underlines the importance of grounding the analysis of humanitarian aid in an understanding of everyday practice by presenting and discussing ethnographic vignettes about three aspects of aid response in Sri Lanka following the 2004 Tsunami. The first deals with the nature of humanitarian actors, the second explores how different kinds of politics intertwine, and the third discusses the issue of humanitarian partnerships. Each vignette points to the need for detailed analysis of everyday practice as the starting point for understanding humanitarian aid. This would require a shift in current academic approaches, where discussions on humanitarian aid usually start from the level of principles rather than practice. It is argued that accounts of the everyday practices and dilemmas faced by NGOs help to counterbalance blind expectations, expose uncritical admiration, and put unrealistic critiques into perspective.

As Tony Vaux points out in his Guest Editorial in this issue, the concept of humanitarianism applies to both war and general disaster, and is based on the principle that ‘in extreme cases of human suffering external agents may offer assistance to people in need, and in doing so should be accorded respect and even “rights” in carrying out their functions’. However, policy makers in humanitarian agencies, and aid workers on the ground, face a bewilderingly complex set of challenges in determining such ‘rights’. Gone are any comfortable certainties about what in the commercial sector is known as ‘the licence to operate’, and claims to the moral high ground of ‘neutrality’ have an increasingly hollow ring. Perhaps more to the point, such assumptions are of little practical use to frontline workers who may risk ambush, abduction, deportation, or even their lives as the result of their professional activities. Nor do outdated road maps help relief agencies to orient their decisions on whether to withdraw or continue providing material assistance in the knowledge that a proportion of it is fuelling the violence or lining the pockets of conflict profiteers. There are no standard ‘off-the-peg’ answers, because each situation must be considered on its own merits. And of course no aid agencies share an identical mandate, or have precisely the same expertise or history of involvement with the affected population – all factors that must be weighed up in deciding what is the appropriate course of action. For reasons of space, we have not sought to cover the areas of early warning, prevention, and mitigation associated with ‘natural’ disasters, although of course the two are always linked, as became very clear in wake of the Asian tsunami in Aceh and Sri Lanka. It has long been recognised that since catastrophic events disproportionately affect the poor and marginalised, they expose and may intensify existing social divides and structural injustice. For instance, in his seminal work on the 1943 Bengal famine, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (OUP, 1984) Amartya K Sen argued that such food shortages do not occur in functioning democracies. Similarly, Roger Plant's, Guatemala: Unnatural Disaster (Latin America Bureau, 1978) showed how the 1974 earthquake triggered an intensification in state violence that was to result in the death or disappearance of 200,000 Guatemalans and create ‘a nation of widows and orphans’. In accordance with the focus of this issue, we have given priority to publications and organisations that reflect on some direct involvement in humanitarian endeavour, rather than giving priority to more policy-oriented or scholarly works or academic institutions. We have included literature on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, since this was such a defining event for humanitarianism; and some recent publications concerning the US-led invasions of Afghanistan in October 2001 (‘Operation Enduring Freedom’) and Iraq in March 2003 (‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’), since these have significantly redefined the global landscape of policy and practice within which humanitarian agencies operate. Inevitably we can offer only a glimpse of the growing literature in these fields, but we hope in so doing that readers, and particularly those directly involved in humanitarian endeavours, will be encouraged to explore the issues further.

One could be forgiven for concluding from the current debate that the ‘protection of civilians’ is something ‘done to’ the passive recipients of international largesse. Whether the macro-level interventions of the UN Security Council or micro-level attempts to reduce the negative side effects of relief action, those in need of protection are rarely seen as key players in their own futures. Although this type of external intervention can be valuable, it is a far from complete picture of how people manage to survive the effects of conflicts. This vision of protection seriously underestimates the resourcefulness of people who have no choice and in so doing misses opportunities to help communities as they are forced to adapt to their new realities. Effective humanitarian action will thus not only focus on the actions of those with a responsibility to protect, but will also support and strengthen the rational decisions that people themselves take to be ‘safe’ in conflict.

Humanitarianism and politics are more often than not considered distinct despite the increasing complexity of contemporary conflict. In some cases the separation is pushed too far and leads to unintended consequences. This article highlights the specifics of the flight of one renegade soldier and some 300 of his men to Rwanda, while the international community was plotting the road map for an ideal solution that everybody could have signed up to. This did not happen, and the article studies what caused the relevant parties to forfeit such a solution and makes recommendations for how to improve coordination and complementarity in international operations involving a range of actors.

The humanitarian aid sector faces a growing skills shortage, at a time when it aspires to expand the scale, quality, and impact of its response to humanitarian needs. Rapid staff turnover has been pinpointed as one of the major constraints on both staff capacity building and organisational learning. A study undertaken for Oxfam GB (OGB) supports previous findings that traditional human resource practices in the humanitarian field, with many staff employed on short-term contracts, have inhibited skills development as well as programme and organisational learning.

Scaling-up local innovations in natural resource management (NRM) involves learning that is centred around three themes: promoting local-level innovation, understanding why local innovations work in specific contexts, and reflecting on their relevance in other geographical and social contexts. Successful scalin- up depends in part upon the relationships among multiple stakeholders at different levels around this learning. The experiences of researchers supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) provide insights into four questions: What is scaling-up? Why scale-up? What to scale-up? and How to scale-up? The authors propose that scaling-up is a multi-stakeholder process consisting of five components including: framing the context, promoting participation, fostering learning, strengthening institutions, and disseminating successful experiences. Key bottlenecks to scaling-up are the absence of open communication and the mutual recognition among stakeholders of each other’s rights, responsibilities, and roles.

Fair Trade has become a dynamic and successful dimension of an emerging counter-tendency to the neo-liberal globalisation regime. This study explores some of the dilemmas facing the Fair Trade movement as it seeks to broaden and deepen its impact among the rural poor of Latin America’s coffee sector. We argue that the efforts to broaden Fair Trade’s economic impact among poor, small-scale producers are creating challenges for deepening the political impact of a movement that is based on social justice and environmental sustainability. The study is based on two years’ research and seven case studies of Mexican and Central American small-scale farmer cooperatives producing coffee for the Fair Trade market.

Following the Renamo/Frelimo conflict and the 1992 Rome Accord ending hostilities, the Christian Council of Mozambique undertook to remove arms from the civilian population by trading them for development tools. The weapons were given to artists associated with a collective in the capital, Maputo. The weapons were cut into pieces and converted to sculptures that subsequently focused international attention on the Tools for Arms project, or TAE (Transformação de Armas em Enxadas). While succeeding in drawing attention to the proliferation of arms among civilians, and collecting a considerable number of arms and munitions, the project encountered difficulties in relating the production of art to the overall initiative. This paper examines the aspect of the project that produced art from weapons, with insights and observations based on fieldwork conducted for CUSO and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

Gender mainstreaming was established in the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action as a major strategy for the promotion of gender equality. As a development strategy, gender mainstreaming requires attention to gender perspectives, making them visible and showing the links between gender equality and the achievement of development goals. To evaluate gender mainstreaming in development projects and programmes requires a squaring of evaluation criteria such as relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, and sustainability, with gender mainstreaming indicators at both project and programme level. This paper suggests a framework for evaluating development interventions from a gender-mainstreaming perspective, with a view to integrating gender perspectives in every phase of the project cycle.

While development cooperation can cause or exacerbate conflicts, withholding aid is not the solution. The issue is how to provide aid in a manner that prevents conflict, so as to achieve sustainable peace. This Practical Note examines how NGOs have prevented and managed conflicts arising from water projects in Ethiopia. The legal framework and institutional settings in that country leave little room for manoeuvre for NGOs, so their scope for adopting a conflict-preventive approach lies mainly in being more sensitive and being non-confrontational yet firm in their style of communication. Different funding conditions, and a more conducive legal framework, are fundamental to increasing NGOs’ effectiveness in preventing conflict.

Collaboration has become a watchword for development practitioners and theorists. Yet collaboration or partnerships between academics and community-based researchers and activists have often proved difficult. This is particularly true for partnerships with smaller, grassroots community researchers, who are generally less resourced than their academic partners. This paper focuses on such partnerships in gender research, with the aim of reflecting on past problems as well as successes in order to develop strategies for making such projects more truly collaborative, rather than a minefield of broken promises and unspoken (and sometimes spoken) resentments.

Decades of development practice suggest the fundamental importance of improving aid-delivery systems and stakeholder competence in order to improve the well-being of poor people. However, it is questionable whether the aid system is able to change its attitudes and values through such partnerships in a way that will do this. This paper suggests that for this change to be possible, processes of individual, organisational, and inter-organisational learning have to be encouraged, in ways that do not sacrifice the knowledge obtained by aid workers in the processes of global management. The paper explores procedures of bilaterally funded community education projects in Ghana, in order to give insights into the working of partnership arrangements as a means to contribute to the alleviation of global poverty. Critical instances from the case study projects reveal the ways in which learning is facilitated, used, ignored, and hindered as the organisational relations develop.

There are a number of serious ethical challenges and problems posed in conducting development research in a poor country. It is argued here that the best way to ensure that research is ethical is to apply three foundation principles. By focusing on self-determinism, non-malfeasance, and justice and beneficence, it is possible to avoid the risks of an unethical, pro-forma approach. This paper discusses the particular challenges of applying standard university guidelines on ethical research to conducting social research in Uzbekistan, where to fulfil all these guidelines would prevent the research from taking place. However, by applying the most basic ethical principles, it was possible to design an ethical research project.

This Research Roundup reports on the pilot phase of BRAC’s ‘Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction/Targeting the Ultra Poor Programme’ (CFPR/TUP), which was initiated in three of the poorest districts of northern Bangladesh (Nilphamari, Rangpur, and Kurigram) in January 2002. The authors find a close link between the initial conditions of the programme participants and the degree of change they have experienced in their lives since its inception, with the most vulnerable reporting the least change. Some modifications to the CFPR/TUP are recommended.

This Practical Note examines the design and implementation of Community-Driven Development (CDD) programmes, using the Kecamatan Development Programme (KDP) and the Urban Poverty Programme (UPP) in Indonesia as case studies. Launched in 1998, both have been praised as successful twin CDD pilots, allowing community groups to gain control over financial resources and decision-making processes. Despite similarities, the paper finds that different CDD approaches have been adopted, for various reasons. By exploring the rationales and trade-offs of these different approaches, the paper offers deeper insights into how CDD principles can be translated into local practices.

Aid agencies provide significant funding for research that is directed at socio-economic development. These agencies typically require out-of-country (OC) researchers to work with in-country (IC) researchers on such projects. Moreover, building the research capacity of IC researchers is often an important objective. This paper is written from the perspective of an OC researcher engaged in building the research capacity of IC researchers.

This article argues for a combination of long-term engagement in providing security, culminating in training and mentoring of new security forces; a comprehensive approach to reintegrating ex-combatants that also benefits civilian host communities and helps to ensure that agricultural livelihoods are made viable; and the opening of a space for discussion of governance issues and revenue distribution that is supported by a revenue-collection trusteeship that takes some of the key areas of economic pillage out of the purview of the state and deposits state revenues transparently into the state's coffers, leaving it to a new breed of Liberian politicians to emerge.

A critical review of five contrasting publications on peace building, including the 2004 UN report A More Secure World.

The overarching challenge facing the growing number of international peace-building interventions is to achieve sustainable peace. This paper illustrates this proposition through a brief investigation of the situation in East Timor as the UN mission withdraws at the five-year state-building mark, and in Haiti as a ninth UN mission is established. Adopting the view that participatory democratic governance will best ensure long-term peace, the paper maintains that to build sustainable peace requires transformation on three inter-related fronts: (a) transformation of the society from one that resorts to violence to one that resorts to political means to resolve conflict, requiring that the elite negotiate and that there should be widespread social dialogue and reconciliation; (b) reform of the governance framework to seek to ensure both that a negotiated governance arrangement between parties prevents future conflict and the adoption of basic democratic governance; and (c) the creation of meaningful institutions that will be sustainable after the mission leaves. These institutions cannot be imposed from outside, but must be bodies that are able to perform their core function and are committed to doing so.

In English only

This article focuses on the debate about the developmental impact of migration on the sending countries. Throughout the post-World War II period, temporary labour migration has been promoted as a path to development. Remittances have grown to rival or surpass official development assistance and have increased living standards in the sending countries. However, the evidence over time is that the remittances do not lead to development or even to higher incomes that are sustainable without further migration. Some determinedly temporary labour migration schemes offer promise. But where the pattern of migration and remittances locks into a semi-permanent arrangement (the standard line is `There's nothing more permanent than "temporary" migration'), then this may be a developmental trap for the South whereby, in a semi-permanent `3 D's Deal', the South foregoes self-development in favour of being a long-range bedroom community to supply the labour for dirty, dangerous, and difficult jobs in the North.

This paper reports on a collaborative research project that shows how participatory social research can be used as a strategy for combating social exclusion. The Crime Prevention Partnership Project brought together dominant and disempowered groups to explore social issues of mutual concern and identify potential solutions. Indigenous Australian undergraduate students played a central role in this project, working with the police as customer service trainees and with the university as members of a project research group. This project became an opportunity to train and empower new researchers who, as people from disadvantaged groups, brought their own knowledge, concerns, and worldviews to a research process that they helped design and carry out themselves. The result was a learning process for all involved, referred to here as multidirectional empowerment. It led to tangible bridge building between mainstream, powerful institutions and a disadvantaged community. The project process offers a model for using participatory research as a framework in which to address development issues.

Kenya is not yet a major emigration country, but emigration of Kenyan professionals and technicians is increasing in importance. Kenyans and those with links to Kenya living abroad are a potentially important resource for national development. It is thus useful to examine the various ways in which this potential can be more effectively realised. The paper first discusses the patterns and impact of emigration before exploring the different ways in which the contribution of Kenyans abroad can be enhanced. It then puts forward proposals for priority action to implement the suggested initiatives.

Global workers' remittances have grown noticeably in recent years. Remittances are now a key macroeconomic factor in many developing countries, representing an increasingly large percentage of total monetary inflows. For many developing countries, remittances are comparable to or greater than total export earnings, official development assistance (ODA), and foreign direct investment (FDI). Remittance flows are also more progressive than these other international flows as they more equally distributed. The relative volume of this resource and its sharp increase over the past decade makes remittances increasingly significant in terms of development. Focusing in Nicaragua, this paper reviews the increasing importance of remittances and examines their potential to bring positive development outcomes to developing countries.

Total remittances from migrant workers (US$80bn in 2003) significantly outstrip the total amount of overseas development assistance (US$55bn in the same year). Many conclude that such remittances make a positive contribution to development in the global South. However, the experiences of women health-care workers and migrants contradict easy and hopeful assumptions about the positive effects of migration. Further, the more economistic analyses of the benefits of migration do not subtract its gendered and social costs when calculating labour savings in the North or income from remittances in the South.

Non-formal education often represents a last chance for adolescent girls who do not attend school to receive some education to improve their health before they become mothers. This paper describes the development of a literacy and health education curriculum for adolescent girls in southern Malawi who will never enter formal schooling. The curriculum was redefined in the light of participants’ feedback and providers’ observations. The health messages could effect change but would have had limited impact on girls’ health practices without the participation of the wider community. The curriculum’s innate visibility ‘under the trees’ was a key factor in facilitating villagers’ involvement and exponential learning.

This paper investigates how, why, and when community-based strategies are effective in promoting corporate accountability (CA) to the poor. It argues that mainstream approaches to corporate social responsibility (CSR) underestimate the importance of power in the relationship between corporations and the communities in which they invest, which limits their applicability to many developing country contexts in particular. In addressing this neglect, the article draws on literatures on power, accountability, and citizen participation in order to analyse 46 cases where communities have attempted to hold corporations to account for their social and environmental responsibilities. The paper argues that more attention should be paid to a number of state-, corporation-, and community-related factors, which are found to be key to the effectiveness of strategies aimed at enhancing CA to the poor.

Economic issues associated with poverty are complex and require holistic responses in order to realise the goals of sustainable development. While business alone may have significant economic impacts, the link between business-level behaviour and macro-level development aspirations is unclear. By developing a sound grasp of how companies understand and manage these impacts, we are better placed to understand how corporate responsibility clusters, or partnerships with other companies, civil society organisations, and governments, can harness corporate impacts to deliver qualitatively better sustainable development outcomes at the macro level.

A corporation has only limited ability to create social capital through philanthropic activity, and in the context of a decline in official aid, the corporate sector is increasingly assuming a de facto developmental role. The presence of social capital assists communities in moving towards sustainable development and may contribute to the business case for corporate- community partnerships. While it is not the role of corporations to deliver social services, their ability to enhance social capital by partnering with community organisations can both contribute to development and work to their own commercial advantage. Such partnerships, whether philanthropic or commercial, will be more effective if delivered through balanced and transparent relationships with community organisations that help to create social capacity at the local level.

In the corporate world, design has received increasing attention over the last 50 years and is now firmly embedded within almost all aspects of corporate activity. This article explores the role of design in development. Design is widely used and understood, within capitalist economies, to denote a diverse set of tools, used to maximise market share, sales, and profits, and support market differentiation and brand identity of products. The progress of two convergent design-related threads is briefly charted: the growth, since 1950, of a view that design has a real contribution to make to social responsibility and sustainability; and the increasing evidence of design-like skills being used in development contexts. The article reviews several alternative models that are being developed and concludes with a number of short case studies, which illustrate these models and highlight the potential of their largely process-based methodologies for private sector activity in a development context.

Since the mid-1980s, aid agencies have endorsed the need to support the development of private enterprise in low-income countries as an instrument for overall economic development and poverty reduction. Facilitated collaboration between firms in industrialised and developing countries has become one of the most popular forms of assistance in this endeavour. Although such collaborations vary in design, they all involve third-party organisations that identify partners and sponsor the first steps in the establishment of a business platform for the cooperation. This paper discusses the mechanisms involved in such facilitation and assesses the effectiveness of the catalyst institutions in nurturing collaboration between companies in industrialised and developing countries. The discussion is illustrated with case studies drawn from Ghana.

Since the 1990s, development agencies and international institutions have promoted private-sector involvement in infrastructure, assuming that this would inject both investment and efficiency into the under-performing public sector. In the water and energy sectors, these expectations have not been fulfilled. Private-sector investment in developing countries is falling, multinational companies have failed to make sustainable returns on their investments, and the process of privatisation in water and energy has proved widely unpopular and encountered strong political opposition. This paper examines the role of this opposition in delaying, cancelling, or reversing the privatisation of water and energy. Local civil society has successfully mobilised highly effective political activity, its opposition being based on the perceived conflicts between privatisation and equity, and over the role of the state and community in these sectors. Such opposition has involved dynamic interactions with existing political parties and structures, including the use of existing electoral and judicial mechanisms. Its success poses challenges for the multilateral and donor community, NGOs, the opposition campaigns themselves, and the future of national systems of electricity and water.

This article is concerned with the question of whether participation in the global economy leads to sustainable income growth. It examines the furniture industry of Central Java, which has grown rapidly since the financial crisis in 1997. The article shows that the exporting small and medium-sized enterprises generated substantial employment and income growth. However, this growth is not sustainable because the viability of exports has become dependent on wood which is logged illegally and risks depletion. Government and donor projects aimed at small enterprises risk driving these enterprises deeper into the race to the bottom. The article then discusses ways to avoid this, stressing the need for a coalition of public and private actors along the local-global axis.

In the last two decades, the private sector has been placed under intensifying pressure to ensure it operates in an environmentally and socially responsible manner. Companies have moved through various phases of response, starting with a `deny and defend' position, moving to `paying penance' through donations and philanthropy, and currently settling on risk management through mitigating the negative impacts of their business operations. Drawing on research undertaken by Oxfam International mainly in the retail sector, as well as in the coffee and pharmaceutical sector, this article argues that the current approach is, as yet, inadequate. Simply mitigating negative impacts through castigating intermediaries or suppliers does not contribute to sustainable solutions. For the private sector to meet corporate social responsibility pledges, companies need to pursue alternative business models that forge connectivity, coherence, and interdependence between their core business operations and their ethical and environmental commitments.

The debate among NGO and union activists about how to improve working conditions and labour rights has been dominated by proponents of specific approaches, arguing variously that the best route is through company codes, legislation, organisation of workers, or sweatshop-style campaigning. This article describes a campaign by NGOs and trade unions that integrates these approaches to improve the labour rights and conditions of UK homeworkers. Its `change model' is to seek changes in company behaviour as part of a strategy to strengthen legislation while also exploring the opportunities and mechanisms for leveraging change in (company) practices and (government) policies: the susceptibility of brand-name companies to campaigning creates an opportunity to leverage changes in their practices; campaigning (threatened or actual) invigorates, and should underpin, engagement with retailers and brand-name companies on the implementation of voluntary codes; and the establishment of a `level playing-field' dynamic means that companies meeting higher standards can become allies in advocating better corporate practices and labour legislation. International development NGOs, with their ability to campaign, engage with brand-name companies, and work alongside unions and workers' organisations across the North-South divide, are uniquely placed to facilitate such integrated strategies.

The global garment-manufacturing industry will confront significant changes from 2005, when the system of quotas established under the Multi-Fibre Agreement comes to an end. These changes pose serious threats to jobs in the Central American assembly plants, or maquila industry. One possibility, however, is that `politically correct' consumption could provide a niche market for firms that are committed to corporate social responsibility and the respect for human rights, and that this might even be a way to improve working conditions in the region. In this sense, notwithstanding the grave risks it represents for the very poorest, the market could serve to bring about changes favourable to working people.

The movement to promote sustainably produced coffee is one of many efforts aimed at linking social responsibility and market capitalism. In the wake of a worldwide coffee crisis in which prices have fallen to levels that do not support small-scale production or living wages for plantation workers, non-profit certifying and labelling organisations are working to develop a market that is sustainable for workers and the environment. They seek to influence cultural and political values in such a way that consumers and corporations in the North will have to respond to them by incorporating the welfare of Southern workers and ecosystems into their purchasing decisions. This paper discusses and evaluates current strategies to link producers and consumers within this movement, all of which involve a great deal of education. It argues that partnerships between businesses and NGOs are essential for broadening the corporate base of the market for fairly traded coffee and promoting norm change among consumers, and discusses the challenges and opportunities that such partnerships create.

This paper addresses the introduction of a public-private partnership (PPP) for water provision in urban Congo. It describes the organisational context before and after PPP and discusses the various outcomes of the partnership, both positive and negative. Despite some promising early results, the PPP arrangements did not develop as planned and the private enterprises ran into financial problems. The role of the political environment in compromising the potential benefits of PPP was important, and the article closes with some policy recommendations in light of Congo's ongoing negotiations with the international financial institutions to secure their assistance for new economic reforms.

Radical approaches to introduce public-private partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure provision in South Asia have been largely unsuccessful. Yet the region is home to a thriving informal private sector and several regional NGOs have become engaged in efforts to involve communities in improved infrastructure provision. Many line agencies and local authorities have devolved some responsibilities for service delivery to the private sector through small-scale service and management contracts. This paper explores the possibilities for expanding and building on these activities, bearing in mind institutional factors, including both organisational structures and the attitudes and assumptions of the various stakeholders. Particular attention is paid to the options for regulating the private sector and the balance to be struck between encouraging competition and promoting improved stakeholder cooperation. Options for moving to `higher' forms of PPP are considered, and brief concluding remarks summarise key findings and suggest some possible directions for the future.

Stakeholder dialogue, participation, and partnership have become mainstream concepts in international development policy, in particular in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR). However, the accountability of multi-stakeholder initiatives on CSR to their intended beneficiaries in the global South is increasingly questioned. This paper looks at how the agendas of some initiatives in the areas of ethical trade and sustainability reporting are driven by what Western NGOs push for, what large companies consider feasible, and what consultants and accountants seek to provide. It describes how the resulting practices and discourse restrict change and marginalise alternative approaches developed by Southern stakeholders. It is argued that enthusiasm for stakeholder dialogue, participation, and partnership in CSR matters, and beyond, needs to be reconceived with democratic principles in mind. `Stakeholder democracy' is offered as a conceptual framework for this endeavour, and some recommendations are made for NGOs, companies, and governments.

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This article identifies the need for an appropriate methodology for evaluating Fair Trade, given that most evaluations to date have been in-house or commissioned reviews and hence not followed a consistent approach. Focusing on the development aspects of Fair Trade, the article reviews a range of impact evaluation methods and presents a detailed methodology for analysing Fair Trade that incorporates standard project evaluation criteria and is based on a wide range of proven methods for collecting and analysing data, principally qualitative but also quantitative. This framework is a modular package from which practitioners may select according to their needs and means, while still retaining an overarching logic. The article illustrates its use by reference to evaluations undertaken in Costa Rica, Ghana, Nicaragua, and Tanzania. The approach allows for a comprehensive understanding of Fair Trade programmes and enables these to be compared with conventional development projects.

The article discusses the methodology and application of the Key Informant Monitoring (KIM) tool as used by the Nepal Safer Motherhood Project (NSMP). NSMP aims to achieve sustained increase in the uptake of midwifery and essential obstetric care services by addressing, among other things, constraints on access to such services. Data collected by community-based Key Informant Researchers (KIRs), are synthesised and used by NSMP and key project partners for monitoring and planning purposes. NSMP has used KIM findings to modify its main interventions at the local level. International and Nepali NGOs have adopted KIM in their safe motherhood and other development programmes. Village Development Committees, with support from NGOs and NSMP, have responded to issues raised by KIM by running maternal health awareness-raising campaigns, working with traditional healers, improving the quality of care, and facilitating local emergency transport and funding schemes. KIRs have proved effective as sources of information and as change agents, spreading safe motherhood messages to promote behaviour change.

Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis With the inability of international economic integration to create opportunities for important segments of society, many Mexicans are searching for ways to forge their own alternatives. These strategies are the concrete manifestations of the realisation that the `mainstream' path of the search for proletarian employment is no longer viable and that a return to traditional forms of cooperation, organised around mechanisms for ecosystem management, might offer greater security and a better quality of life. People are finding ways to strengthen their communities, to ensure that their families can remain in the rural areas as part of dynamic communities searching for a new relationship to their regions, and to the nation of which they wish to continue to be a part. The article illustrates this process with an analysis of a project that focuses on creating a new product -low-fat pork- that can command a premium price in the market and in the process contribute to strengthening a community, providing new opportunities for women, and improving environmental management.

Ever more NGOs are dedicated to the eradication of poverty, while various government bodies are also committed to the moral and material progress of the so-called `human family'. However, the record is bleak. The arms trade constitutes a crime against humanity against which NGOs can make little headway. On the contrary, single-issue campaigns, for example on landmines, may in fact distract them from the wider issues. Similarly, through their involvement in humanitarian missions, often mounted mainly to appease the consciences of citizens in the rich world, NGOs may unwittingly be helping to maintain the deeply unjust world order. We need to reflect upon what NGOs actually do, rather than on ways to increase their efficiency, given that NGO actions alone cannot secure human rights. If NGOs do not engage in self-critical reflection, the poor will be always with us, so will NGOs, and the system will not change for the better.

The Royal Kingdom of Bhutan has not only a unique national environment but provides researchers with an opportunity to observe effective development in a relatively uncomplicated and controlled system that is government-led rather than donor-driven. This paper reviews recent progress in Bhutan's development and sees two inhibitors to this seemingly `ideal' situation: first, internal tensions between Drukpa and Nepali ethnic groups; and second, the impact of Bhutan's opening itself up to external influence through media and the Internet, supported by a willing donor community. Future developments in Bhutan could act as a useful barometer for global events.

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Legal reforms are increasingly seen as essential in combating various constraints women face in relation to property and inheritance. These efforts are reinforced by commitments countries have made by adopting such treaties as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and by the incorporation into their constitutions of various Bills of Rights that recognise women's rights. It is expected that such commitments will reduce discriminatory practices and promote the upholding of women's rights. Based on findings of a study on women's property and inheritance rights in Malawi, this paper discusses the role of District Assemblies in the administration and adjudication of women's inheritance claims. It shows that the whole system is a fertile ground for opportunism and contributes significantly to undermining such rights. The paper illustrates that while human rights legislation plays an important role in the upholding of women's rights, the realisation of these entitlements requires that critical attention be paid to the institutions and administrative systems that are responsible for implementation. It is through these operations of the state that people experience law as practice.

The article shares some ideas about community-based natural resource management programmes (CBNRM), which focus on three areas: rural development, nature conservation, and strengthening of local governance. Arguing that the prerequisites of a successful CBNRM programme are a favourable legislative context, a self-defined community, and the absence of basic felt needs, the article discusses the initial experiences of such a programme in Mozambique. It shows the rather slow response of an inland community that has some forest resources, but which is focusing on economic gains with minimum engagement of its own. By contrast, a fishing community was immediately inspired by the programme, organising itself into co-management committees and starting to use its already over-fished resources sustainably. The two cases show that CBNRM programmes are not universal blueprints but have to be adapted to each specific situation.

Since March 2000, in partnership with the Women's Centre of Montreal and other units at Montreal universities, McGill's Centre for Developing-Area Studies has carried out an action-research programme on gender and human security issues in the context of war and reconstruction. Our interdisciplinary team of researchers and activists has been working locally with women refugees, asylum-seekers, and immigrants from various countries experiencing armed conflict, and internationally with women's organisations primarily in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Combining human security - the protection of civilians across borders - and gender - the different ways in which women and men are affected -- allows us to analyse the impact of gender inequality on the continued insecurity in war-torn societies. Our action-research in a community - university alliance addresses the personal needs (especially untreated trauma) and rights of women while also examining the socio-economic and political context of violent conflicts.

This article examines the role of state in the Joint Forest Management (JFM) programme in the northern province of Haryana in India. In the past two decades, significant developments pertaining to institutional reforms in promoting community - state partnerships in protecting and managing forests have been undertaken in the province. By reviewing the experiences in management of water- harvesting structures and lease of forest area to local communities, the article demonstrates that the adoption of `joint management' rhetoric does not guarantee successful partnerships at the field level. The implementation of the programme calls for a radical re-definition of the role of the state in order to establish credible commitments to the local communities in terms of both policy and practice.

This article explores the implementation of Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour in the mining sector in Burkina Faso. It highlights key lessons from a project funded by DFID and Save the Children UK and implemented by COBUFADE, a Burkinabe NGO. Children were found to be important and capable actors in the fight against child labour, notably in research and lobbying, and the article explores the role that civil society can play in taking local voices to national policy makers and in linking the different actors implicated in Convention 182.

In order to take up the challenge of responding to the thought-provoking insights found in The Selfish Altruist (Vaux 2001), the author brings together some of the threads in the book and combines them with her own psychological approaches to increasing self-awareness in order to put forward specific suggestions as to how personal development and self-awareness could be enhanced for both aid agency managers and frontline workers.

Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. This paper examines the excesses of the `audit culture' in relation to North-South development NGO partnerships. It argues that the focus on documentation needs to be reduced, and greater faith placed on personal interaction and judgement between Northern and Southern development NGO partners. In some circumstances, this is a strategy that can encourage more rigorous monitoring and accountability practices, which are able to move beyond a problematic focus on quantifiable targets. The paper draws attention to similar debates over the public sector in the UK, and the problems associated with micro-management in a culture of distrust.

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This paper reviews the lessons of democratic decentralisation in Madhya Pradesh (MP), a poor and semi-feudal Indian state that emerged as a leader and bold experimenter in institutional design in the 1990s. Despite inauspicious beginnings, political leadership in MP set out to use decentralisation as a lever to expand and improve basic service delivery. The architects of the MP strategy were fully aware of the social and economic constraints, but they believed that through careful design, proper support to build social capital, and the achievement of early successes, the initiative could unlock powerful forces for community development. This article focuses on two initiatives, one to improve access to school and another to promote direct democracy at the village level. The authors find that, while the first phase of decentralisation has resulted in some significant improvements, especially in the area of education, the second stage has been far less successful.

Since Ghana's decentralisation process began in the early 1990s, government officials as well as international aid agencies and NGOs have engaged in efforts to enhance attention to women's concerns and improve gender sensitivity in development processes at the local level. This article looks at three collaborative projects between international development organisations and district assemblies throughout Ghana to promote gender sensitivity and increase the representation of women in local governance. Though, as the author suggests, it is still too early to assess whether such initiatives have succeeded, it is also clear that decentralisation efforts need to be accompanied by adequate resources and appropriate institutional support and capacity building if they are to make a difference.

This overview draws on selected theoretical and empirical works to explore the links between decentralisation and democracy and their impact on participation and empowerment at the local level. Understanding decentralisation as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, the author argues that its potential benefits can be realised only when complementary policies and specific national or local conditions are in place. In addition, it is also important to strike a balance between the local, regional, and national levels of government so as to protect local autonomy while also promoting a reasonable level of uniformity across regions. The essay draws from the author's fieldwork in Mozambique as well as decentralisation experiences in other developing countries.

The author highlights the contributions of four Latin American thinkers and activists in relation to communication for social change. Arguing that development activities are about communicating on various levels, and are deeply embedded in the cultures of those involved, involving significant inter-cultural issues. The author draws on his own extensive experience in these fields, and distils a set of principles and lessons for wider application.

NGOs and social activists run the risk of following the policy directions favoured by foreign donor agencies to the detriment of their own organisational and moral capacity to act in solidarity with those whose interests they claim to support. With specific reference to Tanzania, the author argues that while NGOs readily take action to protect their own interests, they do not consistently stand up for the basic freedoms of working people. In a unipolar era, which holds that the age of politics and international solidarity is over, it is vital for NGOs and other social activists to keep alive the belief that an alternative to the existing world is both necessary and possible.

Children under the age of 18 years represent the largest group of the poor in Uganda (62 per cent). Their perspective has not, to date, been incorporated in the many poverty analyses which have been conducted. The survey reported in this paper asked children between the ages of 10-14 years about their perceptions of poverty, and also about the effectiveness of local government in addressing issues of concern to them. The survey found that children have a different perspective on poverty from that of the adult key informants consulted in our sample; they have a positive view of their own potential role in mitigating poverty, and are highly critical of the current performance of local government.

Issues related to democratic restructuring and citizenship at the municipal level in Latin America have been the subject of increasing interest and debate among scholars and development practitioners in recent years. This study investigates how international cooperation may facilitate enhanced citizen participation in local-level decision making in the region through examination of a specific Canadian-sponsored linking project involving the cities of Charlesbourg, Quebec (Canada) and Ovalle (Chile). The study presents a relatively optimistic account of the role which innovations transferred as a result of this project have played in enhancing citizen involvement in local government. At the same time, it suggests that any such gains may be limited and must be viewed within the larger politico-administrative context in Latin America and attendant factors restricting the establishment of a broad democratic culture at the local level.

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Project monitoring and evaluation in Africa have traditionally depended on the `expert' knowledge of `professional' evaluators to develop so-called SMART indicators. But this expert knowledge has not permeated the various implementing agencies - which include communities themselves. The result has been sporadic and unreliable data and weak monitoring and evaluation frameworks. In Zimbabwe, these difficulties have inhibited the development and establishment of a social statistical database. One weak area of social statistics is information on children. Since 1995, UNICEF Zimbabwe has worked with communities to produce up-to-date and relevant statistics through projects such as the Sentinel Site Surveillance Survey and more recently the development of a village register that will contain simple but vital programme indicators. This paper seeks to document and highlight the thinking on these exercises and the challenges faced by both UNICEF and the communities thus far.

Throughout the world, deeply entrenched barriers exclude women from meaningful participation in socio-economic and political activities. This is not merely an issue of fairness and equality. It has been argued that by expanding women's opportunities, society as a whole would simultaneously be strengthened and this would enhance broader development prospects. Recently, a wide variety of international initiatives have been developed to expand women's opportunities. One such programme is the funding of heifer projects for women. Using data from the Red Cross, this study examines the potential of heifer projects to expand women's opportunities in sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper examines participatory processes in an Asian Development Bank (ADB) technical assistance package in Thailand's water resources sector. The authors analyse various levels of social interaction in the local community, in meso-level stakeholder consultations, and in opposition to ADB's environment programmes expressed by civil society organisations. While participatory approaches are employed to promote more bottom-up management regimes in water resources, the authors find that local power and gender differences have been overlooked. Evolving institutions of resource governance are constituted by gender, reproducing gender inequalities such as regarding water intended for agricultural use as a `male' resource. Finally, it is argued that understandings and practices of participation legitimise particular agendas especially in a politically polarised arena.

The May 2000 coup in Fiji prompted a flight of capital from the country's garment industry. As workers lost their jobs, attention turned away from improving wages and conditions to retaining garment factory jobs in the country. What can feminist researchers contribute in a climate of high capital mobility that prohibits organising for a living wage? This paper applies Amartya Sen's idea of women's `fallback positions' in relation to their husbands to an exploration of women's `marriage' to capital. An exploration of the lives of women garment factory workers beyond the workplace reveals the potential to enhance women's negotiating power in relation to their employers - by boosting women's individual and collective assets, their access to support from state and NGOs, to other income-earning means, and to social support systems upon which to call for assistance.

Mainstreaming of HIV/AIDS is not just about adapting NGO programmes, but involves adapting partnerships. Working in a context of high HIV/AIDS prevalence has a considerable organisational impact on implementing NGOs. As staff, or relatives of staff, fall sick there is more time off work, declining work performance, increased medical costs, and extra training and recruitment costs. Simply to maintain capacity, NGOs will have to invest in changes to their staff planning, training and awareness programmes, health policies, and financial management. It will necessarily cost more money to achieve the same work output and these activities will have less impact (as a proportion of beneficiaries may also be sick and dying). Providing effective support for NGO partners affected by HIV/AIDS therefore has major and difficult implications for donors, particularly at a time when their own back-donors are demanding visible `value-for-money'. Mainstreaming into partnerships requires that both partners change - can we rise to this professional and moral challenge?

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This essay reviews the often heated controversies unleashed by the 2002 publication of Globalization and its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank and recipient of the2001 Nobel Prize for Economics. His critique of IMF policies and other economic orthodoxies, particularly in Russia and South Asia, has since come to be accepted more widely among mainstream economists. The author argues, however, that while Stiglitz is sympathetic to some of the arguments made by the so-called `anti-globalisation' movement, his views are far from the radical end of the spectrum.

This work presents a product development methodology for use with indigenous rural workers. It is based on the revival of cultural and social values, with a focus on the conservation of natural resources. Illustrated by the case of Mixtec craftswomen in Mexico, this paper shows how poor groups can improve their living conditions through innovation and the diversification of their products. The process combines techniques of product development based on marketing, with a participatory focus and continuous improvement, in order to develop a unique and high-quality product that can be more successfully marketed. The craftswomen are now able to plan their production and can evaluate and commercialise their products.

This paper explores the development issue of democratisation from a gendered perspective, emphasising the need to look for the building blocks of democracy within civil society sectors where women play a key role. Chilean and Argentinean women prove an important example for sustainable political development through their roles as Mothers, particularly in the 1980s in the movements to protest political disappearances. The author seeks to demonstrate how these women's practical endeavours have made them an indispensable ingredient in the achievement of real democratic development at the grassroots level, and how they serve as a model for policy makers in developing countries elsewhere.

Social researchers continue to grasp for critical factors that foster or impede the development of social capital. This article highlights some of these factors based on an investigation of a low-income urban settlement in Guatemala. Community activists and leaders, elected representatives, regional government service providers, local residents, NGO directors and staff, and other key informants living and working within the designated locality indicated a complex and diverse range of social, cultural, political, and economic issues that contributed to low levels of `broad-based' social capital. Long-standing fears related to violence and corruption within a historically top-down, authoritarian state were the most significant factors impeding social capital, social organising, and civic participation. Northern-led service-providing NGOs in the area also curbed `broad-based' social capital by fostering dependency through intervention strategies that were external, top-down, non-participatory, and not community based.

Although participatory research methodologies have been widely advocated, most projects do not involve the radical reversal of approach implied. Though defined in theory, participatory research is hard to implement and more precise description is therefore required at the practical level. Here, we describe a participatory research project on agroforestry tree domestication undertaken in the Meru area of Kenya. Continuous interaction between participants allowed the project to evolve from a tree species suitability test, to a species saturation study, and finally to a perception of tree species diversity survey. By allowing evolution through interaction, research results more relevant to the actual needs of farmers were obtained.

The abrupt closure of the WTO Summit in Cancún in September 2003 without any formal agreement dealt a powerful blow to what had been designated as the ‘development round’ in Doha in 2001—and with it to the promise that the concerns of most interest to developing countries would for the first time take precedence in international trade discussions. In this interview, Adrian Lovett, Campaigns and Communications Director of Oxfam GB, talks about the collapse of the summit and about what the future of international trade negotiations may hold. While in many ways Cancún was a missed opportunity, Lovett also argues that the enhanced assertiveness of developing countries may mean that there is now a better chance that the failed negotiations lead to rules that work for the poor as well as the rich.

The pro-poor agenda sees the dissemination of research findings as fundamental to ensuring that research helps contribute to poverty alleviation. In recent years this has led to a substantial growth in intermediary services, such as ‘infomediaries’ (1), networks and websites. Yet the pathway to, and actual uptake by, the ‘poor’ continues to elude practitioners, researchers and policy-makers alike. This article draws out the key lessons of recent dissemination experience, and sets out a new challenge to maximise research impacts: the support of the poor in exerting their own perspectives (and demand) for knowledge-based services.

Conceived by nurses in the hospital of a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, and inspired by Norwegian People's Aid, the international aid agency of the Australian trade unions was designed to give a genuine material base to solidarity with national liberation struggles. Bridging the difficult division in Australian labour politics between the Catholic Right and the social democratic and pro-Moscow Lefts, Australian People for Health, Education and Development Abroad (now Union Aid Abroad, APHEDA) was able to channel funds from unions and the Australian government to agriculture, health, and vocational training projects in southern Africa, Eritrea, Palestine, Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Kanaky. Unlike most counterpart organisations in Europe and the USA, its earlier partners were rarely trade unions. In the last decade, emphasis has turned to work with trade unions: on gender equality, literacy, cooperatives, HIV, and occupational and environmental health. Only recently has APHEDA directly supported trade union training in Cambodia, East Timor, and Indonesia, under pressure from Australian unions, who see workers' rights in neighbouring countries as crucial to their own fate. Yet unions in advanced capitalist countries don't spontaneously understand the humanitarian and development needs of countries, such as Papua New Guinea, where waged workers are a small minority of the population. Unionisation is only one part of the solution. The April 2000 Durban congress of the ICFTU called for trade unions to `organise the unorganised', such as informal-sector workers, and to build alliances with NGOs and civil society around shared values. As a trade union NGO, APHEDA is located in the middle of a challenging intersection. Mandated to educate Australian workers on globalisation issues, APHEDA finds itself often more partisan than other international development NGOs in Australia, sometimes more circumspect. With reactionary national governments since the mid 1990s, attacks on union rights, and the increasing share of the Australian aid budget delivered through/to high-profit companies, APHEDA faces decisions about its independence, alliances, direction, and sustainability.

This paper argues that the NGO position on global labour rights is mistaken. NGOs' concerns over race and gender inequalities and their rejection of the primacy of class in today's global, capitalist economy have frustrated the project of incorporating labour rights into the global free trade regime. Trade unions, meanwhile, are one of the few agencies dedicated to dissolving class inequalities, especially between workers in the North and the South. Until NGOs rethink their position on class, trade unions are the only agency capable of pushing the labour rights agenda forward.

In the early 1980s, support for trade unions was a significant component of Oxfam GB's programmes in various parts of the world, most notably Central America and South Africa. In Central America, this was motivated both because organised labour played an important role in popular movements that were pressing for equitable political settlements to the wars ravaging the region, and because unions as such, as well as their members and leaders, were the targets of repression and political violence. This article explores the background to the rise in funding for unions in Honduras, reflects on this experience, and discusses some of the factors that might change a potentially awkward donor-recipient relationship to one of dialogue and solidarity.

Reviewed by Luz María de la Mora, Trade Representative of the Mexican Ministry of Economy at the EU, Brussels

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Trade unions in India work mainly with workers in formal employment, particularly in the public sector. However, most people in India work in the informal economy, and their needs are attended mainly by voluntary agencies or NGOs. Economic globalisation and the policies associated with it are resulting in the increasing informalisation of work; as representatives of working people, unions and agencies alike are being further marginalised. Paradoxically, this situation is encouraging these organisations to overcome the mutual mistrust that has characterised relations between them in the past, and to join forces in order to pool their strengths. This article describes the background and current situation in general terms before presenting a case study of the National Centre for Labour (NCL), an apex body of labour organisations of all kinds working in the informal sector in India. Its members include unions and agencies active among workers in the construction industry, as well as in forestry, fishing, and domestic work. Such collaboration has not only enhanced the effectiveness of both the unions and the agencies, but has also increased the unions' representative character.

The garment and textile factories and assembly plants in the Central American free trade zones, known as the maquila industry, have given rise to new actors on the labour scene, as women's organisations and local monitoring groups now work alongside the traditional trade union sector. Furthermore, some of these new organisations are linked to networks based elsewhere, mainly in the USA and Europe, and are actively involved in transnational campaigns to improve working conditions in the maquila. To date, attempts between trade unions and these new labour actors to collaborate have been disappointing and often characterised by conflict. Challenging the idea that trade unions and NGOs are in competition for the same limited `space', by looking at the relations between trade unions and women organisations, this paper asks whether such conflicts are inevitable, and suggests ways in which the two kinds of organisations could work together to improve the conditions of workers in Central America.

The author describes the evolution of the garment-manufacturing sector in the district of Totonicapán in the Guatemalan highlands, an area long associated with weaving and related skills. Producers have been shrewd in finding ways to take advantage of changes in the global economy, for instance by importing cheaper fabrics from Asia to reduce the cost of the final products. Producers have thus been able to exploit the domestic and regional market niche for lower-cost garments than are available in the department stores, adapting their output to respond to fashions and trends. This adaptability has in turn generated more local employment and wealth among home-based workers and village workers, as well as among townspeople and traders, and a high level of self-employment. Paradoxically, a factor that has contributed to this situation - as opposed to becoming involved in maquila production - is that the failure of unions to organise the workers in the 1960s eventually brought about more equitable relations between the traditional elite and their former employees and a higher level of mutual dependence than exists in the maquila.

Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. The debate over workplace codes of conduct has created tensions between trade unions and human rights NGOs. These tensions result from the inherent structural differences between interest-driven trade unions and ideals-driven human righst NGOs. The differences play themselves out in how these actors pursue social justice in a globalised economy. Human rights NGOs tend to see codes of conduct as a method to prevent violations, akin to their traditional work on legal reform and human rights monitoring. Trade unions assess codes for their potential to help empower workers, especially to help ensure freedom of association, which will lead to the realisation of participatory rights. In our understanding of human rights as a means of empowerment for vulnerable groups, we argue that the trade union perspective on human rights is a good long-term approach. Short-term successes, such as improving working conditions through outside patronage, seem useful only to the extent they serve this long-term goal.

The proliferation of corporate codes of conduct generates both alliance and tension between trade unions and NGOs that deal with workers' rights in the global economy. Alliance, because trade unions and NGOs share a common desire to halt abusive behaviour by multinational companies and a broader goal of checking corporate power in the global economy. Tension, because unions and NGOs have differing institutional interests, different analyses of problems and potential solutions, and different ways of thinking and talking about social justice in the global economy. There are fears that codes of conduct may be used to undermine effective labour law enforcement by governmental authorities and undermine workers' power in trade unions. The substance behind the rhetoric on this new generation of corporate codes of conduct is certainly open to question. However, this paper argues that, given unions' weak presence in the global assembly line and the rapid-response capabilities of many NGOs, such codes are a valuable asset. Trade unions and NGOs still have more in common with each other than either has with corporations, governments, or international organisations that see free trade and free-flowing capital as the solution to low labour standards. But both need to be clear-eyed about their differences and their proper roles as they navigate the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. Trying to build alliances that span the divide between trade unions and NGOs as well as the divide between the North and the South might seem a utopian task. But this is exactly what an imaginative new generation of organisers from the western hemisphere's labour movements and NGOs are trying to do. This paper analyses two very different efforts working to bridge this `double divide'. The first is a combination of organisations, including unions and NGOs in both North and South, that are focusing on blatant violations of the dignity of workers in apparel export processing zones in the South. This `basic rights complex' has resulted in important victories. A second complex of organisations, also involving unions and NGOs in both North and South, has raised broad macro issues of governance focusing particularly on the anti-democratic character of current proposals for a free trade area of the Americas. Neither of these complexes is without its weaknesses, but each makes it clear that bridging the double divide should be thought of not as a utopian dream but as work in progress.

This paper examines the relationship between workers in the health sector and users of health services as seen through two case studies of trade unions and NGOs working together, one in Malaysia and the other in South Africa. In spite of a history of tensions between these two types of organisations, when they work together effectively, the results can be influential. The Malaysia Citizens' Health Initiative has set up a separate organisation and now has the power to mediate differences between trade unions, NGOs, and the government. The partnership between the Treatment Action Campaign and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in South Africa is providing a unified voice demanding government action on HIV/AIDS.

A comparison of trade unions and NGOs in Iran demonstrates the diverse nature of their activities. Over the last 90 years, trade unions have played important roles in changing the political system in that country. However, unions are largely male- dominated organisations, which explains why some women have begun to organise women's trade unions. This article focuses, however, on the activities of women's NGOs, which are engaged in improving the socio-economic conditions of the most marginalised sectors of society. Their activities are limited and they are not engaged in structural change. However, they are challenging gender-specific access and influence over institutional power, matters that are crucial to the process of democratisation. It is argued that, since many trade unions and NGOs in Iran are strengthening community-based institutions in different ways, their collaboration would have a mutually transformational impact which would turn these organisations into more powerful forces in the process of democratisation.

This article describes the legal frameworks governing trade unions and NGOs in Ukraine, with the latter defined very much as organisations working for the benefit of their members and other citizens sharing the same interests rather than as philanthropic organisations whose mission is to assist others. Trade unions and NGOs are encouraged to collaborate in areas where their interests coincide, and the article describes two recent programmes - one to promote more sport and physical activity among the Ukrainian population in order to address declining health statistics, and the other to address the needs of the growing number of people with disabilities in the country - in which such collaboration has been central.

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This paper draws on five case studies to explore potential benefits and barriers to horizontal networking to promote impact monitoring and assessment of microfinance. Its main aim is to stimulate further discussion of this issue, but it also draws tentative conclusions about factors likely to contribute towards success. In particular, experience from Honduras suggests that network organisations can work most effectively when they facilitate wider use of impact assessment (IA) activities already piloted by a lead member of the network.

Smallholder farmers in developing economies face a range of marketing and exchange problems. This article concerns the organisation of vegetable markets in Ghana, in which transactions are characterised by uncertainty, mistrust and undeveloped buyer-seller relationships. It recommends adopting written standard form contracts to improve buyer-seller exchange and suggests key contractual features. Contracts furnish major advantages over existing verbal agreements by specifying the terms of an agreement by which performance can be measured and improving business attitudes and enhancing moral obligation.

This paper reports on some of the generic findings arising from research being undertaken in the UK, South Africa, and Uganda into the ways in which the management tools currently promoted by official donors are passed down the aid chain, through UK NGOs, to civil society organisations in the South. The increasing competition for donor funds is both squeezing out the smaller NGOs, and also setting an increasingly standardised approach, with the resulting loss in diversity. More disturbingly, NGOs at all levels are increasingly secretive about their own shortcomings, and reluctant to voice their concerns about what is happening, for fear of losing their funding. This environment, and the attitudes it fosters, are not conducive to learning; allow for donor-defined paradigms and priorities to dominate; and threaten to destroy the values and strengths that NGOs can, at their best, bring to development.

In this paper, Asset-based Community Development (ABCD) is presented as an alternative to needs-based approaches to development. Following an overview of the principles and practice of ABCD, four major elements of ABCD are examined in light of the current literature on relevant research and practice. This involves exploring the theory and practice of appreciative inquiry; the concept of social capital as an asset for community development; the theory of community economic development; and lessons learned from the links between participatory development, citizenship, and civil society. The paper outlines how ABCD both reflects and integrates trends in these areas, and stands to benefit from the insights generated from this work.

This paper documents the lessons drawn from several years of practical work with a range of Programme and Project Cycle Management (PPCM) processes and tools. The need for PPCM training, and not simply Logical Framework training, is emphasised, as is the importance of using an experiential training methodology. Institutional ownership of both PPCM tools and approaches are considered to be vital for success. Since so many donors now use PPCM tools, the need for development professionals to have PPCM skills and knowledge is paramount. The value of logframes as a tool to both increase programme/project ownership and communication is highlighted. The importance of thinking outside the boxes of the logframe at the project/programme review stage is also emphasised.

Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. This essay is organised in terms of several propositions for discussion that link advocacy and research dilemmas. Whether researchers can make a difference to the World Bank requires a broader assessment of whether the campaigns they work with are having an impact. While there have been some spectacular successes in terms of halting or redirecting potentially harmful Bank projects, the longer-term significance of these successes is less clear. As the Banks public discourse becomes more enlightened, the challenge for civil society organisations and researchers is increasingly to highlight contradictions among and lack of compliance with its own policies, and the failure of its loans and projects to achieve their declared aims. This calls for vertical integration or systematic coordination between diverse levels of civil society - from local to provincial, national, and international arenas to monitor the parallel partnerships between the World Bank, national, provincial, and local governments. Finally, a call is made for social development professionals who conduct consultancies for the World Bank to adhere to a code of ethics requiring transparency in their relationships with the communities and social organisations who are the target of their research.

Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. Today's rapid changes within and outside Northern and Southern NGOs heighten uncertainty about how to meet new challenges and achieve results. In this volatile environment, risk management is a tool for maximising an NGO's opportunities and minimising the dangers to success. It enables NGO decision makers to think strategically all the time.

This article seeks to contribute to the debate on collaboration between national and international NGOs. It argues that it is vital for the development of stable, independent, and viable civil societies that the international NGOs promote a bottom-up approach in their support to and collaboration with local NGOs, especially among those emerging from situations of conflict or other profound social disruptions. From a study carried out in East Timor, the authors conclude that there is a noticeable discrepancy between rhetoric and practice with regard to such support. The multiple challenges to the international NGO community and persist although many years of development work have offered abundant learning opportunities. The authors argue that such challenges are less a question of standards and rules than of basic approach, attitudes, and power relations. They maintain that if international NGOs and the wider international community do not alter their approach, they will suffocate rather than foster the development of a viable and autonomous civil society in the countries in which they operate.

The discourse on social capital continues in the development arena, within which the concept is examined both as a means to an end and as an end in itself. Strengthening social capital begins at the community level. As the linkages become internalised and institutionalised, the networks created offer both state (weak or strong) and citizens a means of encouraging participatory decision making, problem identification, and problem solutions. As the Jamaican example reflects, development in small island states is an iterative process and not top-down. The paper therefore demonstrates the critical use of the concept as a part of the strategising of national development goals.

The role of organising and disseminating knowledge as a global public good has become a major preoccupation of international development organisations. One area in which they are particularly active is support for microfinance programmes in developing countries. More recently, the microfinance `best practices' deposited in, and disseminated by, these international organisations have been associated with social capital. This paper examines the ways in which the notion of social capital is employed to explain the success of microfinance programmes. It argues that various types of social interactions that are generated around successful microfinance operations are randomly called social capital. This means that the presence of social capital does not tell us much about what sort of microfinance programmes, in terms of design and implementation, should be regarded as good practice.

The results of a field study examined in this article show the remarkable success of a reproductive health education and community outreach project in Cambodia that has been implemented by the Ministry of Women's and Veterans' Affairs since 1995, in terms of levels of volunteer activity and impact of the project on increased knowledge and practice in reproductive health issues among the target population. A key to the project's success appears to be its adherence to principles identified, but seldom practised, such as a strong commitment to capacity building at all levels.

The author uses the metaphor of the development practitioner as psychotherapist in order to explore the perverse relationships of dependence and projection that may be fostered between aid agencies and `beneficiaries' unless there is a clear sense on the part of both parties that the ultimate goal is that the latter should take responsibility for analysing their situation and taking appropriate steps to improve it.

Zhuhai was designated a special economic zone (SEZ) as an experimentation point of economic liberalisation. This articles traces the development of the Zhuhai Special Economic Zone from a humble village to a significant economic power in southern China, focusing on industry, trade, education, and logistics.

For more than a decade, resolutions from the UN and the European Commission have highlighted women's suffering during wars, and the unfairness of their treatment upon the return to peace. Yet the injustices and the hypocrisy continue. Women are reified as the peacemakers while they are excluded from peace processes. Women's suffering during war is held up as evidence of inhumanity by the same organisations that accept, if not promote, the marginalisation of women's needs during peacetime. The author reviews the processes through which these phenomena are perpetuated and outlines some ways forward which could help to break these cycles. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives

The Gender Audit (GA) and associated reports and reviews drawn upon in this article enable an evaluation of how far the intervention processes at work in Kosova since 1999 have been inclusive of gender analysis and supportive of women's and girls' needs and interests. This assessment considers the strengths and drawbacks of various attempts to use and implement gender-sensitive projects. The GA was designed to support the emerging feminist reconstructive politics in Kosova. Its findings and recommendations tackle aspects of empowerment, equity, and opportunities, outlining some developments from community activism as well as outcomes of the international administration. By considering developments over a two-year period, it is possible to place issues of equity and opportunities in the context of change over time, with change at local and national levels linked with developing international dialogues. The article analyses local work undertaken by the Kosova Women's Network to overcome violence against women in war and domestic peace, and reviews international work engaged in by the Kosovo [sic] Women's Initiative (KWI). Many Kosovar women (of all ethnicities) do fully acknowledge their community membership, and recognise the risks involved in talking across their differences to achieve everyday security and reconciliation. International reports and reviews such as those produced in 2002 by the UN Secretary-General and UNIFEM on women, war, peace, and security, as well as the review of the KWI, allow an assessment of how dialogues are changing and what the potential impact of such change might be on policy development and implementation. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives

The fact that war changes roles and responsibilities within society, while exposing men and women of all ages and classes to new threats and opportunities, has become increasingly recognised. Civil wars disrupt and destroy civilian life. Men leave, die in combat, are brutalised, lose employment, or resort to despair, violence, or apathy. Women assume enormous burdens of work and all manner of different tasks and responsibilities, lose their security and their protectors, and are victimised and marginalised. Yet few members of peacekeeping missions have any training in dealing with the civilian population, much less the specific issues relating to gender relations. In response to this, a basic training package titled Gender and Peace Support Operations has been designed for use in pre-deployment induction. This article describes the background to its development and outlines how it is expected to be used and evolve in the future. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives

At first glance it would appear that despite women's vital participation in peace-making processes, they are for the most part marginalised or belittled. However, moving away from the idea of women as outsiders and/or victims, we find evidence of their involvement in projects initiated and driven by them and/or in activities in which they work in equal roles alongside men. Many women in conflict areas are advocating and working effectively with approaches to lasting positive peace that transcend traditional male-dominated structures and ideologies. Large numbers of ordinary women, men, and children are working mostly behind the scenes to achieve justice and equality. Women are very much involved but get far less recognition than men. The scale and diversity of largely unacknowledged but effective grassroots peace efforts worldwide, particularly among women, requires much greater recognition by the international community. This article is based on a research project that uses an oral testimony approach and a multicultural perspective to give voice to women working in the field in a wide range of transformational processes. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives

This paper, based on field research in Kabul in February 2002, begins by discussing how women experience war and violent conflict differently from men, in particular by defining different types of violence against women in Afghanistan. Second, by identifying individual Afghan women, as well as women's networks and organisations, I analyse their different coping strategies and the ways in which networking and different forms of group solidarity became mechanisms for women's empowerment. Third, I demonstrate how, throughout Taliban rule, many women risked their lives by turning their homes into underground networks of schools for girls and young women. I argue that, as social actors, they created cohesion and solidarity in their communities. Their secret organisations have already laid the foundation for the building of social capital, which is crucial for the process of reconstruction in Afghanistan. In the final section, I propose that women in Afghanistan, as social actors, are optimistic and willing to participate in the process of reconstruction. As a researcher, I intend to articulate their voice, views, and demands, which I hope will be taken into consideration by policy makers and aid workers. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development, Women and War: Feminist Perspectives

This paper, based on a survey of benefiting and non-benefiting farm households in Uganda's Mpigi district, analyses the Heifer-in-Trust scheme. Although the scheme is intended to alleviate the nutrition and income deficiencies of the poorest rural farmers through dairy production, the actual beneficiaries tend to be the less poor because of the expenses involved. Such is the fate of many development initiatives in which the benefits often do not reach their intended recipients, with the risk of widening the inequality gap. On the other hand, those who did benefit from the scheme, though better off from the start, were found to be very active and enthusiastic, and it was obvious that the scheme had made a significant contribution to dairy improvement. The challenge, then, remains to devise the means by which the poorest farmers can be reached.

The research summarised here addresses the ambiguities and discrepancies of the capacity building dialect within the aid and development industry. Three interrelated themes are found to permeate the capacity building literature, despite diverse ideological persuasions. The appropriation of these themes within the capacity building discourse is subject to critical analysis. A meta-theoretical analysis questions the ability of functionalist constructs of capacity building to reduce poverty or achieve sustainable development. From a community development perspective, equitable social transformation will occur only when the focus of `development' involves strengthening the capacities of all people, communities, and nations to create a just and equitable world.

Through an analysis of how Bangladeshi NGOs have become institutionalised, the author examines patterns of bureaucratisation and professionalisation to argue that NGOs are part of a process of incorporation that mediates opposition to gender and other structural inequalities. Two important tendencies - the growing partnership between NGOs, the state, and donor agencies, and the discursive shift from social welfare and redistribution to individualism, entrepreneurship, and self-reliance - exemplify these processes. The paper shows how institutionalisation, accompanied by the conflation of civil society and NGOs, masks the loss of member-citizens' voices, channelling opposition through NGOs in ways that often compromise their interests.

Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. This paper reflects critically on issues of North-South collaboration and participatory research arising from a project on participatory and sustainable local-level environmental management in the peri-urban area surrounding Kumasi, Ghana. Rapid immigration, uncoordinated conversion of farmland to housing, intensified resource exploitation, and declining water quality and availability are particular problems there. Collaborative research arrangements with local partners as well as sustained participatory relations with selected village communities were central to this project. More generally, the paper reflects on institutional issues relating to the dichotomy between research and development assistance projects, and their implications for project evaluations.

Decentralisation is a policy feature common to many African countries. Local governance is therefore gaining in relevance, though not yet in clarity. Based on the experience of a development project in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, the article examines the case of local governance in practice, grounding this in a historical analysis and focusing on the relationship between local government and civil society. Through a phased process from experimentation through piloting to lobbying, the PAMOJA project develops interface mechanisms to structure local government - civil society relations at district level. Three actors are identified for the success of the project: the external agent as process facilitator, local champions as change agents, and strategic partners for the lobby component. A successful outcome would ultimately strengthen decentralisation processes.

This paper seeks to understand the human development potential of a lift-irrigation scheme introduced by a development NGO in Western India. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which this micro-level intervention has been able to create conditions for enlarging the choices of the poor. The impact of the intervention, captured at the farm and household level through both conventional and PRA data, is shown to have enhanced the productivity of the land, resulting in improved food security, higher employment, and a significant reduction in distress migration, especially among women. The success of the intervention is attributed to its appropriateness to local needs and to the creation of a suitable institutional mechanism. Given its demonstrated potential, the paper emphasises the need for replicating such interventions more widely.

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This article describes an NGO project intended to empower scheduled caste women working in the silk-reeling industry in India through the provision of microfinance. It documents the impact that the project had on their economic and social status over a period of time and highlights the negative consequences of excluding male relatives from playing any meaningful role. It suggests ways in which the project might have been made more male-inclusive while still empowering women. At the same time, it acknowledges that even if the men's hostility to the project had been overcome, the women's micro enterprises were unlikely to have been viable commercially. This is because the project insisted that the women operate as a group in what was a high-risk area of economic activity, with no clear strategy as to how their work could be sustained.

Microfinance--both credit and savings--has potential to improve the well-being of poor women in developing countries. This paper explores practical ways to achieve that potential. Based on lessons from informal savings mechanisms that women already use, the paper proposes two savings services designed to address the development issues that confront women. The proposals call for safe-deposit boxes and for matched savings accounts for health care or education.

NGOs have played an important role worldwide in trying to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS through achieving behaviour change. NGOs have often been at the fore of innovative changes, influencing government and international programming activities. This paper identifies and analyses the evolution of the HIV/AIDS programmes of one NGO in Thailand over a period of ten years. Three generations of programming are identified both through distinct approaches to this area of work, and also by the changing jargon describing the people the programmes are aimed at.

In 1999, with a view to strengthening the JFM arrangement, the Gujarat State Forest Department, in collaboration with the Aga Khan Foundation, initiated a nodal agency called the JFM cell. Its mandate is to assist in strengthening and expanding JFM in Gujarat by providing training, research, and communication support to the Forest Department (FD) and NGOs. The cell commissioned a study to understand the process of instituting JFM at the village level and the impact of training and communication by the FD and NGOs in this context. This Practical Note is based on the findings of the study conducted by the authors.

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This article proposes Bottom-Up Learning as a normative framework for international NGOs. It explores the common but often unacknowledged disparity between organisational values and mission versus actual practice. The first section of the paper raises the question of organisational learning disorders followed by an exploration of learning organisations and bottom-up learning in particular. A section briefly summarising positive developments in the field is followed by discussions of organisational barriers and possible mitigation techniques. The paper closes with a challenge for international NGOs to take a closer look at their learning capabilities with a view to improving service to communities of need. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections

Learning and knowledge management are crucial capacities for many NGOs. This article attempts to answer such questions as: why is learning seen as so important for NGOs? How do successful NGOs actually learn? And what role do key individuals or leaders play in this process? The article draws heavily on the findings of a study of South Asian NGOs, which suggests that an NGOs ability to learn is dependent on its organisational culture and in particular the development of an internal culture of learning. The case studies from South Asia reveal that the creation of this learning culture derives primarily from the attitude of the leadership towards learning: at the heart of a learning organisation is a learning leader.

Change is driven not only by good ideas, but also by disagreement and frustration. This article takes, the reader through a selective organisational history of the British NGO, ActionAid from 1998 to 2001, looking at events and changes that had a bearing on the introduction and initial impact of the agencys new accountability system. Systematic change appears very unsystematic. Effective transformation took a long time to arrive, and was preceded by a number of failed experiments. It seems that the frustrations of this time were necessary to develop the creativity needed for significant change. The efforts started to bear fruit once the organisation began to realise alignment of mission, structures, procedures, and relationships.

The integration of learning into community development processes and how that learning can stimulate positive change pose challenges that development practitioners have met with mixed success. Who are the most effective change agents, how they can be supported, and how their efforts can be diffused in the community and scaled up are key questions in the community development literature. The authors designed and implemented an action-research project in Western Kenya on traditional vegetables, recruiting pupils as co-researchers. The purpose of the research was twofold. One was to explore the feasibility of increasing the intake of traditional vegetables through a school-based horticulture programme. The other was to increase pupils competence as effective change agents by empowering them in culturally compatible ways. The results offer lessons for practitioners regarding creative means to identify and empower change agents within traditional organisations and encourage innovative creation and diffusion of knowledge.

This paper discusses the implications for organisational learning of recent research on NGO activity in natural disaster mitigation and preparedness. It identifies several institutional and other barriers to NGO learning. However, personal networks in NGOs are often strong, and determined and well-placed individuals can push significant innovations through. Greater emphasis on this human factor may be the key to mainstreaming disaster mitigation and other new or marginal approaches to development.

Organisational principles or value standards are considered crucial for maintaining quality in humanitarian assistance. Research among staff members of Médecins Sans Frontières-Holland (MSF-H) showed that fieldworkers construct their own interpretations of principles and priorities in response to demands placed on them in the field. Organisational principles are important for the performance and the wellbeing of volunteers: they serve as beacons, identity markers, and interpersonal glue. It also becomes apparent that while in practice, staff members renegotiate the formal principles of their organisation, they also adhere to patterns of organisational culture resulting in a number of ordering principles they deem typical of their organisation.

This article explores attempts by eight UK-based international NGOs currently engaged in rural development interventions in Ethiopia, to employ monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems as a means of strengthening accountability and institutional learning. Premised on the conviction that such NGOs comprise loose coalitions of interest groups at different organisational levels within them, the study explores how respondents in head offices, Addis Ababa, and field offices perceived and practised M&E. It was found that perceptions of M&E vary considerably between hierarchical levels and can have a significant impact on practice. Such perceptions are also framed by individual interests and thus frequently fail to reflect the reality of M&E practice. The story that unfolds offers valuable insights into the current myths and realities of M&E among INGOs.

This brief paper describes one attempt to update the programme logic models to incorporate organisational learning. It begins with a brief review of learning concepts, describes the traditional Logical Framework Analysis, and concludes with a sketch of an alternative programme model, entitled the Temporal Logic Model.

In the late 1970s, feminist social scientists began to challenge some of the assumptions underlying the dominant paradigms on organisations, arguing that they reflect and are structured by the values articulated within the larger institutional arenas in which they are embedded, thus reproducing gender-discriminatory outcomes. This paper unpacks the deep structure of one NGO, Utthan, based in Gujarat, India, to understand the extent to which it is an engendering organisation. It suggests that while gender-sensitive leadership, training, and resources play a critical role in addressing gender equity in development practice, organisational transformation is a much harder and longer process requiring sustained commitment from the leadership, staff, and funding partners.

The Learning Organisation (LO) is both a concept and a particular methodology within the larger domain of Organisational Development (OD). To fully appreciate the premises of LO, it is necessary to fall back on the main premises of OD, beginning with the view of the organisation as an open system. Many of the established concepts of systems science as applied to organisational systems such as system robustness, system intelligence, and system proactivity have a direct bearing on the capacity for continuous learning in the organisation. Moving on from concepts to action, an organisation needs a set of working practices to acquire the characteristics of a Learning Organisation. One particularly useful gateway for the LO process is a comprehensive performance management system that compels the organisations membership to re-examine ideas of performance and the assumptions about organisational processes underlying management practices. The gateway follows the Action-Research paradigm and appears well suited to non-profit development NGOs.

Many organisations do not learn. There are many reasons for this, and a lack of donor support tends to be cited as the greatest of these. But this is not the primary reason for a lack of learning. We fail to learn because we are unable to see the importance of doing so. We become so embroiled in our busy-ness, our self-inflicted demands for action, that we have ceased to value learning. And we have lost sight of the fact that without learning, our action is doomed to ineffectiveness. If we are about development and cannot measure how we are doing, how can we develop a rigorous and effective practice?

The concept of Learning Organisations is gaining prominence in the non-profit sector. Most organisations see the concept as a means of attaining organisational change for greater impact on development. While the principles of organisational learning (i.e. team learning, shared vision, common goal and strategy) seem to have produced impressive results in the private sector and some non-profit organisations, the question is whether these principles can be adapted with similar results in complex bilateral programmes. This article explores this question in relation to a programme between the Dutch and Kenyan governments in Keiyo Marakwet. It analyses the process of institutionalising participation as both a learning and a conflict-generating process. In the highly politicised context of bilateral programmes, learning is not necessarily carried forward from one phase to the next due to rapid changes in actors, national politics, diplomatic considerations, and the international development agenda.

This paper is based on a small micro-level study carried out to assess the impact of recent socio-economic changes in Tajikistan on the livelihoods and well-being of women in Gorno-Badakhshan. It examines the recent involvement of women in trading and informal economic activity with a focus on the trade-offs that women have faced as a result. It argues that the shift towards a market economy in a depressed economic environment has resulted in increasing socio-economic differentiation, insecure livelihoods, and declining social capital. Women's involvement in trading along with the withdrawal of the state from basic social services have increased women's workload. Women's participation in the political sphere is declining from an already low base. Increasing material poverty and multiple roles and responsibilities have made it difficult for women to take up opportunities for public participation, even at a local level. It concludes that there are structural barriers to reducing poverty in Gorno-Badakhshan and raises questions about the possibilities for disadvantaged groups and regions to benefit from a strongly market-based development paradigm.

Gender experts who formulate planning frameworks, and strategies for mainstreaming gender issues in organisational policies and programmes usually characterise non-expert policy makers and planners as either active resisters or passive implementers rather than as capable change agents. Because of this, more resistance to gender mainstreaming is encountered than is necessary, and mainstreaming programmes often fail to take into account the needs and contributions of planners as stakeholders. The paper discusses these shortcomings and presents cases from the UN system in which the author was involved, where organisational change and mainstreaming were based on stakeholder participation that began to overcome some commonly identified limitations. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections

This paper is based on the authors' analytical study of the experiences of participatory development interventions in Mozambique, which compared how different projects interpreted and applied the concept and identified the problems encountered and lessons learnt in using such approaches.

Two energy development projects were examined as the basis of recommending improvements in how resettlement issues are handled. One of these illustrated the [INS: following :INS] problems: lack of a proper communication channel from the implementing body to the local residents; the failure to address the resettlers' own preferences; the compensation scheme for the resettlers did not allow them to re-build their livelihoods; employment of local people in project-related activities was only marginal; and the development of communities and local industry failed to benefit the resettlers.

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Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. International funding of civil society organisations within the framework of support for democratisation processes has increased significantly in recent years. Yet this raises a set of questions quite apart from the effectiveness of the activities of the recipient organisations. Who are these groups? Whom do they represent? What effect does international funding have on their organisational workings and their rootedness in their local societies and political systems? This article presents the results of a survey that examined the sources of financing, level of organisation, domestic constituencies, and relationships to political parties of 16 civil society groups in Latin America that received support from the National Endowment for Democracy in 1999. It finds that while the groups demonstrate a remarkable diversity in their sources of funding, all of them receive the lion's share of financing from international donors. The author argues, however, that given the scant possibilities for domestically generated funding, this dependence is to be expected. The article concludes with a series of questions about the meaning of international support for local groups in developing democracies and the potential effects it may have on de-linking such groups from their broader political and party system.

The article investigates the impact of anthropology consultancy activities in the UK university sector and the role of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) as a major provider of consultancy work. DFID and other donors see anthropology consultancy as useful primarily in the delivery of technical assistance to Third World projects with a community or social development dimension. The article points to tensions both between UK-based consultancy and `grassroots' development in the Third World, and between applied anthropology and the relative autonomy of anthropology as an academic discipline. The author suggests that a necessary precondition for understanding the contribution of anthropology to policy is the need to overcome the unwillingness by practitioners to question politically the power relationships within which the social sciences, anthropology, and commissioned activities themselves are located. The primary purpose of the paper is to open up a debate on the relationship between power, knowledge, empowerment, and consultancy work.

The author asks what'win-win'public policies can substantially reduce the percentage of people who live in absolute poverty and enable the poor to become richer even if the rich also become richer.

Inadequate household income due to degraded resources and limited opportunities has led to migration, malnutrition, and poor quality of life among tribals in India. These problems have been effectively tackled by enabling people to re-build their resource base, and by strengthening local action through Gram Vikas Mandals (village development forums) and developing human resources at village level. The orchard programme described in this paper currently reaches more than 11,000 families and 4000 ha of marginal lands are converted into orchards. It has helped people to plan further development actions, improve their knowledge and risk-taking ability, and build social cohesiveness. Thus, it has ensured that tribals' wellbeing is linked with that of the ecosystem. This time-bound, result-oriented programme is now recognised as a model for development of tribals and rural poor and is run by BAIF Development Research Foundation and sponsored by the Government of Germany through KfW and NABARD, India.

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This article focuses on performance measurement in the democracy and governance (DG) programme of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in its Zimbabwe mission. The article tells the story of one qualitative indicator used for measuring progress, namely the 'Advocacy Index.' It traces the history of this indicator, from rationale and concept through the early stages of implementation. The article discusses the problems of quantitative measurement and observes that there have been a number of suggested 'qualitative' responses. It goes on to describe the introduction of the Advocacy Index by USAID mission and the responses of its Zimbabwean partners, and draws out some tentative lessons and questions raised by the experience.

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Never before has the Bolivian state made such a serious effort to promote peasant participation in local development. In 1994, it promulgated the Law of Popular Participation which institutionalised a Participatory Municipal Planning methodology. While fully recognising its progressive nature, it is not too hard to discover authoritarian flaws within this methodology. The authors argue that the concept of participation should be viewed as `negotiation' in order to increase the scope of peasant participation in the planning process. This in turn implies some major methodological changes, but would result in Municipal Development Plans with the flexibility to account for the specific situations of the Bolivian peasantry.

There is a widely recognised need for innovative institutional arrangements to provide financial services to poor people, and numerous efforts have been made to that end. These have ranged from modifying the services provided by existing banks to the promotion of people-centred systems. Programmes addressing the latter have tended to emphasise a broad development approach, with financial services as one of several interrelated activities. This article discusses the main features of organisation and operation in people-centred systems, explores the meaning of social mobilisation in this context, indicates a range of benefits that such systems may generate, and illustrates their features, activities, and benefits through one case study.

In the absence of a cohesive and controlling government in Afghanistan, NGOs have taken over much of the work in the economic and social arena, becoming, by proxy, the makers of policy and directors of practice. However the unpredictable yet growing power of the Taliban leads NGOs to put off confronting the policies of the government in favour of maintaining their own influence and implementing projects. The time has come for NGOs to abandon this proxy role, and seek to engage constructively with the dynamics of the emerging government. This paper describes seven small ways for microfinance to acquire the virtues of informal finance, which are commonly perceived as slashed transaction costs, supply of not just loans but also savings and implicit insurance, sensitivity to the constraints faced by women, substitution of confidence in character for physical collateral, socially enforced and/or self-enforced contracts, and sequences of repeated transactions.

Economies based on solidarity and mutual support, and which are geared to human development and social justice, represent the basis of an alternative to the neo-liberal model that is driving the current globalisation process, and which tends to destroy local initiative and expression. The author draws on long experience in southern Mexico to describe this alternative economic vision.

Investments in process-oriented and farmer-participatory research have led to the emergence of sustainable agroforestry solutions to the problems of land degradation, poverty, and food insecurity in rural areas. Thousands of farmers in diverse ecoregions have taken up innovations that demonstrate the potential of agroforestry. This paper highlights the importance of institutional change through illustrating the approach taken by the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry to scale up adoption and impact of innovations. Eight focal areas of intervention constitute the key elements of a development strategy aimed at providing 80 million poor people in rural areas with better livelihood options by 2010.

The case studies demonstrate the breadth and richness in approaches to and lessons learned from scaling up. A key lesson is that scaling up is far more complex than simply transferring information and planting material; it entails building community-level institutional capacity for promoting and sustaining the innovation process. An overarching problem is that there is a paucity of research on the scaling up process. Careful assessments of the relative costs and benefits and advantages and disadvantages of different strategies are often possible and can greatly strengthen the effectiveness of scaling up. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Agroforestry: Scaling Up the Impacts of Research

Valuable tree genetic resources are declining around many farming communities in the Peruvian Amazon, limiting farmers' options for economic development. The International Centre for Research in Agroforestry is working with farming communities to increase productivity and long-term sustainability of their forests, and to empower them to conserve tree genetic resources. This paper describes some principles of participatory tree domestication, and how researchers are working with farmers to select improved planting materials, reduce the risk of poor tree adaptation, produce and deliver high-quality planting material, and scale up participatory tree domestication. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Agroforestry: Scaling Up the Impacts of Research

This paper describes developments in forestry extension in two districts of Kenya conducted under the auspices of the Nakuru and Nyandarua Forestry Extension Project 1990-1995 and the subsequent influence of those developments on extension policy pertaining to agroforestry in Kenya. It provides examples of innovative aspects within a conventional service- delivery programme and describes in some detail the successes, weaknesses, and opportunities of the pilot activities using a participatory extension methodology. These activities, together with others piloted in the country, have contributed to conceptualising the bottom-up planning approaches that underpin the National Agricultural Extension and Livestock Programme, a government programme that, in conjunction with the ongoing government restructuring, has replaced the previously dominant national approach of Training and Visit. The current programme relies on interdisciplinary and participatory planning in focal areas. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Agroforestry: Scaling Up the Impacts of Research

This paper describes the structure and impacts of a development project in Nagaland, India. The project was a large-scale experiment in participatory development that emphasised local technology based on farmer-led testing of agroforestry, where farmers themselves select agroforestry technologies, implement the field tests and assume responsibility for disseminating the results locally. This assessment suggests that agroforestry has spread rapidly and been primarily adopted on land that otherwise would have been used by traditional farmers for swidden agriculture. Thus, Nagaland appears to be on a path to intensifying its land use, based on agroforestry, which is likely to brake deforestation rates. The high rate of scaling up was due to an effective property rights system, access to a large and growing timber market, a continual process of internal monitoring and evaluation, provision of low-cost seeds and seedlings, and a participatory project strategy with interventions based on flexibility and community empowerment. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Agroforestry: Scaling Up the Impacts of Research

Sustainable land use is critical for the development of the Philippines uplands, where about 18 million people live. This paper relates our experiences using a participatory approach to develop agroforestry practices and institutions for conservation farming that ensure food security, alleviate poverty and protect the environment in Claveria, Northern Mindanao, Philippines. We found that natural vegetative strips provide a simple solution to the technical constraints of soil conservation on slopes. These are buffer strips, laid out on the contour, in which natural vegetation is allowed to regrow into a thick, protective cover. The strips also provide a foundation for developing more complex agroforestry systems including fodder, fruit and timber trees. The tremendous surge in adoption of these systems has been enhanced by the Landcare approach. Landcare is a movement of farmer-led organizations that share knowledge about sustainable and profitable agriculture on the sloping lands while conserving the natural resources. The Landcare movement is spreading rapidly to many municipalities in Mindanao and Visayan islands. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Agroforestry: Scaling Up the Impacts of Research

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Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. Sub-standard and insecure housing conditions are recognised as a crucial aspect of urban poverty. In most large cities in the developing world, the formal market serves only a minority of the population. It is estimated that between 30 and 70 per cent live in `irregular' settlements, and that up to 85 per cent of the new housing stock is produced in an extra-legal manner, with severe social and environmental consequences. John Turner's ground-breaking work and the first Habitat conference in 1976 marked a paradigm shift towards an enabling and participatory approach to housing provision. However, little progress has been made in translating the new paradigm into practical and sustainable policies. Relocation schemes, social housing, slum upgrading, and sites and services are beset by two related problems: first, they are far too small-scale to serve the growing demand, and second, products are far too expensive to be affordable for low-income groups. The paper states that the informal sector's strategy of incremental development and improvement of housing and infrastructure can be incorporated into public policies, and introduces cases from the Philippines and Pakistan as best practices in this direction. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities

Large areas of Zimbabwean cites still reflect colonial planning traditions designed to promote racial segregation, which no longer adequately meet the demands of urban areas which are doubling in size every 10 to 15 years. This paper looks at the political, economic, and social influences on urban space production and use in Harare, and the extent to which the planning and regulatory system accommodates competing demands on public space in a fast-growing city. It argues that urban space is a crucial resource for poor households that cannot be ignored in the context of sustainable development, and that the failure of official policy and regulations to recognise its importance inhibits the ability of the urban poor to help themselves. Policy initiatives to redress this balance are explored. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities

The Casa Propia programme of the Buenos Aires City Government is an innovative case of public-private financing of social housing. It aims to encourage investors to build housing on private land for sale to low-income buyers receiving `soft' credits from the state. The Casa Propia experience suggests that in the South, where states tends to lack consolidated `social contingency networks', the design of housing programmes that are theoretically sustainable for low-income groups tends to give priority to financial variables over social and environmental concerns. This creates contradictions within such programmes that result in negative social and environmental impacts. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities

The MOLAND methodology adopts earth observation techniques combined with geo-processing tools and statistical data to monitor environmental and morphological changes in urban areas. The methodology is an aid to understanding urban development processes as well as a tool for planning. The MOLAND methodology provides detailed territorial information at a regional scale, enabling development agencies accurately to derive specific environmental indicators, and to improve existing urban sustainability indicators. This article describes the kinds of information that can be produced with the MOLAND methodology, efforts to develop comparable data series over time in different locations, and applications of these data to planning tasks involving population growth, mobility and security, strategic and environmental impact assessment on a large scale, and urban sprawl. Recent experiences in applying the methodology to Eastern European and Third World cities are discussed. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities

As part of a human rights education campaign, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) fixed 700,000 posters throughout Bangladesh. This met with opposition from religious organisations. This paper investigates the nature and cause of the backlash and sets out strategies for how development organisations can achieve their objectives in the face of opposition. The opposition was found to be in response to interpretations of the posters based on the Holy Koran and Islamic practices, and a perceived intrusion into the professional territory of religious organisations, which affected the socio-economic interests of these organisations' representatives. It was therefore concluded that development organisations should pre-empt such opposition by spelling out their objectives to potential critics, and formulating programmes that do not provide scope for opponents to undermine their development activities. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities

Democratisation, structural adjustment, state reform (including decentralisation), and liberalisation of the economy (including privatisation) have brought about dramatic changes in the nations, societies, and cities of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). As central governments devolve greater responsibilities to them, local governments are obliged to perform new roles and strengthen their managerial capacity to cope with increasing urban problems and popular demands. In response to the state's inability to address local problems, there has been a flourishing of civil society organisations (CSOs) engaging in self-help initiatives, building social networks and mutual support groups in order to meet their basic needs. To deepen democracy and promote popular participation in resolving urban issues calls for clear guiding principles and methodologies. These should be based on the wealth of experience that Latin American cities have acquired over the years. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities

High rates of urbanisation in the South have led to unsustainable development in its cities and towns. The form of development that is taking place is `parasitic', in that it excludes the poor and follows the development paradigm of the North rather than one more appropriate to the situations faced in the South. Sustainable development is seen as a measure to counterpoise economic growth with environmental concerns, but it remains doubtful whether this can be realised since the impact on countries of the South of their participation in the global market has proved disastrous. This paper highlights the need to be aware of a country's `carrying' and `caring' capacity, and argues that work towards sustainable development needs to go from the poor upwards. The Philippines epitomises these concerns, especially regarding the high rate of urbanisation in Metro Manila, where environmental problems and lack of services have led to a deterioration in the quality of life. This is seen by the author to be the responsibility of five overlapping power groups - the state, business, the church, the media, and international aid agencies. The latter tend to follow the Northern development paradigm, which places the South in a vulnerable position and forces Southern governments to act against their country's best interests. A new development paradigm is desperately needed that will avoid the mistakes of the past and improve future prospects for the poor and the environment. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities

At 300 million, the urban population of India is still less than one third of its total population. It is projected that by 2045 nearly 800 million Indians will be living in its cities - more than the total population of the whole of present-day Europe. Already, the infrastructures of all the six mega- and 40 million-plus cities of India are under very severe stress. The ground water is depleting rapidly, pollution is reaching crisis levels, the transportation system is in disarray, and sewerage and sanitation are in shambles, all of which is affecting public health and hygiene. This explosive state of affairs has not been adequately appreciated at the national and international level. This paper analyses the programmes and policies adopted so far to correct the situation, identifies their shortcomings, and looks into the new initiatives that have been undertaken to make the cities self-sustainable units of governance and reliable service-providers. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader [13]Development and Cities

In English only

In a largely unregulated NGO sector, Living Earth Foundation (LEF) is piloting an externally accredited learning course in Environment and Community Development as part of an overall NGO capacity building strategy. The programme has a needs-led approach with the design and delivery of the course being managed in close consultation with the learners themselves. The advantages of such an approach are beginning to become apparent to individual learners and is informing the way in which LEF promotes community-based learning.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Government of Georgia has been struggling to provide healthcare services to a population experiencing a deterioration in health status, while at the same time restructuring and reforming the delivery, priorities, resource allocation, and overall focus of this healthcare system. International humanitarian and development organisations in Georgia can exploit this historic opportunity by serving as facilitators and mentors in stimulating a process of positive social change within this reform dynamic. But this process will require strategies and tactics that are broadly inclusive of internal actors and stakeholders, and that can be put into practice by using a range of participatory approaches.

The concept of 'community' became a popular buzzword towards the end of the twentieth century. However, its meaning is increasingly vague because of its rhetorical use in politics, as well as in development, gender, and environmental circles. Based on the experience of a Mohlakeng Township Site and Service Scheme that was undertaken between 1990 and 1994, the paper examines some of the implications of the flexible use of the term 'community' in South Africa.

This article argues that if children were the focus of more deliberate attention on the part of donors, it could result in more effective use of the resources available for poverty reduction. Instead, development assistance neglects some of children's most pressing needs, and fails to take advantage of the long-term benefits to be gained by ensuring their physical and psychosocial welfare. The article focuses especially on the living environments of children in poverty, an area which receives little attention, but which is integral to poverty reduction.

Civil society and grassroots campaigns are increasingly affecting foreign policy. Some of these campaigns are driven by solidarity groups in the North, who are in solidarity with a struggle in the South. This paper looks at the role of the martyr as a motivating factor to participation in solidarity groups. It looks at the pitfalls of relying on a martyr image, including the fall-out from a controversy between two books: I, Rigoberta Menchú and Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Advocacy.

Many farmers in less developed countries (LDCs) lack comprehensive information detailing the acute and chronic health impacts of pesticide use. Even at low levels, the use of pesticides can have significant chronic health implications. The results of research conducted among sugarcane farmers in Fifi demonstrate significantly higher occurrences of illness and disease among farmers using pesticides compared with a control group. Government agencies, NGOs, and donor groups must provide farmers with information describing the short- and long-term health risks in using pesticides. Improved information will allow farmers to make rational decisions regarding the types of pesticides to use or whether to use pesticides at all. Otherwise, LDCs can expect levels of chronic illness to increase alongside increasing agricultural output.

Often the primary barriers to improving women's health are rooted in socio-economic, legal, and cultural factors. Women are generally assigned subordinate status in terms of economic power, decision making, and options regarding education, work, and family. National laws often restrict or prohibit equality and choice within society. Thus, the improvement of reproductive health is not only a matter of effective health interventions, but also a matter of social justice and human rights. This article discusses how the international human rights (IHR) system can be used more effectively for the protection and promotion of reproductive rights. In particular, it focuses how IHR treaties can play an important role in fostering state compliance with rights relating to reproductive and sexual health. It ends with a discussion on how NGO advocacy work can better collaborate with the treaty body monitoring process in order to advance women's reproductive rights.

This paper is concerned with the requirements of microfinance organisations (MFOs) that seek both to reduce poverty and to become increasingly financially self-reliant. They need information on their impact in order to improve the services they offer. But impact assessment (IA) work has generally been carried out primarily to comply with the accountability requirements of their financial sponsors. This Note advocates re-orienting IA towards the MFO's own strategic decision processes, and integrating it more closely with internal monitoring.

Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. Participatory methods are increasingly being used in development work at grassroots level in Africa. Western liberal concepts like `one person one vote' underlie these methods. However, such concepts may not be easily compatible with a grassroots reality in which ethnicity (i.e. superior and subordinate ethnic identities) is an important factor shaping the social order. This article provides insights into the socio-political realities of ethnicity at village level in Botswana. The tension between participatory methods and the ethnically-structured village reality are illustrated with examples from a project that tested the relevance of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) in Botswana. The authors identify problems and opportunities of participatory methods in addressing the inequalities in ethnically divided communities. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections and Development and Culture.

There is considerable focus nowadays on the involvement of communities in planning their own projects. Much of this involvement is in the form of verbal communication whereby villagers inform development workers of their problems and how they propose to solve them. Drawing on experience from two projects in Uganda and Ethiopia, this article argues that the starting point for any project planning in a community context is the current practice of that community. It is argued that if one looks at the community's practice, beliefs, and knowledge, one has a firmer foundation on which to build a project.

The ethos of technical assistance in emergency relief work has emphasised the importance of recruiting people with appropriate professional and technical skills to work under the difficult circumstances of disasters. The authors used the Critical Incident Technique to assess job-related skills that were seen to be crucial for the achievement of the objectives towards which emergency relief personnel were working. Fifteen Irish nurses, working predominantly in refugee camps, identified over 60 different work objectives and 54 distinct job-related skills. It is argued that greater account should be taken of the variety of objectives which motivates such field workers. The job-related skills identified were primarily process- rather than outcome-oriented skills, and the authors hold that a greater emphasis should be placed on the development of fluid as opposed to crystallised skills. The possibilities of using the Critical Incident Technique as a mechanism for feeding back authentic field experience and operationalising effective process skills is discussed.

Stepping Stones is a training package on HIV/AIDS, gender, communication, and relationship skills designed both for use in existing HIV/AIDS projects and more generally. Narrating her experience of a training of trainers programme in India, the author explores the possibilities and challenges of using this as a means of integrating gender into HIV/AIDS projects.

This paper attempts to draw some lessons from the experience of development NGOs throughout the world over the last five decades. It starts by describing the meaning of alternative development paradigm as practised by NGOs. It then examines some of the major socio-political changes that have occurred in recent years, and their impact on development NGOs. Finally, it outlines some key dilemmas facing development NGOs, and their potential implications for their future roles and contributions at the start of the new millennium. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.

This paper analyses the significance and scope of the globalisation process, focusing on its implications for the autonomy of national actors, on the one hand, and on the new demands that global governance imposes upon multilateral action, on the other. It is argued that the current form of globalisation is in fact compatible with some degree of autonomous coordinated social action outside the realm of the market. This allows us both to differentiate between the realities and mystification (i.e. ideology) that underlie the concept of globalisation and to reject the standard discourse and economic therapy offered by certain international organisations to developing countries. If globalisation does not rule out the possibility of autonomous national-level action, it also establishes the basis for more solid and effective multilateral action. The factors that support the need for such action in the future are analysed, action that responds to demands for greater management of international public assets, and to calls for more effective global governance. The article ends by analysing the necessary characteristics of such a multilateral system if it is to meet the needs arising from a new international reality. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.

In recent years, both the corporate sector and civil society organisations, particularly international NGOs, have become more influential in shaping development debates and policies. There is increasing awareness within the corporate sector of the need to demonstrate social responsibility; and growing acceptance among NGOs that business is essential to the economic growth which will fuel social development. This paper shows how the two sectors can engage constructively in order to establish and monitor standards, though it also argues the need for some pressure groups to retain an uncompromising and radical agenda in order to keep the critical debates alive. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.

Development NGOs are in crisis. They are losing their capacity to engage in critical analysis and propose global solutions; to react to or seize the political initiative; or to situate themselves on the cutting edge of those social and political processes in which new approaches and potential solutions might be found. While some NGOs have sought to accommodate themselves around donors' policies and projects that focus on reducing the negative effects of structural adjustment, the raison d'être of NGOs is to have the autonomy, initiative, and flexibility that the non-governmental status confers upon them. A growing split between NGOs' capacity to lobby and do research and their grassroots work reflects a deeper division that exists - both practical and theoretical - between the concept and process of development and the concept and process of democratisation. The author argues that human development and participative and representative democracy are both mutually reinforcing and indivisible and that the challenge the NGOs face is to link - theoretically and practically- democracy with development. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.

Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. After 50 years of spectacularly successful work (particularly in raising the equity stakes, improving the quality of ODA, fostering Southern NGO work at the international level, and organising quick and effective humanitarian assistance), Northern development NGOs have come to a crossroads. Van Rooy argues that the history of the NGO `occupational category', coupled with a changing political and economic environment (the end of the cold war, rising international investment, declining ODA, and vastly heightened Southern NGO capacity), means that most Northern NGOs should close up shop. Instead, a kaleidoscopic rebirth is envisaged, where four key functions remain for Northerners (as humanitarian agents, economic policy watchers, North-South brokers, and corporate responsibility advocates). This change of job is heralded as good news: evidence that the project of global social justice has moved dramatically forward.

Every organisation has certain core convictions about its endeavours and about the ways to go about its work. When these convictions are translated into relatively enduring practices they can be called organisational values. Managing an organisation's value system is an important strategic task in itself, and the concepts and methods for undertaking this task are examined in this paper. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.

This article reports the results of and conclusions from a survey of Northern NGOs conducted during 1998 and 1999 for the purposes of testing generalised criticisms of Northern NGO advocacy and providing benchmarks further research on the policy impact of the Washington Advocacy office of Oxfam International. Based on the survey findings, the author challenges Northern NGOs more thoroughly to evaluate their advocacy so that they may effectively demonstrate their advocacy achievements and, by so doing, confidently invest a greater proportion of resources into advocacy programmes which effectively contribute to their goals of reducing poverty. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Advocacy and in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.

The growing crisis of external indebtedness in the South has become the focus not only of multilateral policy debate, but also the subject of an increasingly vocal international anti-debt campaign, the influence of which was clear at the abortive World Trade Organisation at Seattle in December 1999. Though effective, however, the anti-debt campaign encompasses a range of different positions, which result in diverse strategies and tactics. This paper examines the reasons for and implications of such differences, particularly in relation to North-South solidarity and action, and makes the case for Northern campaigners and lobbyists to take their principal lead from anti-debt groups that are mobilising public opinion in the South. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Advocacy and in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.

The conventional (but false) dichotomy between humanitarianism and development, hitherto grounded in the perceived differences between international humanitarian law and international human rights law respectively, is not merely unhelpful in practical terms but also serves to diminish our understanding of the shared issues underlying the two discourses. There are welcome signs, however, of a growing recognition that all development and relief work is essentially rights-based and of efforts to integrate thinking and practice under one common set of principles. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections and in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.

This paper examines the application of the Local Capacities for Peace framework in field operations in Sudan, and identifies lessons learned about planning and implementation in the World Vision programme over a 20-month period. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.

The concept of capacity building is elusive, and our current approaches are doomed to failure, not because we lack adequate models, but because these approaches are in themselves inadequate. This article attempts to outline some of the fundamental shifts which a new form of approach to capacity building would entail, the first shift being from the tangible to the intangible, and the second being from static model to a developmental reading. Some of the consequences of such shifts are discussed. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections and in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.

While women's movements in Latin America and elsewhere have succeeded in putting many issues that are relevant to women and to gender relations onto the political agenda, and although most international aid agencies have made efforts to incorporate gender analysis into their work, this progress has been neither comprehensive nor unproblematic. This article focuses on ways in which the development co-operation agenda, and the priorities and working methods of development agencies and NGOs, have served to distort the vision and practice of the women's organisations whose work they seek to support. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.

The question of how development agencies should assess their impact has no simple answers and so is often either unasked, or is framed in terms that privilege time-bound and quantitative findings. Describing a council estate neighbourhood project in the UK, the author probes the understandings and perceptions of different stakeholders concerning what they believe has changed over the life of the project, and to what they would attribute those changes. The findings suggest that the impact of development interventions is always contingent upon many factors and can only be properly viewed over time; and that many of the most critical factors in shaping change are intangible and have to do with a wide range of social relations and with human motivation and drive, both individual and collective. The author does not present a `blueprint' for how to conduct impact assessment, but offers some insights into how to frame the questions and interpret the answers. This article is freely available as a chapter in Debating Development: NGOs and the Future.

Literacy programmes conventionally focus solely on non-literates and use a 'learn first, do later' model that is ill-suited to adult learning. Programmes based on existing groups (whether function- or location-based), and which use a 'learn through doing' approach, are more likely to be successful both in achieving literacy and in reinforcing other development goals. This paper reviews the theory and practice of adult literacy programmes.

Conferences are typically organised around specialist presentations and panel discussions in ways that do not foster broad participation or effective knowledge-sharing. The paper describes a computer-based method to facilitate focused dialogue among participants.

The author reports on this conference held in Tromsö, Norway, in June 1999. Discussion centred on the discourse of `gender' and on the women's movement, and the author considers these themes from the dual viewpoint of the practitioner and the academic.

In English only

In the 1990s, fair trade, as practised by alternative trading organisations (ATOs), has evolved from a solidarity to a partnership model. This paper explores the nature of fair trade partnership using a case study of Cafédirect and one of its suppliers, the KNCU in Tanzania. For ATOs, fair trade is articulated in terms of a partnership with both producers and consumers. Partnership in this paper is conceived in terms of a fusion of the market and ethics in the links in the supply chain from the producer and consumer, the core partnership being that between the ATO and the producer organisation. The case study is used to highlight the elements of the partnership that are necessary for a fair trade relationship to 'work', highlighting the importance of participation by the producer partner.

By exploring two approaches to organisational change, gender and organisational development (OD), the author argues that OD is flawed since it perpetuates existing gender inequalities by failing to address them. By contrast, the gender approach brings change both for women and for men and is contextualised in a broader agenda of social transformation. Analysis of how power is gendered is the critical starting point. While gender is not disconnected from other forms of oppression - such as race and class - special attention needs to be given to gender because experience has shown it gets 'lost'. The article seeks to contribute to breaking new ground in theory and practice in order to promote organisations that are both equitable and effective. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections

Educational and societal development programmes in the Third World have paid too little attention to the facilitative and motivational merits of using indigenous languages. From primary education through to development activities among adults, the use of a non-indigenous language may in itself hinder the development process. In academic institutions, more interaction between the two fields of language planning and development studies is needed.

This paper describes the relative advantages and disadvantages of formal Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (RoSCAs), in contrast with informal RoSCAs, as seen in Argentina. NGOs, it is argued, are not in a good position to use the formal RoSCA structure to developmental advantage, since they could not manage the risk assessment or legal framework necessary with formal RoSCAs, which do not rely on social censure and capital for their operation.

In English only

MOPAWI is an NGO in La Mosquitia, Honduras, working with indigenous communities in the region to create ecological sustainability and to strengthen technical knowledge and resource management. This paper presents the findings of research into how MOPAWI has `created linkages among the grassroots, the state, and ultimately the international level of politics in practice.' The strategic role of NGOs, and their ability to work across these levels, is discussed.

This paper examines a Community Banking Scheme set up in Nigeria in 1991, in terms of its financial capabilities - `deposit mobilisation capability, and the value and ratio of its loan portfolio' - and considers four examples of its non-banking development functions. The author believes community banks have much development potential, and, while stating that the Scheme `has had mixed achievements', argues that the growth of non-banking facilities, and increased collaboration with self-help groups or NGOs, should lead to greater success.

The author reports on this conference, held in Tokyo in 1999, which brought together leading development thinkers and practitioners, and finance experts. The main discussions are summarised, often with reference to the recent Asian financial crisis, and the author states that the IMF's apparent neglect of the link between finance and development was worrying, and evidence of the need for its reform.

Spirituality is central to many of the daily decisions people in the 'South' make about their own and their community' s development, including that of whether or not to participate in risky but potentially beneficial social action. Despite its importance, development literature and development practices have systematically avoided the topic of spirituality. This avoidance results in inferior research and less effective programmes and ultimately fails to provide participants with opportunities to reflect on how their development and their spirituality will and should shape each other. The author offers some possible explanations for the avoidance and suggests ways in which to address spirituality in development theory and practice. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Culture.

ABANTU for Development embarked on a regional programme to strengthen civil society capacities for engaging with policy from a gender perspective. An early activity involved an in-depth study of NGO capacities for policy engagement which ABANTU carried out in Nigeria during the recent period of military rule. In keeping with ABANTU's commitments as a regional human resources network dedicated to promoting development and gender equality from an African perspective, the local research team used a participatory action methodology to gather and interpret the findings in a way that privileged local NGO perspectives and understandings of gender and policy. The exercise generated hitherto unavailable information and experiential case study material, and simultaneously identified and involved a core group of NGOs in the development and planning of the subsequent training programme. More importantly, it also furnished the regional training network with an understanding of indigenous cultures and local gender politics. These were found to be infused with diverse local cultural dynamics, as well as with the contradictory legacies of the military's state-driven programmes for women, both of which constrain the extent of gender activism, especially when this is monitored through instances of direct policy engagement. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development NGOs and Civil Society.

The author analyses the concept of social exclusion, arguing that the term has become a label for `another `vulnerable group' with no differentiation, complexity, agency, or resistance'. She instead suggests that we look to broader ideas of justice, participation, and citizenship, to bring the `social' aspect back into the concept, which should be more synonymous with discrimination and marginalisation than with the failure of formal (education, employment, legal etc.) systems.

The author provides a matrix examining gender-based financial, economic, social/cultural, and political/legal obstacles to women benefiting from microfinance and enterprise. She goes on to discuss how impact assessment work can be approached in the light of this matrix, highlighting the importance of establishing the nature of gender relations prior to projects, considering the potential outcomes that assessors should look out for, and carrying out gender-sensitive assessment.

The authors explore the deleterious effects of economic globalisation on people in the USA, and explain the rise of poor people's organisations as a response to these conditions. They look at the impact of economic changes in terms of public policy and argue that the global economy is preventing a growing number of people from being able to meet their basic needs, by limiting or eliminating living-wage jobs as well as welfare programmes. However, poor people in the USA are organising to end poverty, and the Kensington Welfare Rights Union is given as a case study. Finally, the authors discuss the challenges faced by social workers and how they can be most effective in the face of a dying welfare state alongside growing exploitation and exclusion of the poor.

The author argues, using the example of microfinance institutions, that it is essential to build genuinely solid and alternative institutions if development is to take its direction from the poor and vulnerable. He sets out his view of the characteristics such institutions would have, and the vulnerabilities currently seen in microfinance institutions.

With reference to a recent visit to Dhaka, Bangladesh, the author gives his personal view on the spread of IT technology that accompanies globalisation. He comments particularly on the communication potential of the Internet and email, and the tendency of the technology to aggravate existing inequalities.

The author argues that Northern NGOs are increasingly moulding themselves in the image of, and accepting the impetus of governments to become, a delivery service for global welfare. Commins believes that NGOs can, and should, avoid this by reassessing themselves on a variety of levels, including where they fit in complex emergency situations and how the new vocal presence of Southern NGOs presents a challenge for their role. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development NGOs and Civil Society.

There has been growing concern in Bangladesh that access to higher education is restricted to high-income families. Here, the author reports on the early findings of research into the socio-economic backgrounds of students at Bangladesh's major universities. These findings indicate that the average student is from an affluent, probably land-owning, family. The results are worrying since they suggest that doing well in the education system prior to university is not enough to ensure one has access to higher education.

Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. Recent initiatives from the OECD, the World Bank, and others on the subject of corruption have received widespread attention. However, the author argues that the incidence of corruption is closely connected with contracting-out, concessions, and privatisation, where multinationals based in OECD countries stand to gain profitable business. The encouragement of privatisation by the World Bank, and the economic benefit to OECD multinationals from this business, mean that action against corruption needs to involve effective sanctions by developing countries against multinationals which engage in corrupt practices; greater political transparency to remove the secrecy under which corruption flourishes; and resistance to the uncritical extension of privatisation. This article looks at empirical evidence on this subject.

As the agonising over `what next' for Kosovo and Serbia continues, Eastern Slavonia offers a transition experience and timescale from which we may learn. Each case is specific in historical and political terms, and in the nature of international intervention. But questions of transition and minority rights are inherent across the region. Though Eastern Slavonia was one of the areas of former Yugoslavia that saw some of the fiercest fighting in the 1991 Serb-Croat war, few international aid agencies now remain. The 1995 Dayton Agreement provided for a one-year transition period for its re-incorporation into Croatia, under the auspices of a special UN mission (UNTAES). Based on extensive fieldwork, this article details the constraints on the UN's input into integrated social and civil structures, and describes the Kafkaesque welter of legal and bureaucratic obstacles as well as economic and other forms of discrimination that now face minority groups living in, or returning to, Croatia. Without a firm government commitment to full equality and fair treatment of all citizens, the pattern of violent `ethnic cleansing' may yet repeat itself.

The author, the former president of Tanzania, answers this question resoundingly in the negative, arguing that while universal social principles may be possible, the inequity of wealth alone between countries means that social standards cannot currently be universally applied and adhered to. He goes on to argue that the equality of sovereign nations should be the basis for international economic, social, and political relations.

A fundamental question to be decided at the November/December 1999 World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial meeting is whether to support or resist a new round of trade negotiations. The author argues that while many developing countries, and development NGOs, are right to feel that the earlier Uruguay round produced results skewed in favour of developed countries, there is nothing to be gained from resisting a new round: rather, developing countries should signal their willingness to get involved, but only if certain conditions are met. `[C]onstructive, but critical, support' is the only way to realise benefits and avoid further marginalisation.

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KwaZulu-Natal has the highest HIV infection rate in South Africa. The authors here report on a workshop using a participatory approach to train doctors, nurses and Environmental Health Officers from the region. The methodology, an adaptation of SARAR techniques, successfully provided an open forum for discussion, and, the authors feel, could help in developing household coping strategies and highlighting ways health care professionals can provide support at a community level.

Many NGO financial institutions and co-operatives are, arguably, incorporating the rules and norms of banking which, as `alternative' institutions, they sought to avoid. Here, the author uses CARUNA (the National Savings and Credit Co-operative `Caja Rural', in Nicaragua) as a case study through which to discuss what makes a truly alternative financial institution, with a gender focus. These institutions should recognise the value of promoting `innovative services that support social reproduction and food security activities, and promote participation by and accountability to communities.'

The author gives personal feedback on a review of this publication (Development in Practice 8(3)). She argues that the reviewers' criticisms in respect to the book's treatment of abortion and intra-uterine contraceptive devices, and it's failure to consider cultural and religious sensitivities, were unsubstantiated or incorrect.

By the 1990s, innovative ideas such as Sustainable Human Development (SHD) and People-Centred Development (PCD) had begun to shift the development discourse beyond economistic perspectives and the ideological (market versus state) debates of earlier days. This article describes how, despite their promise and the genuine efforts of international development agencies such as UNDP and ActionAid to put SHD/PCD ideas into practice, the conceptual deficiencies of the SHD/PCD paradigm, and internal organisational interests within the two agencies, have gradually displaced the agenda's core components. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development NGOs and Civil Society.

Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. Microfinance programmes are increasingly popular in Bangladesh, and are especially renowned for the excellent repayment performance of women borrowers. This article examines the loan use pattern of women involved in wage employment and the benefits they gain from such loans. It also explores the effects of wage employment on gender relations. Women wage earners are found to value paid work more than they value credit. It is thus argued that more employment opportunities should be created for women as these would help to promote economic and social empowerment.

In 1997, the International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA), which was formed in 1962, came close to being dissolved. The author provides a personal viewpoint on the way that the ICVA moved towards this point: highlighting organisational, managerial, financial, and structural errors of judgement. The ICVA remains in existence, but the author argues that while it continues to act as a promotional network encompassing NGOs with differing agendas and resource bases, it will lack `a genuine basis for a common agenda', concerning itself more with individual members' institutional security than with its emancipatory remit.

Based on her own experience as part of a Primary Health Care (PHC) community development project in Angola, the author assesses the way the project was set up, identifying problems and potential solutions. Greatly concerned with ensuring local participation in and ownership of new health clinics, the author dwells on the dynamics of relations between local clinic nurses, their trainers, and the community using the new services.

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Describing two models for the development of informal women's groups in Orissa and Kerala, India, the author discusses how it is possible to avoid the `top-down management' and bureaucracy that often contribute to the failure of other schemes. Informal self-help groups in rural areas serve to empower women, and provide a basis for the provision of credit and other support for various production and income-generation activities.

The author gives an account of a partnership between a UK-based NGO and the Zambian government, designed to encourage `smallholder farmers to form `cattle clubs' [to] operate and manage community cattle-spraying points on a full cost-recovery basis'. The project's success has been tempered by changes in the external environment and the perceptions of the farmers, and the inability of the government to continue to allocate enough resources to it. The author offers practical lessons to be learned from these difficulties.

This paper examines the potential for participatory rural appraisal techniques to contribute positively to community development and empowerment in a deprived rural community in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. A series of participatory workshops was undertaken in which a number of innovative techniques were used to identify people--environment relationships and, in particular, the community perception of the value and problems relating to the river and riparian zone. The workshops led to the community taking positive action to address problems identified. The study indicates the value and role of participatory research among disempowered communities in rural Africa.

This paper questions the appropriateness of some of the 'help' that has been given in mental health in 'developing' countries, particularly Africa, and examines some of the complex ideological issues underlying different cultural understandings of the aetiology and treatment of mental illness. Some personal experiences, illustrating examples of the imposition of culturally inappropriate ideology in the teaching of psychiatry, are described. In conclusion, some principles of good practice are suggested which could form the basis of a synthesis between cultures, and maximise the possibility of Western aid in the field of mental distress being more culturally appropriate. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development and Culture.

Developing countries with large nomadic populations have found it difficult to cater for itinerant people in their healthcare strategies. Some have tried to settle nomads, others to bring in health workers from outside the nomadic community, both costly and ineffective intervention measures. The author advocates a strategy which seeks to build on the traditional healers' and birth attendants' skills present in nomadic communities, to encourage self-care as far as sensibly possible, and to take account of `community ecology, the definition of an epidemiological profile...and group identity' when planning health services.

When Hurricane Mitch hit South America in November 1998, it most harshly affected Honduras and Nicaragua, and most of those affected were already living in extreme poverty. The author highlights the connection between the extent of the damage from this `natural disaster' and deforestation and bad land management practices, which greatly increased the impact of Mitch in these countries. He advocates a rebuilding strategy for the countries, which reconstructs the economies more equitably rather than reinforcing the socio-economic and political orders that perpetuate the violation of human rights. He makes specific reference to the need to cancel debt repayments.

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This paper, based on a review of SIDA's funding of NGOs in Bangladesh, explores the changing relationships between bilateral donors, Northern NGOs (NNGOs), and Southern NGOs (SNGOs). It compares direct and indirect funding routes between donors and SNGOs. Most SIDA funding of SNGOs was previously undertaken through Swedish NGOs. As SNGO competence and capacity has increased through their own efforts at professionalisation, through wider recognition and support from government, and by the provision of `capacity building' partnerships with NNGOs, these Southern organisations have taken up positions within the burgeoning `third sectors' of aid-recipient countries alongside the governmental and business sectors. SIDA has increasingly funded SNGOs directly through its Dhaka office. The paper sets out to address two main themes in the context of Swedish aid to NGOs in Bangladesh. Firstly, as bilateral donors provide an increasing proportion of their resources to NGOs, how can sound and responsible funding relationships based on mutual trust be built between bilateral donors and NGOs? Secondly, how can NNGOs work usefully in contexts where the number and capacity of local SNGOs has expanded significantly?

What does organisational decentralisation mean? What types of decentralisation can NGDOs choose from and what appears to be occurring? The author sets out answers to these questions and proceeds to analyse the pressures and forces involved in choosing, pointing towards devolution as the preferred option. The author argues that globalisation calls for a truly international response from NGOs, namely the formation of global associations. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Management.

Using the example of a project in Sheffield intended to promote user-involvement and participation in planning healthcare services, the author criticises the failure of the project to actually provide any forum for user-participation. The structures used to set up these partnerships are often too prescriptive, he argues, setting out a framework in which consultation may take place, and leaving no room for legitimate local interests which may not fit this framework. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Management.

Six development managers working for Health Projects Abroad in Tanzania provide an account of a typical working day, outlining their work, their frustrations, and the way they are perceived by local communities, for example. This Practical Note provides an insight into the pressures on managers, who must cope with day-to-day tasks while maintaining perspective on the bigger picture. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Management.

This Practical note describes the work of the Southall Black Sisters, a group, based in London, England, which provides a variety of assistance to, mainly Asian, women who have been victims of domestic violence and abuse. The author discusses how the UK legal system fails to help some of these women, as well as how patriarchal Asian social structures enable this abuse to go unchecked and unreported. The SBS consciously try to challenge on many fronts at once, working 'against gender and racial oppression (including religious fundamentalism and communalism) and...[operating] at the level of the family, the community, and the state.' This article is freely available as a chapter in Development with Women.

Thailand is experiencing the unfamiliar phenomenon of aid and multilateral agencies such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank lending money for internal development programmes. In the economic boom years, aid was neither sought nor required since structural development was funded from the growth which South East Asian countries had begun to take for granted. Today, falling growth and rising unemployment linked to a depreciating currency and weak export markets have meant that Thailand has had to look elsewhere for development capital and to become proficient in managing educational projects. This article describes a rapid training needs analysis of the Thai educational sector commissioned by the British Council, the purpose of which was to discover the capacity of the education sector to undertake and deliver externally-funded projects. Using the Kolb learning cycle as a paradigm of good practice, and an adapted version of the soft systems approach to planning, the paper describes a learning process for developing an action plan to produce a training package for enhancing project management skills. Finally, the paper reflects on the experience of the project and sets out some learning objectives for future exercises of this type.

Urban and industrial growth in developing countries makes the provision of adequate waste management services vital. Public sector-private sector partnerships (the authors describe potential structures for these partnerships) offer one way to manage this provision. The authors discuss how responsibility for public services should ultimately remain with the public sector, investigate different types of public-private partnership, and present five guiding principles for effective partnerships, as identified by the Cairo Workshop on Micro and Small Enterprise in Municipal Solid Waste Management in Developing Countries. This article also appears in the Development in Practice Reader Development and Management.

This paper focuses on the contradictory relationship between tools, always open to criticism as technocratic and mechanistic, and processes of development. It focuses on the tools often known as Logical Framework Approach (LFA) which are increasingly used as process tools by many different agencies, including those who espouse values of participation and empowerment. We assess the tools from the perspective of their use in public action-based approaches, as a means to improve clarity and focus in multi-actor interventions. No one tool can fulfil the range of tasks required in complex situations and LFA is useful as one of various options. We consider two of its limitations. First, it can be used in many different styles, including as a means to analyse public interest as contested terrain, or as a technocratic tool. Second, the focus on viewing assumptions as immutable can limit the effectiveness of interventions.

The authors draw on experience from Uganda's commitment to decentralisation. This commitment is transforming the way services are planned and financed; new associations between local governments, NGOs, and private sector agencies are being created. Much attention has focused on the adoption of various techniques - such as participatory rural appraisal - through which direct and intensive forms of participation can be encouraged in decentralised planning. This trend is critically examined and potential unintended consequences are highlighted. A broader concept of accountability is outlined to illustrate a more inclusive approach to planning and allocation for more equity and sustainability in rural services.

With its emphasis on target-setting and performance measures, the New Public Management appears to offer a coherent and `no-nonsense' approach to public sector reform and the public management task. This article suggests that three questions require further thought: `Management of what?', `Management by whom?', and `How to manage?' It considers these questions using the case of Community Based Health Care and its promotion by NGOs in Tanzania. The article argues that the task of public management is one of managing an arena of public action which includes (and excludes) a range of actors and agendas. Once this is taken into account, it becomes clear that the challenge to all development managers is how to manage more effective interdependence.

This paper looks at the opportunities for civil society organisations (CSOs) in Brazil to increase and diversify income. It demonstrates the range of potential new sources of funds, including the Brazilian public, commercial activities, and government institutions. The role of volunteers is also addressed. The institutional and cultural changes that CSOs must make in order to mobilise these resources are highlighted, along with associated risks, such as diversion away from their representational and advocacy roles, loss of political independence, and bureaucratisation. The paper then suggests how aid agencies might fulfil their responsibilities to help counterparts bolster income, and raises the possibility of more inter-institutional collaboration in what is increasingly a global rather than national activity. Finally, some comments are offered regarding the funding priorities of the international NGOs, given the new income opportunities facing CSOs. The main recommendation is that these concentrate on supporting advocacy work rather than service provision.

In English only

This article sets itself to answer the question: why theatre in development? It examines the reasons why development agencies have been reluctant to put Theatre for Development high on their agendas. It demonstrates the importance of critical pedagogy in the history of the form, which is linked directly to the emphasis placed on learner-centred participation in the Theatre in Education movement and in the techniques of Theatre of the Oppressed. It advocates a central role for the cultural component in any development process which claims to represent the needs of specific communities as articulated in their own voices, while exploring the particular dynamics of theatre as a non-literary form of dialogic communication that creates a `safe space' of fiction in which those who are habitually marginalised can not only find, but also use, a voice to effect change.

Worldwide concern for the environment has spawned a new field of interest and expertise within the development assistance industry. Environmental projects have become the new `darling' of the foreign aid community with donors and practitioners vying for suitable `eco' projects to support. While this support for the environment mimics the attention the development industry has paid to women (and later, gender), concern for these equally fashionable issues has not always been synchronised. Many development practitioners promote environmental projects which accord nominal concern to gender issues. Drawing on a case study of eco-timber production in the Solomon Islands, this article demonstrates how environmental sustainability and gender equity should be seen as complimentary project goals.