Publications

From Users and Choosers to Makers and Shapers: Repositioning Participation in Social Policy

IDS working papers;127

In this paper, we take up these questions. We explore an approach to social policy that sees citizens not only as users or choosers, but as active participants who engage in making and shaping social policy and social provisioning.

Andrea Cornwall

John Gaventa

Voices of the Poor: Crying Out for Change

This book is based on the realities of poor people. It draws upon research conducted in 1999 involving 20,000 poor women and men from 23 countries.

Robert Chambers

From Poverty Assessment to Policy Change: Processes, Actors and Data

IDS Working Paper 133

This paper focuses on the production of poverty knowledge through measurement and assessment, providing an overview of contemporary poverty assessment approaches, and the issues and dilemmas involved in applying them in the context of poverty reduction policy processes.

Rosemary McGee

Dynamics and Diversity: Soil Fertility and Farming Livelihoods in Africa

The management of Africa's soils is one of the major challenges facing agriculture and livelihoods in the 21st century. Policies to address this trend to assume that soils are being degraded on a large scale, and farmers' practices often contribute to a 'downward spiral' of degradation and...

Ian Scoones

The New Dynamics of Aid: Power, Procedures and Relationships

Effective poverty reduction requires narrowing the gap between words and actions, making trust and accountability real within and between organisations, at all levels and between all actors. Aid agencies today are shifting emphasis from projects and service delivery to a language of rights and...

Robert Chambers & 2 others

Sustainable Rural Livelihoods in Bangladesh

This Report is based on research from the IDS environment team on Sustainable Rural Livelihoods in Bangladesh.

¿Quién da cuenta de la realidad? Monitoreo y evalucación participativos: revisión bibliográfica

Resumen Con el aumento en las oportunidades para promover una mayor participación en el desarrollo, crece también el reconocimiento de que el monitoreo y la evaluación deben ser participativos.

John Gaventa

El Seguimiento y Evaluacion Participativos: ¿Como Aprender Del Cambio?

Las organizaciones promotoras del desarrollo necesitan saber qué tan efectivos han sido sus esfuerzos. ¿Pero quién debe hacer estos juicios, y con qué fundamentos? Normalmente son los expertos externos los que se encargan de esta misión.

John Gaventa

¿Pueden los pobres ser copartícipes de las estrategias de reducción de la pobreza?

En un nuevo enfoque anunciado por el Banco Mundial y el FMI, se ofrece a la sociedad civil un papel en la definición y puesta en práctica de las estrategias nacionales en contra de la pobreza. Con el fin de tener acceso a reducciones en sus deudas, se pide a los países que prepaen un...

Rosemary McGee

In Search of a New Impetus: Practitioners’ Reflections on PRA and Participation in Kenya

From tentative beginnings in the late 1980s, Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) has spread through Kenya 'like a bushfire'. In response to growing demand for 'doing participation', PRA has been popularised and marketised to such an extent that, as one Kenyan practitioner put it, 'everyone is...

World Neighbors’ Experience of Going Beyond PRA in Kenya

IDS working papers;132

The paper is a case study of the way that World Neighbors used PRA in a process of community development in one sublocation in Kenya.

Modelling the Effects of Trade on Women: A Closer Look at Bangladesh

This paper builds on previous work on Bangladesh that set out the principles of a gendered computable general equilibrium (CGE) approach by accounting for household work and leisure in addition to standard market sectors.

Marzia Fontana