Participation for Development: Why is this a good time to be alive?

Robert Chambers

Based on and abbreviated from a keynote to the Australian Council for International Development (ACFID) conference in Canberra on 28 November 2012

For us engaged with participation for development, why is this a good time to be alive? There are so many negative trends in our world – in climate change, rising inequality, abuses of globalisation, the glorification of greed….and so much else. But for participation for development, I believe the glass is not half empty but half full and filling, because there are so many wonderful realities and potentials for making a difference for the better.

First, meanings. Participation in development-speak is used to cover a multitude of practices, some inspiring and good, and some depressingly bad. I shall not define it but simply say that participation has implications for power relations, personal interactions, and attitudes and behaviours – and that participatory can apply to almost all social contexts and processes, not least in organisations, education, research, communities and the family. For its part, development can be taken to mean good change, raising questions of power and relationships concerning who says what is good and who identifies what change matters – whether ‘we’ professionals do, or whether it is ‘they’ – those who are poor, marginalised, vulnerable and excluded.

In our contemporary context, four major trends are both significant for participation for development, and easy to overlook or underestimate. First, change accelerates for poor and marginalised people – changes in the conditions they experience, and changes in their awareness, aspirations and priorities. The revolution of the mobile phone in the past decade is one spectacular dimension, but more broadly social change, including changes in gender relations, appears to be more and more rapid. In consequence the challenge to development professionals to keep in touch and up to date is greater now than ever.

Second, development professionals are increasingly isolated from poor people. This applies especially to senior people in governments, aid agencies and NGOs. Many are caught in ‘the capital trap’ – capital cities in which they are imprisoned, held tight by meetings, visitors, internet and the digital tyranny of email, skype, webinars and the like. Field visits outside the capital have become more difficult to find time for and rarer. And when donor staff from OECD country headquarters say they are visiting ‘the field’ they often mean the capital city of a recipient country.

Third, tensions have become more intense between the Newtonian paradigm of things, design, planning and predictability (the domain of the left hemisphere of the brain) and the complexity paradigm of people, participation, processes, emergence and unpredictability (the domain of the right hemisphere). The buzzwords empowerment, participation, partnership, ownership, transparency and accountability all imply changes in power and relationships, but these are contradicted especially in aid by top down standardised demands and the mindset that goes with ‘delivery’ (a prominent word in AusAid and other aid literature). The Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness repeatedly talks of partners and partnership, which added together are used more in the Declaration than any other word or word root (my count is 96 times) and monitor, measure, assess, performance and results are very common, but poor, vulnerable, marginalised, people and power are not to be found anywhere. The 1990s were a time when people and participatory approaches were being mainstreamed; in the 2,000s the pendulum swung back towards things and preset planning and continues to swing in that direction.

So why is this a good time to be alive as a development professional? The fourth trend – the quiet revolution of proliferating Particpatory Methodologies (PMs) – is one reason. We now have an extraordinary variety of PMs. The named brands of the 1990s – PRA, Appreciative Inquiry, Reflect and many others – survive but increasingly now practitioners adapt and improvise their own ways of doing things to meet their particular contexts and needs. ICTs, most notably mobile phones, but also GIS and other technologies, have added to the ever richer range of participatory methods that can be combined with others.

Three Rs are relevant here– reversals, reflexivity and realism. For reversals there is now vast scope, with many ways of reversing adverse trends. Reality checks, pioneered in Bangladesh and used by AusAid for learning about basic education in Indonesia, are one: researchers live with families in representative communities for five or so days and nights, and then come together to compare experience and learning – revealing very rapid social change of which those in capital cities are often not aware. Participatory statistics are another with huge potential for win-wins – outsider professionals or local people facilitate the generation of upto-date statistics about qualitative changes, and those whose participatory analysis generates them themselves learn and change as a result. Behaviour, attitudes and facilitation are more and more recognised for their primacy as drivers for change in almost all contexts.

Reflexivity – becoming aware of and offsetting the biases and frames of one’s mindset and beliefs – is a key way forward, with each discipline looking at itself in a mirror and good professionalism being recognised to require this sort of introspection in order do better in development. It will be a great day when this is integral to all university courses.

Realism is the nub. It demands being in touch and up to date with rapidly and unpredictably changing grass roots realities. It requires recognising and rewarding those who learn from what works and what does not, acknowledging failure, and learning and changing fast. It means being constantly alert to learning from new insights, like those to be published this month (December 2012) as Listening for a Change. 6,000 recipients of aid were listened to, in some 20 countries. From these voices we hear strong appeals for smarter aid, and not too much too fast. We learn how bad the effects are of ‘proceduralisation’ with its log frames, lists, matrices and templates, closing off as they do the ‘spontaneous and respectful interaction’ that recipients want.

The primacy of the personal and personal relations comes powerfully. Very widely recipients would like their donors to be present and to have direct relations with them. Time to Listen reports that ‘Every story of effective aid told by aid recipients included a description of particular staff who worked in ways that developed respect and trust with aid recipients’. The implication is more donor staff, closer to the ground, with continuity, and continuous mutual learning of recipients and donors together. This reinforces a point much wider than aid – that each one of us can make a difference, and on a daily and hourly basis. Many big changes come from many small actions of many, many people. Before Palestine was recognised in the UN as a country, 1.8 million people had signed a petition on AVAAZ, each taking perhaps less than five minutes to do so. As Time to Listen concludes: ‘Every moment of business as usual is a lost moment for making change’ And Gandhi’s much quoted ‘We must become the change we wish to see in the world’ is as pertinent today as ever.

So across a wide front we have more and new challenges and opportunities – in participation for development and through its wide interpretation and implications. In our globalised world, and with all the innovations to hand, we have scope as never before to make a difference. Creativity, fulfilment and fun are there waiting for expression and experience. And we can show and know them immediately in this Conference. So let us make these two days, as we can, a time to share, to learn, to change and to enjoy, so that between us and individually, we can truly make a difference. And as part of this, let us make it a good place to be, and a bloody good time to be alive.

Robert Chambers is a Research Associate in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS.

Read other recent blog posts from Robert Chambers:

• Sanitation and Hygiene: Undernutrition’s Blind Spot
• Ensuring those who are ‘last’ come first: using Reality Checks to inform post-MDGs
• Discrimination, duties and low hanging fruit: reflections on equity in CLTS

Ensuring those who are ‘last’ come first: using Reality Checks to inform post-MDGs

Robert Chambers

The MDGs picked low hanging fruit.  To achieve them,  the incentive has been to go for those who were closest to thresholds or easiest to help, for instance people close to the poverty line, those who are most accessible and so on.   But this precisely leaves out the last, those who are poorest, least able, most marginalised, women most vulnerable to maternal mortality and babies most likely to die.  What this has meant can be shown by UNICEF’s diagram of sanitation in India.  The  Total Sanitation Programme of subsidised toilets was meant for those below the poverty line, roughly the bottom two quintiles.  But they hardly gained at all.  The biggest gains were by those already better off, the third and fourth quintiles.

Let me propose, and add my voice to others who are proposing, that post-MDG the great need and opportunity is to think and act from the other end, with those who are poorest, weakest, and most excluded and marginalised, those who are disadvantaged and lving with physical, mental and/or social disability.  It means aiming to level up from the bottom with equity as the goal and a radical rethink of policies and priorities.

It also means reviewing and focusing systems of monitoring and learning.  Policy-makers need to be closely in touch with what is happening on the ground to those who are worst off, the conditions they experience and their changing realities. It means finding ways in which there can be flows of honest, accurate, insightful and credible information to those in positions of power. This matters more than ever given the rates of change for all people living in poverty, not least with the rapid transformations of global interconnectedness, the mobile phone revolution, and accelerating changes in social conditions and relationships.   Being out of touch and out of date has always been a problem, and has repeatedly led to misfits between policy and field realities.   More than ever before, those in capital cities are finding it challenging to keep up with developments and changes at the grass roots,. This can be expected to be even more pronounced after 2015.

Fortunately, we have a new means for being in touch and up-to-date.  An approach has been pioneered which all countries can and should adopt.  This is the Sida-supported Reality Checks pioneered in Bangladesh.  This is a brilliant and extraordinarily successful innovation.  Many have still not heard of it, but it is beginning to be recognised and spread.  

The Reality Checks are conducted annually at the same time of year by the same teams.  Outsiders spend several days and nights staying in the homes of people living in poverty. Each year they stay with the same families in the same nine representative areas.  The brief for those who take part in Bangladesh is to listen, observe and understand the perspectives of their host families and others in their communities. The focus has been primary education and primary health care, two sectors which Sida supports, but a great deal else has come to light.  The approach lends itself very well to learning about the realities of those who are poorer, weaker and most marginalised.

The insights repeatedly surprise, not least people’s changing experiences, behaviours and priorities. Unrecognised policy issues are raised. Much more is learnt than just about education and health.  The teams have been struck, even astonished, by how much has changed and how fast it has changed since the first Reality Check was conducted in 2007.   The people who live in poverty in all countries deserve that their governments keep themselves in touch in this sort of way. 

A bottom up focus on equity and on those who are ‘last’, and the approach of Reality Checks, combine and support each other well. Emulating Bangladesh, they could and in my view should be adopted and adapted by all governments.  David Cameron could set an excellent and early example by starting Reality Checks in the UK. Though his stay was brief, the Secretary of State, Andrew Mitchell, can testify to the value of staying overnight in a community from his own experience with a poor family in Ethiopia.

We do not need to wait for 2015.  We could start now.  Experience could then be gained across a range of countries and conditions, ready to inspire and inform extensive adoption post 2015 and to make it more feasible for equity and the wellbeing of those who are ‘last’ to come first.

Robert Chambers is a Research Associate in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS.

Discrimination, duties and low hanging fruit: reflections on equity in CLTS

Robert Chambers

The equity day at the WSSCC Global Forum in Mumbai (October 2011) made a deep impact on me.  I am ashamed to admit this.  I should not have needed this. I have been banging on about ‘putting the last first’ for years, but the fuller implications of this with sanitation only came home to me on this day. Thank you those who came and shared their experiences with us –rehabilitated manual cleaners, slum dwellers, disabled, minorities… and Louisa Gosling, Archana Patkar and Nomathemba Neseni and who pulled scales from my eyes.

I am not proud that when sanitation as a human right first came up, my enthusiasm was muted.  I was so imbued with the CLTS (Community-Led total Sanitation) philosophy of no hardware subsidy and of people digging their own pits and making their own toilets that I feared that a rights focus would encourage dependent attitudes and undermine CLTS.  People might demand that government provide them with everything. Well, how wrong can you be?  It depends how you see rights. Frame them differently and  you can see that poor rural people have a right not to be marginalised by top down standardised hardware subsidy programmes like the Total Sanitation Programme in India, in its usual and classic form. Instead they have a right to be facilitated, to be enabled to do their own appraisal and analysis and collectively come to recognise the gruesome reality that they are ‘eating one another’s shit’ and decide to do something to stop it.  Before the equity day, that was about as far as I had got.

What hit me on this day went further. The pieces were shaken up and settled to fit in a new pattern.  We have rights-holders, to be sure.  But we also have duty-bearers.  And we are duty-bearers. But how are our duties determined? They have been defined in terms of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), of building up from the base, of filling the empty glass fuller, of achieving targets.  But even achieving the MDG targets would leave hundreds of millions of people still without even the most basic sanitation, still without hygienic behaviour, still suffering the multiple deprivations of Open Defecation (OD) and the horrendous and often cumulative debilitations and sufferings of multiple faecally-related infections.  Not only that, but what does striving for the MDGs in sanitation imply? It implies going for the easy ones, picking the low-hanging fruit. That’s how you achieve targets (or minimise shortfalls).  And that implies neglecting, leaving out, not serving, the more difficult, more challenging, and more deprived ‘last’ whose need is so often greater.  For achieving targets, those who are last are not cost-effective.

And who are these last?  Well, the UNICEF quintile bar charts show how the poor and rich compare: and among these, the charts for India are a stark and shocking indictment of a decade of programme failure on a mega scale: the last who were meant to be served –like the bottom two quintiles – have been barely touched. Then consider who these last are.  Someone said that half of humankind are in some way disabled or specially vulnerable.  I found that difficult to believe until I began to think it through.  Consider who they include: the very poor and destitute; those with the many forms of physical or mental disabilities; people living with HIV/AIDS; those who suffer discrimination – sex workers, LGBTs, low status minorities…; those exposed to and living in insanitary slums and other ‘places of the poor’;  migrant workers, refugees, internally displaced people, and other distress migrants; the chronically sick; and more and more, the infirm aged (unable to walk or walk far, unable to squat…) who are a growing proportion of humankind.  And then, what about vulnerable children?  And all this before considering discrimination against females, or menstrual hygiene. There are shocking answers to questions too, questions I had not asked myself.  How do blind people manage with OD?  Or people who have to crawl? Do they have to go where others go?  Do they get the stuff on their hands? How do they clean up?

As long as any of these ‘last’ are exposed or deprived in such ways, and lack proper access, are we as duty-bearers discriminating by default?  That was the question Archana threw out at the end.  And it will not go away.

So I am in a new space.  With renewed anger.  And asking what the implications are for CLTS. Two stand out straight away. First, with rural CLTS, triggering and/or early follow up must be facilitated so that people identify the ‘last’ in their communities and what needs to be done that they cannot do or be expected to do for themselves.  For the poorer and less able this is already standard good practice but it must go further, and identify those who face physical and other disabilities, encouraging local actions and innovations to provide what is needed.

Second, with urban  Citizen-Led Total Sanitation, when full or even partial self-provision is not an option, rights-based demands, mobilising to secure support and services from the authorities, has to be a major part of the way forward.

So thank you WSSCC for the equity day and for the whole Forum, and roll on the next; and by then let’s hope we will have seen big shifts with many actors and champions – in communities, in governments, in NGOs …- turning the MDGs on their heads to put equity first by starting with the last.

Robert Chambers is a Research Associate in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS. . This piece will feature in a forthcoming publication by WSSCC, entitled “WSSCC Global Forum on Sanitation and Hygiene: Insights on leadership, action and change”.

Reflecting back upon the PPSC team’s activities in 2011

Danny Burns

As 2012 begins, I want to take this opportunity to wish you a happy (and stress free) New Year. In this blog I want to talk offer a few flavours of things that members of the team have been working on; others you will see from recent contributions to the blog; more will follow over the next weeks…

An increasing area of interest for development actors at all levels, from grassroots movements to major donors, is how to better understand the complex, shifting and multi-layered social and political environments in which development and change occur. Many organisations are searching for more relevant tools of context analysis. Jethro Pettit and others have been working on new tools for power and political economy analysis. Popular frameworks like the Powercube (developed by John Gaventa) are being adapted and combined with other approaches. Recent learning partnerships on power have included Oxfam, Novib, Hivos, Christian Aid, the Swedish Cooperative Centre, and Trocaire. Work has also been carried out within the UK voluntary and philanthropic sector with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation,  Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, and the Carnegie UK Trust, Trust for London. This work has included three, year-long action learning processes with dozens of participants from these foundations and more than 20 of their partner organisations Training modules on power have adapted into Spanish and French and facilitated by IDS staff in universities and workshops in Spain, West Africa and Latin America.

The team’s work around “unruly politics” has been growing steadily through the “Summer of Unruly Reading” group facilitated by Akshay Khanna. We have been building a collective conceptual analysis within the team, and growing a work programme with Hivos and their partners.  We have also been building connections with people in the Occupy movement. Mariz Tadros continues to be closely engaged with the emerging situation in Egypt and other parts of North Africa.

PPSC has been contracted to engage in a number of new programmes this year. These include:

• a three year programme on gender and sexuality funded by SIDA (Sweden)
• a three year programme with SDC (Switzerland) – on participatory methodologies and developing the resource centre as a hub for materials on participatory methodologies
• a three year programme with SDC working with the IDS Governance team to support the work of their Decentralisation and Local Governance Network
• an extension of Gates Foundation funding for our Community Led Total Sanitation Hub

The PPSC team played a major role in designing and delivering the Bellagio initiative on the future of international development and philanthropy in pursuit of human well being which comprised a series of global dialogues, commissioned papers and a major international summit. PPSC fellows – Danny Burns (Delhi and Kinna, Kenya), Patta Scott-Villiers (Kinna, Kenya), Alex Shankland (Sao Paulo) and Mariz Tadros (Cairo) – facilitated four of the global dialogues. Georgina Powell Stevens co-ordinated the summit participation of around 200 participants. In June of this year Alex Shankland and I, will be facilitating another Bellagio conference on Indigenous health with colleagues from KIT (Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam).

Rosemary McGee has recently carried out a major review of accountability and transparency initiatives with John Gaventa. Naomi Hossain continues her longitudinal work with Oxfam and others on food price volatility; Joanna Wheeler, Peter Clarke and I are working on a six country action research programme with VSO and the international volunteering network FORUM on the impact of volunteering on poverty; Joanna Wheeler and Tessa Lewin have been working on a range of participatory video initiatives; Marzia Fontana has been working with the Ministry of Industry and Commerce of Lao PDR on a project which has brought Lao-based women’s groups and international organisations into dialogue with each other. Rosalind Eyben has been organising The Big Push Forward – an international initiative that links practitioners and researchers to identify and share strategies and approaches for fair assessment and evaluation. Patta Scott Villiers is leading a programme of action research in Karamoja Northern Uganda funded by Irish Aid. Alex Shankland is opening up new areas of work on the role of emerging powers in reshaping development especially through civil society.

Pathways to Women‘s Empowerment in the Middle East hosted a UN Women organized conference on “Pathways for Women in Democratic Transitions: International Experiences and Lessons Learned” in Cairo. The meeting featured Michele Bachelet and others discussing legal reform, women’s movements and gender-responsive accountability systems. Mariz Tadros was a speaker on the panel “Building Strong Women’s Movements in Democratic Transitions”.

The team has recently published a number of IDS Working Papers and Bulletins and will publish a bulletin on Action Research in International Development this spring.

Finally I want to say a huge thank you and good luck to John Gaventa and Kate Hawkins. John has been an inspiration to the PPSC team for more than a decade. He has joined the Coady Institute in Canada as their new Director. Kate Hawkins our sexuality programme convenor who has initiated and developed a great deal of exciting work within the team will be leaving IDS (but will continue to work with us as a free lancer). I would also like to welcome to the team Research Fellow Jerker Edstrom and Jas Vaghadia who will be working on our gender, masculinities and sexuality programmes. Welcome also to Naomi Vernon who is joining our CLTS team.

As I say, just a few flavours of the many different things that are happening. If you want to find out more, follow the links, or contact us directly.

Danny Burns is the Team Leader for the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS and will be publishing IDS Bulletin 43.3 ”Action Research in Development” in May 2012