Participatory Approaches Learning Study

The Participatory Approaches Learning Study (PALS)

Overview Report

INTRAC (International NGO Training and Research Centre) For the Department of International Development, UK

October 1999

CONTENTS List of Acronyms Foreword PALS Recommendations & DFID’s response

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Executive Summary and Recommendations

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Chapter 1:

Introduction to PALS 1.1 Inception and Evolution of the Study 1.2 Overview of PALS Country Studies 1.2.1 India 1.2.2 Nepal 1.2.3 West and North Africa Department 1.2.4 Bangladesh

9 9 11 12 14 15 16

Chapter 2:

Operational Lessons from PALS 2.1 The Concept of Participation in Aid Delivery 2.2 Primary Stakeholders 2.3 Health Sector Programmes and Projects 2.4 Public Utilities 2.5 Forestry and Natural Resources Sector 2.6 Participation Issues in the Education Sector

18 18 19 22 24 26 29

Chapter 3:

Participation and Project Cycle Management 3.1 Identification, Design and Approval 3.2 Implementation and Monitoring 3.3 PCM and the Tools of Participation 3.4 Office Instructions

32 32 33 34 35

Chapter 4:

Training Needs and Participation 4.1 Competencies that Facilitate Stakeholder Participation 4.2 Views on Actual Staff Competencies and Recruitment 4.3 DFID Training and Induction 4.4 Options for Building Staff Capacity

37 37 38 39 41

Chapter 5:

Institutionalising Participation: Moving Towards Partnership 5.1 Institutionalising Participation in Public Sector Projects 5.2 Sector Investment Programmes 5.3 The Management of DFID’s Country Programmes 5.3.1 The Structure of Geographical Departments 5.3.2 Staffing 5.4 Participation and Organisational Change in DFID

44 44 45 47 47 49 50

Appendices PALS Core Team & PALS Country Study Teams List of Reports Produced for PALS

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List of Acronyms ADB AMOD BRAC CBOs CFMP DACC DCOD DFID DPEP FMO GOSD HRD INTRAC NDHSP NGO NUKCFP ODA PALS PCM PCN PEC PM&E PRA PRIA RIBEC SEADD SEAM SIPs SWAPs TCO TDU TOR WNAD

Asian Development Bank Aid Management Office Dhaka - now DFID-Bangladesh Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee Community Based Organisations Collaborative Forest Management Project District Level Co-ordination Committee Development Co-operation Office Delhi - now DFID-India Department for International Development District Primary Education Project Field Management Office General Origination for Sanitary Drainage Human Resource Development International NGO Training and Research Centre Nepal District Health Strengthening Project Non-Governmental Organisation Nepal-UK Community Forestry Project Overseas Development Administration - now DFID Participatory Approaches Learning Study Project Cycle Management Project Concept Note Project Evaluation Committee Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation Participatory Rural Appraisal The Society for Participatory Research in Asia Reforms in Budgeting & Expenditure Control South East Asia Development Division Support for Environmental Assessment and Management Project Sector Investment Programme Sector Wide Approach Programmes Technical Co-operation Officer Training and Development Unit Terms of Reference West and North Africa Department

FOREWORD In early 1995, the (then) Overseas Development Administration (ODA) published guidance (Technical Note) on enhancing stakeholder participation in ODA-funded projects and programmes. Stakeholders were divided into two groups: those with some intermediary role secondary stakeholders - and those ultimately affected, primary stakeholders who may or should benefit from our assistance. The Participatory Approaches Learning Study was commissioned from International NGO Training and Research Centre (INTRAC) by the ODA in 1996. The purpose of the study was to assess and disseminate the extent and manner to which selected country programmes were putting stakeholder participation into practice. While the study looked at the involvement of both primary and secondary stakeholders, most attention was given to secondary stakeholders with whom ODA/DFID staff have most direct relations. The study was designed, and much of the initial work undertaken, prior to the establishment of the Department for International Development (DFID) and the subsequent publication of the White Paper on International Development in November 1997. The projects examined in this study also pre-date the White Paper and inevitably, therefore do not take full account of changes in DFID’s approach that have emerged since then. In particular, DFID places now much greater emphasis in working with recipient governments, civil society, the private sector, multilateral development institutions and others to eliminate poverty and to achieve the International Development Targets agreed by the United Nations. The present document consists of the INTRAC report and recommendations, with a DFID response to those recommendations.

Social Development Department, Department for International Development October 1999

PALS Recommendations GENERAL Staff skills – The Participatory Approaches Learning Study (PALS) has shown that participation is not only a principle but an operational strategy that has to be developed. In order to promote effective participation DFID staff must develop the skills and ability to engage meaningfully with other stakeholders. Having sound knowledge of participatory methods is crucial but it is not sufficient. Guidance to staff – Given the evolving nature of DFID’s aid programme, and the growing importance of sector investment programmes, more guidance must be given to DFID staff to ensure better participation with secondary stakeholders so that they can in turn promote more effective participation with primary stakeholders. Learning from experience – PALS identified a number of encouraging and innovative methods in DFID-funded projects. DFID needs to learn from, and build on, these – promoting greater openness for the sharing of experiences between different departments. Furthermore, DFID should establish the mechanisms to learn from the wide experiences of other development agencies in promoting participation and partnership.

DFID response DFID generally agrees with these recommendations. It is only by building and sustaining effective partnerships, both horizontally and vertically, that we can make progress in eradicating poverty. We accept this has implications for the way DFID works and what we do. Operational collaboration is our preferred mechanism for mutual learning. Sector wide approaches have encouraged sharing of experiences. We have also developed more participatory approaches to strategy development, typified by the way we develop our country and institutional strategies which we discuss fully with representatives of all interested stakeholder groups.

PROJECT CYCLE MANAGEMENT (PCM) Review of PCM as an instrument of aid management – Given the central role of PCM in DFID’s programme and the strong evidence that it is not a perfect mechanism for the promotion of stakeholder participation, DFID should be prepared to review PCM and explore approaches that are more consistent with engaging stakeholders. Such approaches imply, among other things, the freeing up senior staff time to work more closely with stakeholders. More flexible PCM – Participation and partnership are essentially client-based approaches, but PCM is driven by DFID’s own internal needs. If DFID is seriously committed to participation and partnership it must be prepared to make PCM more flexible and more open to engagement with other stakeholders. Shortening PCM – The PALS study revealed many examples of projects in which the delay between project identification and approval in particular undermined stakeholder participation.

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The time gap between these two PCM stages must be significantly reduced if stakeholder interest and commitment is to be sustained throughout PCM. The need for piloting – Larger and more complex projects involving multiple stakeholders would have a greater chance of sustaining high levels of participation through the PCM if more opportunities were to be provided for piloting prior to planning. DFID should seek to build this, where appropriate, into the cycle. A commitment to stakeholder involvement – Recent attempts to improve stakeholder consultation have not always influenced project design or the later stages of PCM. DFID must ensure that staff are seriously committed to involving stakeholders in all stages of PCM. Furthermore, the systems and procedures in PCM should be geared towards stakeholders and not exclusively towards DFID’s own requirements. Review of documentation requirements – At present, a great deal of senior staff time is absorbed in the preparation and presentation of PCM documents. Despite this effort, many PCM documents remain inaccessible to key stakeholders. The documentation requirements of PCM should be reviewed, with the aim of making documents simpler and more accessible. Review of the monitoring system – In the PCM the design stage gets most of the emphasis while the monitoring stage is weak. At present, PCM monitoring emphasises expenditure and outputs. As a means of strengthening stakeholder participation and accountability to stakeholders, DFID should be prepared to re-assess its monitoring system to give greater emphasis to process and impact monitoring. Furthermore, if DFID is to implement a more participatory approach to monitoring, it must help partners to develop their own monitoring and evaluation systems. Better use of the Log Frame – The Log Frame is an important internal DFID tool, but it is not a method with which all other stakeholders can easily engage. DFID must be more discriminating and critical in its use of the Log Frame and recognise that it is of limited value as a tool for promoting the participation of other stakeholders. Review of Technical Note – In order to update thinking within DFID on stakeholder participation in the PCM, the Technical Note on Participation should be re-examined and reviewed with the aim of preparing a new one.

DFID response DFID recognises that PCM needs to be sufficiently flexible to allow for a range of approaches to the management of the project cycle. Staff training in PCM stresses this point. Partnership and Participation are two of the guiding principles in the section of our Office Instructions on Beginning the Project Cycle. Following the PALS study, we intend to expand this section to provide more details about participatory approaches to PCM. In all instances we must balance our requirements to be accountable to UK taxpayers while focusing on the interests, views and needs of our development partners. Since the publication of the Technical Note on Participation four years ago, much of the good practice recommended in that note, regarding relations with secondary stakeholders, has become the norm. We agree that piloting is useful and we adopt it when appropriate. It is not always easy to shorten the interval between identification and approval, particularly if we are seeking to include broad based participation in the planning and design process. Delays sometimes occur

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also between DFID approval of funding and the exchange of the Memorandum of Understanding with partner governments. Nevertheless we are conscious of the need to keep other stakeholders informed of progress and should be ready to explain delays. In the last year we have reviewed our procedures to reduce staff time and to enhancing secondary stakeholder participation. For example, we are making increasing use of partners’ project documents as the basis for project approval. Examples here would include, from Bangladesh, BRAC (for some years now) and more recently Gono Shahajo Sangstha phase 4; and various Sector Wide Approach Programmes (SWAPs), for example in education in Ghana and Uganda. We are working with our partners to develop and strengthen participatory monitoring and evaluation system, including at central/policy level through Uganda Participatory Poverty Assessment Project. In projects, examples include Wajir Pastoral Development Programme, Kenya; Kribhco W. India Rainfed Farming, Peri-Urban Self Help Project, phases I and II, Zambia; a collaborative approach to monitoring and evaluation is developing in Ha Tinh, Vietnam and in the ActionAid and Care poverty programmes in Nepal. Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation (PM&E) has been integrated into various forestry projects, perhaps most thoroughly in the Nepal-UK Forestry Project. We consider that the Log Frame does have value for promoting the participation of other key secondary stakeholders, if it is drawn up following a participatory stakeholder analysis and risk analysis. The Log Frame methodology has value in exposing differences between stakeholders. Nevertheless, it is helpful to be reminded that the Log Frame is a good servant but a bad master. We need to use the Log Frame intelligently and be sensitive to other approaches and methods. Our reporting requirements against the Logical Framework (Office Instructions (OI) Vol II G) expect any updating/improvements to be identified with each regular report from project implementers and at the monitoring stage. We are improving our performance in modifying the log-frame following joint reviews with project partners during implementation. In the light of the PALS recommendations we are considering whether there is anything further we could usefully add to Office Instructions on this point. Many of the innovative approaches proposed in the Participation Technical Note are now widely accepted by DFID staff (although actual performance clearly varies). Meanwhile, the White Paper on International Development has introduced a number of significant changes in our approach and understanding of participation. The most important of these is our commitment to a rights-based approach. That means making people the central purpose of development. A rights-based approach is predicated on people’s right to participate. There is no single prescription for effective participation, but real participation only occurs when people are content with their level of involvement in decisions and actions which affect their lives. Rather than publish an updated version of the Technical Note we plan to produce guidance on the operational implications of a rights-based approach.

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HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT AND PARTICIPATION Human Resource Development (HRD) – The promotion of participation is not just an issue of staff training. DFID must recognise that it will require a much broader, long-term strategy of human resource and organisational development, if it seeks to work in a more participatory way. In turn, there is a need for the HRD strategy of DFID’s larger country programmes to be more integrated with the country strategy. Competencies, recruitment and induction – In the recruitment process, greater weight should be given to the competencies needed for promoting participation and partnership, including inter-personal skills, understanding organisations and change, awareness of participatory approaches and social analysis. More emphasis should also be given to these competencies in DFID’s induction process, and less on DFID’s own internal systems and needs. Different approaches to learning – There are a variety of ways of helping staff sharpen their competencies in using participatory approaches. DFID needs to consider more innovative ways of encouraging and legitimising learning, particularly on-the-job. This can include mentoring, setting up action-learning sets, shadowing, secondments, improved induction and language training, as well as in-country training tailored to the context. The Training and Development Unit (TDU) has some innovative ideas to learning but they appear marginalised within DFID. DFID needs to give more weight to the strategic role that the TDU can play in relation to DFID’s own HRD needs. Organisational competencies – Individual approaches to learning are not enough if participatory approaches are to become institutionalised within DFID. DFID needs to review its own internal communication systems for sharing experiences and learning throughout the organisation, developing an organisational memory with more attention to debriefings from staff and consultants and creating a more supportive culture which encourages experimentation and innovation. External Learning – Other agencies and development networks have also developed great experience in using participatory approaches; DFID needs to encourage staff to be less isolationist and make greater contract with such bodies with a view to facilitate greater learning and exchange. Value local knowledge – More importance should be given to staff and consultants who have in-depth local knowledge including language skills. In particular, more value should be given to the contribution of Technical Co-operation Officers (TCOs), many of whom have considerable experience of working in one country. Consultants’ skills and competencies – DFID relies heavily on consultants. Therefore, consultants, as well as staff, must both understand the concepts of participation and partnership and have the competencies to use participatory approaches. Strengthening local consultancy capacity – DFID also needs to diversify and broaden its consultancy base by developing the capacity of local consultants. This means developing a clear strategy of strengthening the organisational capacity and practice of local institutions that provide training, consultancy and research services.

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DFID response We agree with a number of these conclusions as far as DFID’s internal management and organisation is concerned. We have been consulting widely with all staff in the organisation to develop a culture which gives greater priority to the managing and valuing of staff; to systems which more directly respond to the objectives of the Department; and to the role of training and development. We are in the process of integrating our different administrative structures for dealing with human resources issues in DFID to ensure a more coherent and strategic approach to the management and deployment of all those employed by the Department, regardless of their location or terms of service. To strengthen our relationship with our partners overseas, we have increased the recruitment of staff in the social development and institutional disciplines whose competencies are strongly focused on promoting partnership and participation and understanding the dynamics of organisational and social change. We have also taken a number of steps to enhance our capacity to be more responsive and sensitive to local knowledge. We are giving greater attention to the recruitment and career development of DFID administrative and advisory staff from within the countries where we operate. We are also making significant efforts to increase the proportion of locally appointed consultants. TCOs, consultants and Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) staff, both UK and locally based, are regular participants on the 3 day PCM training course. This enhances the value of the course in two ways: (a) developing their knowledge of DFID and our approach, (b) giving DFID staff the benefit of ‘outsiders’ different experiences and approaches.

INSTITUTIONALISING PARTICIPATION Sector Investment Programmes (SIPs) – DFID’s current shift in some country programmes away from discrete projects to SIPs can, if managed well, provide opportunities for more effective partnerships with senior officials in national governments. However, DFID should take steps to ensure that these sector programmes do not marginalise both primary stakeholders and other secondary stakeholders. Long-term partnerships – DFID’s dependence on consultants and staff on short-term contracts limits the development of long-term partnerships with secondary stakeholders. To overcome this, DFID should develop a more appropriate approach to the management of its country programmes to ensure greater continuity of key personnel. Collaboration with other donors – In its country programme work DFID does not appear to consistently and effectively promote its relationships with other donors. Many donors have useful and interesting experiences and policies, and are often stakeholders with considerable influence over the programmes in which DFID is involved. It is strongly advised that DFID should be prepared to work more collaboratively with such donors at the country level. Policy dialogue and advocacy – Participation and partnership demand consistent and ongoing dialogue with government and other donors. DFID must be prepared to allow senior

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staff to spend more time on policy dialogue and advocacy and less time on simply satisfying DFID’s own internal procedures. Institutional change – If DFID is to give greater weight to participatory approaches and partnership, as demanded by the White Paper, it will need to reassess its procedures, systems, structures and management approaches. This will require institutional change. Such changes are beyond the remit of PALS, but DFID should be prepared to examine these critically and openly.

DFID response Many of these recommended changes are in the process of taking place. A sector wide approach offers the possibility of assisting institutions to improve equity in resource allocation, to focus on activities which meet the perceived priorities of poor people, enhance accessibility and relevance of services for poor people and develop regulatory frameworks which respond to the needs of poor people. We recognise the risk associated with this approach and have published a social development working paper which describes how to pay specific attention to processes of consultation and participation in sector programmes. DFID has recently established a resource centre to provide support to management of public expenditure and this should strengthen our ability to enhance participation in sector wide approaches and investment programmes. Shared experience between departments takes place through regular meetings of advisory groups and administrative cadres. The regular transfer of staff between regional offices is also a very effective mechanism for disseminating lessons from experience. During the last year or so, DFID has become more aware of the experience and good practice of other development agencies, including NGOs as well as other bilateral agencies. An increasing number of DFID staff are being recruited from development NGOs as well as some from other bilateral programmes. The International Development White Paper commits us to work closely with other donors and development agencies to build partnerships with developing countries and to use our influence to help mobilise the political will to achieve the international development targets. We want partner governments to take the lead in setting the agenda, co-ordinating efforts through instruments such as the Comprehensive Development Framework. In implementing the White Paper strategy, senior staff are doing much more advocacy and policy work. Advisory groups are in constant contact with professional colleagues in other agencies and Aid Policy Resources Department had visits in 1998 from a number of bilateral and multilateral organisations (including JICA, SIDA, DANIDA, UNESCO and the World Bank) to discuss improving systems and procedures. We are also contributing to collective donor efforts to harmonise procedures in the EU. Finally, we are placing greater effort in assessing the performance of our country programmes in consultation with our development partners.

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Executive Summary and Recommendations The Participatory Approaches Learning Study (PALS) examined the potential for increasing stakeholder participation in DFID country programmes. Its recommendations include proposals on staff development, on ways to make the Project Cycle Management System more flexible and accountable, and on making participation a stronger characteristic of DFID itself. The PALS examined DFID’s experience of delivering aid through participatory approaches. This unique two-year research project involved separate studies for four of DFID’s geographical departments – DFID-India, DFID-Bangladesh, South East Asia Division, and the West and North Africa Department. These included extensive research into projects in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Ghana, Egypt and Nigeria, resulting in substantial reports, each of which comprises an overview paper and project case studies. This report is a synthesis of the main findings and lessons from each of the geographical studies. Over the past decade, development agendas and practice have increasingly been influenced by the concept of stakeholder participation. This has become important not just as an approach to such issues as exclusion and marginalisation but also as an operational concept that could lead to more effective project-level development. Alongside other concerns such as equity, sustainability, and helping the poorest, development agencies at all levels have therefore been making participation a basic principle of their development interventions. British aid delivery too has in recent years had participation as a high-profile operational principle. Senior DFID staff wanted to see what could be learned from this experience and commissioned this report. Participation was brought to the forefront of debate within DFID by the publication in November 1997 of the Government’s White Paper on International Development. This makes it clear that a central theme of the British Government’s new strategy for poverty eradication is the need to work with governments that have established the welfare of their poorest citizens as one of their main policy priorities. To move this process forward, DFID will have to establish stronger partnerships with the governments it supports – a change that may require a shift in emphasis away from discrete projects and towards long-term institutional development and policy dialogue. While recognising that partnership is not the same as participation, the PALS study argues that it is impossible to develop partnerships before establishing more basic kinds of participatory practice. If DFID as a whole is to take forward the White Paper’s ideas on partnership it will have to achieve one of the more resonant senses of participation –viewing development partners as political equals. This is an enhanced sense of participation that goes well beyond the mechanics of project aid delivery. Participation also requires broader and deeper accountability. Some may argue that increased stakeholder participation weakens traditional upward accountability for donor funds. Accountability to donors is of course a central concern, but equally important is accountability to beneficiaries. This will be enhanced through stakeholder participation. There should be no question of choosing between accountability either to the donor (ultimately, the British taxpayer) or to local stakeholders. What is needed is optimum accountability to both.

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Operational Lessons As a bilateral aid donor, DFID tends not to deal directly with beneficiaries. Its relationships in the countries in which it works are more with secondary stakeholders – civil servants and NGO staff. DFID however also wants to achieve more effective primary stakeholder participation in the programmes and projects that it supports – while accepting that it may have limited influence over whether this takes place. In some cases, the PALS country studies did find a number of DFID-funded projects that had achieved a high degree of primary stakeholder participation. Many of the approaches used by DFID’s project partners have been both innovative and successful in ensuring that primary stakeholders have a sense of involvement and ownership of project interventions. These tended, however, to be those projects implemented through NGOs or local municipalities and have usually been concerned with a specific intervention at the community level – such as the construction of rural water supplies or the improvement of slums. In the case of national level projects implemented through central government ministries, such as institutional development within, say, a health or education ministry, it proved more difficult to establish any direct link between project interventions and primary stakeholder participation. The projects reviewed as part of the PALS geographical studies reflect a wealth of both positive and negative experiences. They cover four major sectors: health, public utilities, forestry and natural resources, and education. • Health – The health sector has traditionally functioned in a vertical and delivery-conscious manner and its strategies to promote more active local involvement have been driven largely by concerns to recover costs and to ensure that health services are sustainable. • Forestry – This was one of the most optimistic sectors, reflecting a commitment by many DFID staff over the past 20 years to community forest management and the wealth of experience that has been established. • Public utilities – Here there was little evidence of any serious primary stakeholder involvement – participatory development is almost exclusively in terms of secondary stakeholders. This reflects the essentially hierarchical and tightly controlled nature of the administration of these utilities and the fact that their work is predominately technical. Nevertheless PALS did find some efforts to promote a more participatory approach. • Education – Most DFID aid reviewed by the PALS study involved working with secondary stakeholders at different levels of state education systems, with little consultation beyond senior civil servants. In one of the projects studied, however, there were moves to allow for strong elements of village user consultation in the design, construction and location of schools, and thus, it is hoped, to an expanded sense of local ownership. Operational Level Recommendations 1. Staff skills – In order to promote effective participation DFID staff will need the skills and ability to engage meaningfully with other stakeholders. Having sound knowledge of participatory methods is crucial but it is not sufficient. 2. Guidance to staff – Given the evolving nature of DFID’s aid programme, and the growing importance of sector investment programmes, more guidance must be given to DFID staff

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to ensure better participation with secondary stakeholders so that they can in turn promote more effective participation with primary stakeholders. 3. Learning from the experience of others – DFID should establish the mechanisms to learn from the wide experiences of other development agencies in promoting participation and partnership. 4. Learning from its own experience – PALS identified a number of encouraging and innovative methods in DFID-funded projects. DFID needs to learn from, and build on, these – promoting greater openness for the sharing of experiences between different departments.

Project Cycle Management and Participation At the core of DFID’s aid delivery process is the Project Cycle Management (PCM) system, as set out in the Office Instructions (OI). This provides the management framework and norms for all DFID projects and programmes. However this formal system can be at odds with the ideals of stakeholder participation. Many staff would like a less prescriptive approach to development interventions – seeing the PCM as excessively front loaded, with a strong focus on project planning and design, possibly at the expense of implementation. It is also time consuming. The bulk of senior staff workload goes on fulfilling its requirements, especially the preparation of the Project Concept Note (PCN), the Project Memorandum (PM) and the Project Evaluation Committee (PEC) submission – demands that can divert advisers and managers from networking, advocacy, engagement with project partners and strategic monitoring. The PALS country studies offer interesting examples of innovative, participatory approaches to project design, including the use of stakeholder consultation workshops. If such innovations are to be used more widely, however, there will need to be changes. Consultation will need to be slower and more far reaching, and it will have to involve a selection of primary-level stakeholders as well as some of the more junior officials who have to make projects work. In addition, DFID will need to help partners establish systems for monitoring stakeholder influence over project design. At present primary stakeholders have only marginal involvement in project identification, planning and design, since proposals are often prepared by programme managers and expatriate consultants. Other obstacles to stakeholder participation include frequent delays, of many months or even years, between planning and implementation; the exclusion of partners and other secondary stakeholders from the approval process; and staff movements that can disrupt the smoothness of the PCM process. There is also a considerable dependence on short-stay international advisers or consultants, who are often responsible for project design but not for implementation. This disrupts the transfer of learning and weakens the emerging social relationships on which good projects can capitalise. Some of the guidelines on monitoring, reporting and reviews in the OI are entirely consistent with a participatory approach. For example, it is clearly specified that these are management tools and not DFID policing activities, that they should ensure continuous learning and quality control, and that during the project design stage mechanisms for participatory monitoring should be developed in partnership with recipients. Furthermore, the guidelines offer

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considerable flexibility on the frequency of monitoring and reporting. Monitoring strategies can be quite informal, involving little more than a meeting with project staff or a visit to project sites. Nonetheless, PCM procedures can present obstacles to participation. Short-term expatriate consultants are engaged for much of the monitoring, their reports are not normally available to all project staff, and decisions on who shall carry out monitoring are often taken at senior levels, far removed from the project. PCM provides one basic instrument that is regarded within DFID as a means of promoting stakeholder participation. This is the Log Frame. The Log Frame is used in several ways – as a predictive planning tool, a reporting device, and as a mechanism for checking progress during implementation. It tends to be understood intuitively by senior management and is well liked by planners because it promotes logical clarity, task-specificity and functionality in the project process, and is particularly effective for clarifying objectives. Considerable efforts have been made in some individual projects to use the Log Frame in innovative ways to ensure greater stakeholder participation. However, during PALS it became evident that the Log Frame had a number of limitations. Many project staff often see it as an imposed burden and not all DFID staff understand that it can be used flexibly. The principles can also be alien to some stakeholders: as an abstract, planning or reporting tool the Log Frame encourages a linear thought process and can exclude people who lack corresponding analytical skills. The Log Frame does provides an important opportunity for DFID and other key stakeholders to align their thinking. However, it is not inherently participatory and Log Frames developed in participatory workshops are usually significantly redesigned by project staff who are experienced in using this tool and understand what is required to get approval from donors. The key issue is that particular groups of stakeholders may need tailor-made participatory methods. A method effective at one structural level may be disabling at another. Recommendations on Project Cycle Management 1. More flexible PCM – Participation and partnership are essentially client-based approaches but PCM is driven by DFID’s own internal needs. If DFID is seriously committed to participation and partnership it must be prepared to make PCM more flexible and more open to engagement with other stakeholders. 2. A commitment to stakeholder involvement – Recent attempts to improve stakeholder consultation have not always influenced project design or the later stages of PCM. DFID will need to ensure that staff are seriously committed to involving stakeholders in all stages of the PCM. 3. More accountable monitoring – In the PCM the design stage gets most of the emphasis while the monitoring stage is weak. While maintaining accountability to Whitehall, DFID will need to promote more effective stakeholder participation in monitoring and evaluation. 4. Better use of the Log Frame – The Log Frame is an important internal DFID tool, but it is not a method with which other stakeholders can easily engage. DFID must be more discriminating and critical in its use of the Log Frame and recognise that it is of limited value as a tool for promoting the participation of other stakeholders.

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Staff competencies, recruitment and training Promoting participation and partnership within DFID-supported programmes has important implications for the way DFID works and hence for the skills of its staff. It suggests, for example, that staff must be prepared to relinquish control over implementation, to bear technical imperfections and delays with patience, and to facilitate the involvement of others – helping develop their capacity and competence. This has major implications for both staff recruitment and staff development. With regard to recruitment it was noted that, while academic and technical skills may be highly valued within DFID and also give it credibility in policy engagement, they are not necessarily consistent with the promotion of stakeholder participation or with the partnership agenda laid out in the White Paper. This raises questions of whether DFID is recruiting the right people to promote stakeholder participation and partnership, and whether the organisation is using the skills of its staff appropriately. The issue of recruitment has less to do with changing official procedures, which do give weight to inter-personal skills and team work, and more to do with re-assessing their interpretation from the perspective of stakeholder engagement. It is also worth bearing in mind that deploying people in jobs where they cannot use their skills can have an adverse effect on career development and morale. For example, rigorous project planning and approval processes that demand a great deal of staff time often force programme managers and advisors into administrative roles, to the detriment of policy innovation, advocacy and the operationalising of partnerships. A major conclusion of the PALS study was that staff training in participatory approaches must be part of more general human resource development. DFID’s TDU has developed a strategy for human resource development and has requested that all departments prepare a business plan that incorporates the needs for staff development and training. The mandatory component in staff training is delivered in the form of courses, but it is important that DFID appreciates the limitations of this approach and regards courses as one option among many. The TDU’s strategy also cites coaching, secondments, job swaps, shadowing, distance learning, among other methods, as having an important role in staff training and development. In practice, despite the guidelines provided by the TDU, it would appear that DFID has given insufficient attention to human resource development. Senior managers do not have clear responsibilities for the identification of HRD needs, which are therefore often neglected. The response to the request to prepare departmental business plans for human resource development has been poor, so few departments have a strategy for staff training and development. Staff were quite critical of the use of training within DFID and also of training content and methods. One of the limitations, it was argued, is that training does not encourage the institutionalisation of participatory values, attitudes and practices within DFID. Training cannot create within an organisation an openness to change; this is a role for senior management. It was further argued that in terms of content, the emphasis on internal systems and procedures contributes little to the competencies, work practices, values and attitudes that staff feel are essential to facilitating stakeholder participation and partnership.

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Recommendations on Staff Competencies, Recruitment and Training 1. Human Resource Development – The promotion of participation is not just an issue of staff training. DFID must recognise that it will require a much broader, long-term strategy of human resource and organisational development. 2. Recruitment – DFID will need staff who have a positive attitude towards participation and the inter-personal skills to promote it. DFID should therefore review its approach to recruitment and give much greater weight to these competencies. 3. Training – Training can help sharpen staff competencies in using participatory approaches. DFID should consider establishing appropriate training programmes on the skills needed in different countries and contexts. This should include improved induction, language training incentives, in-country training, setting up action learning groups and improved recognition of on-the-job training.

Institutionalising participation within DFID Perhaps the most challenging area of the study has been the issue of institutionalising participation within DFID. If DFID is to follow its commitment to partnership then secondary stakeholders need to participate in decision making about DFID interventions. Similarly DFID should expect its partners to commit themselves to more participatory approaches with other stakeholders. But DFID will also need to consider how far its own internal organisation and procedures facilitate participation. Addressing these questions will mean going beyond the confines of particular projects to the issue of institutionalising participation. Most projects reviewed in PALS were in the public sector, and the studies found particular challenges in institutionalising participatory approaches among DFID’s key secondary stakeholders, the government counterparts. In public sector projects the major limitations in developing partnerships include the tendency to work with only a small department or unit within a ministry, and the prioritisation of immediate project objectives at the expense of longer term reform. The limited time frame is also a major hindrance: institutional reform in the public sector is a long-term process and is not easily accommodated by the 3-5 year project cycle of DFID-funded projects. PALS found that a useful way of increasing dialogue with secondary stakeholders, and overcoming some of the limitations of a purely bilateral approach to policy influence, is to collaborate with a number of like-minded donors through Sector Investment Programmes (SIPs). As a vehicle for participation the sector approach should theoretically be better than the project approach. It requires a long term commitment by donors and involves building up trust and common policy objectives between donors and government departments. Central to this approach is greater donor co-ordination. This also has the advantage of reducing the strain on government capacity and the need for senior government staff to deal with a large number of individual projects, often covering similar ground with different donors. SIPs offer opportunities for developing long-term partnerships between DFID and governments in aid-recipient countries. However, the study found that in order to engage further at the sector and policy level, DFID will need to address a number of difficulties in its current mechanisms for delivering aid. Some of these relate to DFID’s own internal management structures and

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organisational culture. These include a high turnover, particularly of senior staff, which constrains the development of long-term personal relationships and mutual understanding; a lack of staff time for policy dialogue and donor co-ordination; the location of advisers and senior administrative staff outside the country; and a rigid adherence to PCM requirements at the expense of innovation and flexibility. In relation to participation and partnership, SIPs also raise profound questions about accountability. Some people regard the conditions and constraints inherent in the donor-recipient relationship as an important guarantee of accountability. The delivery of development aid involves a central dilemma: accountability in tension with trust. Ensuring financial accountability to the British public necessitates a high degree of financial control, while high levels of stakeholder participation and strong partnerships imply that much of this control must be relinquished. Advisers in the case study countries expressed a concern that the diminished control implied by sector investment programmes runs the risk of reduced financial probity. However, a central argument of this report is that accountability and participation are not mutually exclusive, but rather that accountability itself must be broadened to include a wider group of stakeholders than just DFID’s senior management and the British tax payer. As was noted above, the key means of achieving this is through participatory monitoring and evaluation systems, in which both primary and secondary stakeholders are fully engaged. Institutionalising participatory approaches with secondary stakeholders demands a long-term commitment. DFID will need strong country knowledge, and will have to co-ordinate more with other development actors and to demonstrate greater flexibility, open-mindedness, and trust. DFID country programmes do not at present have enough of these characteristics. For example, one of the problems from the perspective of stakeholder participation and partnership in departments that have out-of-country advisers is that they lack essential capacity for in-country policy advocacy. This absence of high-level engagement with counterparts limits DFID’s ability to persuade reluctant government bodies to consult, plan and collaborate with their clients. Even so it does not seem that advisers based in-country are achieving much more. They should in theory be better placed to develop informal consultative networks yet they do not seem to take as much advantage of this as they could because they experience the same generic organisational pressures. During the course of PALS many of those interviewed, particularly DFID staff themselves, highlighted the importance of organisational change within DFID. They argued that promoting participatory approaches has profound implications for DFID’s own internal organisation. The original PALS’ Terms of Reference (TOR) stated that the study team should identify staff learning and training needs as a means of reinforcing participatory approaches in DFID-funded projects. But in interviews many staff said that it was not enough to focus solely on individual competencies since staff skills are often less important in facilitating or undermining stakeholder participation than the systems, procedures, structure and overall normative framework of DFID itself. High levels of stakeholder participation in DFID-supported programmes would not be possible, they believed, without a corresponding change in the organisation’s own internal culture.

Recommendations on institutionalising participation

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1. Sector Investment Programmes – DFID’s current shift in some country programmes away from discrete projects to sector investment programmes can, if managed well, provide opportunities for more effective partnerships with senior officials in national governments. However, DFID should take steps to ensure that these sector programmes do not marginalise both primary stakeholders and other secondary stakeholders. 2. Long-term partnerships – DFID’s dependence on consultants and staff on short-term contracts limits the development of long-term partnerships with secondary stakeholders. To overcome this, DFID should develop a more appropriate approach to the management of its country programmes to ensure greater continuity of key personnel. 3. Collaboration with other donors – In its country programme work DFID does not appear to consistently and effectively promote its relationships with other donors. Many donors have useful and interesting experiences and policies, and are often stakeholders with considerable influence over the programmes in which DFID is involved. It is strongly advised that DFID should be prepared to work more collaboratively with such donors at the country level. 4. Policy dialogue and advocacy – Participation and partnership demand consistent and ongoing dialogue with government and other donors. DFID must be prepared to allow senior staff to spend more time on policy dialogue and advocacy and less time on simply satisfying DFID’s own internal procedures. 5. Institutional change – If DFID is to give greater weight to participatory approaches and partnership, as demanded by the White Paper, it will need to reassess its procedures, systems, structures and management approaches. This will require institutional change. Such changes are beyond the remit of PALS, but DFID should be prepared to examine these critically and openly.

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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO PARTICIPATORY APPROACHES LEARNING STUDY (PALS) Over the past decade the concept of stakeholder participation has come to have a major influence on development agendas and practice. Participation has become both a focus for issues of exclusion and marginalisation as well as an operational concept which, it is argued, could make project level development more effective. While commitment to participation in one sense or another in development activities is pledged on all sides, inevitably the rhetoric often runs ahead of the practice and it would be wrong to suggest that most development practice is now substantially participatory. The process is too complex, influenced by the prevailing political climate and competing interests to be treated as a technical application. Nonetheless, the idea of participation now characterises the thinking of development agencies at all levels and, whatever the perspective, is discussed as a basic principle of their development interventions, alongside equity, helping the poorest, and sustainability. The PALS has been undertaken because senior DFID staff wanted to see what could be learned from the period in which participation has been a high-profile theme in British aid delivery. This chapter describes the process by which the study was initiated and implemented.

1.1 Inception and Evolution of the Study The PALS was commissioned by the Overseas Development Administration (ODA) (now DFID), UK in 1996 with the goal of ensuring that participatory approaches contribute to ODA’s capacity to deliver high impact aid. The study has been a joint initiative between the Social Development Division and certain geographical departments. These are: Aid Management Office Dhaka (AMOD), Bangladesh; Development Cooperation Office Delhi (DCOD), India; South East Asia Development Division (SEADD), Bangkok, West and North Africa Department (WNAD). The study has been undertaken by INTRAC, and conducted over a two year period beginning in October 1996. The research involved an initial visit to each department in order to discuss with them what should be included. In each case a portfolio of candidate projects and programmes were agreed, spanning the main sectors of education, natural resources and forestry, health, water, and infrastructure. Each separate regional study involved an amendment to the original contract between INTRAC and DFID, and each of the regional studies was funded by the department concerned. This has involved negotiations with each department and accounts for the long lead time to set up each study. Both the West Asia Department and the British Development Division Central Africa were originally nominated by their senior managers for the study, but later withdrew for their own reasons, but ongoing work pressures featured in both cases. This is noteworthy - the regions were consulted about their participation in the study, and rights of veto were exercised. For where a different kind of organisation might have ordered its components regions to take part, from the top and the centre, DFID was sufficiently de-centralised in this, at least, to allow for opting-out, as well as opting-in.

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The TOR called among other things for a study of how participatory approaches are used within the PCM, with attention to which kinds of participatory procedures (e.g. informing, consulting) were most effective at each phase in a project’s life. This has remained a core task of the study; the lessons learned are presented in Chapter 3. However, during the course of PALS, it became clear that many DFID staff saw the study as a way to ensure better participation of secondary stakeholders in DFID projects and programmes. This became apparent to the INTRAC consultants who undertook the first PALS overseas visit in February 1997 to India. Although valuable work had been done there to encourage beneficiary participation, there was a recognition among staff that for programmes to be sustainable and meet their overall goals it was essential that Indian government officials were committed to and felt proprietorship over the programmes supported by DFID. This concern with the participation of secondary stakeholders was shared by DFID staff in the other countries covered by PALS. As a result, the research proposals developed for the different country studies focused far more on the participation of secondary stakeholders and less on primary stakeholders than was originally envisaged in the TOR for the core PALS contract. Furthermore, in some of the country programmes, notably in Ghana and Bangladesh, DFID had been moving from a project approach to sector investment programmes. Staff were less concerned with participatory approaches at the project level than with how such approaches related to issues of policy influence, co-ordination with other donors, and building long term relationships with government ministries. Again, while this shift was not anticipated in the original TOR for PALS, it has been a key demand of the geographical departments who funded the country studies that the PALS research included sectoral programmes. The publication of the government’s White Paper on International Development in November 1997 brought these concerns to the forefront of debate within DFID. A central theme of the government’s new strategy for poverty eradication is the need for DFID to establish stronger partnerships with those governments it supports. These governments must show themselves to have the welfare of the poorest citizens in the frame. This requires a shift in emphasis away from discrete projects to long term institutional development and policy dialogue. The White Paper’s concern with a new kind of partnership has direct relevance to the concerns of PALS. While recognising that participation and partnership are not the same, this study, when it touches upon DFID’s organisational culture, suggests that it is impossible to develop partnerships without the more basic kinds of participatory thinking and practice being already institutionalised. For DFID as a whole to take forward the ideas on partnership set out in the White Paper, it is essential that one of the more resonant senses of participation - seeing one’s development partners as political equals - informs its wider relations. This enhanced sense of participation goes well beyond the mechanics of project aid delivery. Another development from the original TOR has been the focus on organisational issues within DFID. The TOR anticipated that lack of staff training was likely to be a key obstacle to improving the use of participatory approaches within DFID which are discussed in Chapter 4. However, during the course of the study it became evident that there were far more serious and less technical obstacles within DFID as an institution to fulfilling its aid mission. These related to DFID’s internal structure, organisational culture and management procedures These are discussed in Chapter 5. It is important to stress that the demand to focus on the organisational issues came from DFID staff. Many DFID staff were concerned that if PALS were to focus only on training, this would be a lost

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opportunity to highlight the fundamental problems that DFID needs to tackle if it is to deliver high quality aid overseas. INTRAC - was awarded the contract to undertake the study. This has been done by a core team of seven, comprising of both INTRAC staff and associates. Different members of the team have been responsible for leading the different country studies. The PALS TOR also encouraged the use of local consultants for the individual country studies, and this led to variations in how the regional studies were conducted. To summarise, in Ghana, Egypt and India, local institutions were subcontracted to undertake the primary research, with INTRAC consultants playing a coordination and supervisory role. In both India and Egypt a national research institution managed the whole study whereas in Ghana, each of the four individual studies was undertaken by a different local institution. In Nepal and Bangladesh, joint teams were established comprised of both INTRAC and local consultants. Details of both the core team members and country study teams are given in the appendix.

1.2 Overview of PALS Country Studies This section provides a summary of the PALS country studies, including details of how they were conducted, which projects were covered and major findings. All the research conducted for PALS has been done in the context of the four studies commissioned by four of DFID’s geographical departments. A detailed report has been produced from each of the four main PALS studies. Each of these reports contains both an overview paper and detailed case studies of the projects researched as part of PALS.

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Box 1.1: Summary of Countries and Projects Covered by PALS DFID Office Development Cooperation Office, Delhi

Country India

Projects Andhra Pradesh Primary Education Project; Andhra Pradesh District Primary Education Project; Andhra Pradesh Slum Improvements Project; Orissa Health Project; Orissa Power Project; Cuttack Urban Services Improvement Project. Ahmedabad Sexual Health Project

Research Period May-Nov 1997

South East Asia Development Division

Nepal

Nepal UK Community Forestry Project Rural Water Supplies Project (Gurkha Welfare Scheme) Phase 2 Secondary Education Project Nepal Health Projects

Aug-Sept 1997

West and North Africa Department

Ghana

Health Sector Reform Collaborative Forest Management Programme Wenchi Farming Systems Development & Training Project Formulation of a Renewable Natural Resources Strategy

Nov 1997March 1998

Egypt

Cairo Wastewater Organisation General Organisation for Sanitary Drainage Support for Environmental Assessment & Management GALAE Adult Literacy Training Programme

April-June 1998

Nigeria

Benue Health Fund Project

June 1998

Bangladesh

Agriculture Support Services Project CARE INTERFISH Proshika The Institutional Development Component of the Second Road Rehabilitation and Maintenance Project Bridge Improvement & Maintenance Project (Phase 2) Reforms in Budgeting and Expenditure Control (RIBEC) Fifth Health and Population Plan

January-May 1998

Aid Management Office Dhaka

1.2.1 India The PALS India study was faced with the challenge of looking at one of the largest UK government programmes in the world’s second most populous country. India is a complex country consisting of interlocking social and political structures, presenting immense problems for DFID in developing and implementing a coherent aid programme. Following an initial visit to India by two INTRAC consultants it was agreed that the study would be in three major parts. One component would be file reviews and interviews with key staff DCOD, Field Management Offices, and British Council staff implementing health and education programmes in Delhi. The second component would be two state level studies of participation by both primary and secondary stakeholders in the British aid programme. Both these studies would try to collect perceptions of state level staff both about DFID’s projects and their participation in them. In discussion with DFID the states of Andhra Pradesh and Orissa were selected for these studies because of the range of DFID projects at different stages of implementation in both states. A study

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of the Ahmedabad Sexual Health Project was carried out by the Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) because of its relevance for the study. The PALS research also incorporated into the study the findings from a recently completed study of the Karnataka Watershed Project. The third part would be the Review of Training and Learning Needs in DFID itself, and this would be conducted by INTRAC in the final stages of the research. It had always been envisaged that a local consultancy group would be engaged to undertake the India study. Because of their strong interest in all issues related to participatory development, INTRAC contracted PRIA to undertake this research. In turn PRIA sub-contracted two State level organisations, the Centre for Environment Concerns based in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh and the Centre for Youth and Social Development, based in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa to undertake the state components of the study. This was to ensure that the local dynamics and context were fully understood, and that the study would benefit from the already established relationships which these partner organisations had in their respective states. One of the aims of setting up DCOD in India was to ensure a greater impact for its programme through influencing national and state level policies based upon the experience of its programme. However, the study found that the solid achievements made by DFID at the programme level were not being used to the best advantage for wider influence. At the time of the study the organisational structure for managing DFID’s India programme was still relatively new after the move of advisers from London to Delhi. There was some confusion between the roles of the DCOD and the field management offices which led to certain important functions falling between the two, such as policy influence and strategic overviews of national and state programmes. Furthermore, the study concluded that DFID’s concentration of staff in Delhi entailed lost opportunities for developing partnerships at the state level. India is a huge country and many of the states themselves are far bigger than many countries in which DFID works. If state authorities were to feel more engaged with DFID, opening state-level offices in those states in which DFID had focused might improve its relationships with key secondary stakeholders. The project reports demonstrated that Indian counterparts often felt that DFID could do more to understand the way Government of India and state administrations worked in order to improve the levels of participation of local stakeholders. Many of the approaches currently used by DFID (PCM, heavy upfront emphasis on project design documents, use of Log Frame) seemed to reinforce the perception that the programmes were DFID’s rather than those of the local partners. The PALS India report discusses in more detail some of the problems related to the influence of DFID procedures on participation and the sense of its India-based staff looking more towards London than towards local partners. One of the conclusions of the study was that the relocation of staff from London to Delhi had not changed, at least in the short term, the priority DFID staff gave towards meeting the demands of upward accountability to London rather than developing accountability towards Indian partners.

1.2.2 Nepal

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The South East Asia Development Division (SEADD), based in Bangkok, covers a large number of countries in South East Asia as well as Sri Lanka and Nepal. Nepal was the country selected by SEADD for their contribution to PALS and they initially proposed a number of projects for inclusion in the study. An introductory visit to Nepal and Bangkok was undertaken by two INTRAC consultants in April 1997 to explore the potential of studying these projects for PALSNepal. Following discussions with both project managers in Nepal and SEADD advisers in Bangkok, an agreement was reached to focus on four projects. In August 1997, the two INTRAC consultants returned to Nepal to undertake the study. They had put together a team of four consultants to assist them, one for each project to be reviewed. All these consultants were specialists in the particular sector they were reviewing. Thus a team of six consultants worked intensively on the study over a one month period with an additional local consultant employed to help with the fieldwork undertaken as part of the study of the Rural Water Supply Project. On the completion of the Nepal study, the INTRAC consultants went to Bangkok to report back to SEADD staff. Meetings were held with the individual advisers and a joint seminar was held with SEADD staff. The projects selected reflected a wide variety of participatory approaches. The Nepal-UK Community Forestry Project, in particular, was a continuation of DFID’s commitment to participatory forest management in Nepal which had begun in the early 1980s, and is widely considered to be an outstanding example of promoting participatory development through the government’s Department of Forestry. The education and health projects were not envisaged as explicitly participatory projects but nonetheless were useful case studies for looking at partnership within the context of public sector projects. The fourth project, the Rural Water Supply Project, worked independently of government and involved the actual construction of village rural water schemes. It provided a fascinating example of how a non-participatory organisation - the military had successfully implemented rural water supply schemes with a strong degree of primary stakeholder participation. In terms of DFID developing partnerships, the study identified two major limitations on its ability to do this at a national level in Nepal. Firstly, in many ways aid delivery in Nepal still follows the traditional project approach and there has been no actual move yet towards sector investment programmes. The public sector projects (health, forestry and education) all involved project managers working in close collaboration with Nepali officials from respective ministries and at both national and sub-national levels. However, the project cycle, especially the 3-5 year time period, was identified as a major limitation on DFID’s ability to influence whole sectors and engage in policy dialogue and sectoral involvement. Secondly, only one of these projects was managed by DFID TCOs. Two of the others were managed by private consultancy firms while the water project was done through the Gurkha Welfare Scheme, based at the British Gurkha Camp in Pokhara. The current use of private consultancy firms for project management of DFID funded projects does not lend itself to developing long term partnerships with the government. While contract staff give a great deal of time and energy to making the project on which they are employed work and have a strong interest in the sector’s development, the imperatives of a commercial contract, with its tight costs and constraining time schedules does not allow much space to reflect on long-term sectoral direction and donor co-ordination. Furthermore, contracting out means that learning and experience are lost to DFID with the end of the project. For example, the National District Health Strengthening Project was meant to be a successor to the Eastern Region Primary Health Care Project, but a

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different consultancy firm won the bid for the contract and the management team of the old project dispersed.

1.2.3 West and North Africa Department (WNAD) After a series of internal discussions it was decided by WNAD that PALS should include three countries: Ghana, Egypt and Nigeria. A desk study began in early 1997 and the first visit to Ghana was undertaken in June 1997. The overall study included a review of project documentation in London, field visits to Ghana and Egypt (but not Nigeria which was entirely a desk-based study), workshops in Ghana and Egypt at the conclusion of the country studies and a programme of interviews with both in-country project based staff and WNAD staff in London. The INTRAC consultant managed the PALS study in collaboration with national colleagues and gave technical support and advice to the local consultants contracted to undertake the specific project studies. A total of nine DFID supported projects were selected by WNAD for inclusion in the study. A distinctive feature of the WNAD study was the use of local consultants as the principal researchers at the project level. In Ghana, four different research groups were set up under the coordination of the National Development Planning Commission and met on several occasions to discuss the progress of the study. In Egypt, researchers attached to the Centre for Development Services undertook the four project level studies. The INTRAC consultant visited Ghana and Egypt three times each: an initial visit to map out the broad parameters of the research with the local researchers, a visit in mid-research to support the local researchers and a final visit for a PALS seminar at the end of the whole exercise. Inevitably such a drawn-out and distant process encountered some difficulties, largely to do with the process of the approval of the PALS country proposals, the availability of the consultant and the problems that DFID advisers had trying to build PALS into their own work schedules. The positive outcome, however, was the successful engagement of local consultants in the whole process and the constructive and collaborative way in which they tackled the PALS study, despite some fairly trying administrative difficulties. The WNAD study dealt principally with secondary stakeholders as those directly involved in the management of the projects. The projects studied by PALS were selected by WNAD in London, both on the basis that they represented a cross-section of DFID’s work in the region and also because it was felt that they would all, in one form or another, add a particular perspective on the operational issues related to the implementation of participatory development. In this respect it should be noted that all of the projects are being promoted in countries where ‘participatory development’ is not the norm and where it is largely a donor driven issue. In each case, a participatory approach has been grafted on to a sectoral project and vigorous efforts are being made to build in a more stakeholder sensitive approach. In none of the projects was a participatory approach flourishing and institutionalised; in most there was a determined effort to ‘involve’ primary and secondary stakeholders even if the challenge in one or two cases was daunting. The two PALS studies in Ghana and Egypt have revealed the quite considerable difficulties that any effective promotion of a participatory approach will confront. In neither country has this approach been mainstreamed within the public administration and researchers had genuine difficulties at times in engaging senior officials in analysing its role and progress. Furthermore there

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were obvious difficulties for national staff to step outside their prescribed roles and to examine the complexities and the potential of the approach. An interesting comparison that can be made is between the above situation and the state of preparation of DFID staff to promote and support a participatory approach.

1.2.4 Bangladesh The Bangladesh country study was the longest of the PALS studies and, as it was undertaken just after the publication of the White Paper, it offered an early opportunity to review the feasibility of the kind of long term ‘partnerships’ envisaged in this document. The research involved a team of four researchers, two of whom were national consultants, working over a period of four months. DFID-Bangladesh staff selected six projects for case studies. In each of the case studies the methodology included reviews of key documents held by DFID and interviews and focus group discussions with a range of stakeholders - DFID staff, technical assistance teams, project and agency staff, and where appropriate primary beneficiaries. Since all but one of the projects involved technical assistance, the case studies examined in detail the different relationships between technical assistance teams and their local counterparts. There were some positive cases in which the counterpart agency was able to make strategic use of individual consultants to achieve project objectives; and in the case of reforms in budgeting and expenditure control, a consultancy team had successfully used innovative team building approaches to increase the Government of Bangladesh’s long term participation in the initiative. However there were also cases in the public sector projects reviewed in which long-term technical assistance was tending to inhibit participation from the Bangladesh side. This problem was more acute in the case of those projects in which institutional development work was being undertaken as part of donor conditionality rather than to meet a more locally defined agenda. The slow and uneven pace of administrative reform in Bangladesh was found to be constraining the progress being made by any one technical assistance team, and the PALS team recommended that DFIDBangladesh needed to work out a stronger advocacy strategy on fundamental issues of this type. As regards participation by primary stakeholders the case studies found that DFID’s relationship with this group is normally mediated through intermediary agencies, either government departments or NGOs, and the most critical factor is the extent to which these agencies feel a sense of accountability to their primary stakeholders. In a hierarchical society like that of Bangladesh with enormous gaps between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, this sense of accountability requires active advocacy and constant re-enforcement by aid donors. The study reviewed how DFID’s own PCM system influenced participation at different stages in the project cycle, and pointed out opportunities for increasing participation at each stage. Specific recommendations were made about the need to increase participation by local partners both in the approval process and in evaluation. The PALS study coincided with a process of internal review connected to the preparation of a new Country Strategy Paper, and at DFID-Bangladesh’s request, the organisational review was the most detailed of the PALS country studies. Overall the study found that the aid programme in Bangladesh was facing a number of competing pressures - for instance to improve the quality of aid, while also increasing disbursement. It was difficult for many DFID staff to realise the full benefits of being located in Dhaka since the demands of the project

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management system, and specifically the amount of documentation required for a project approval, left staff at all levels little time to build long term relationships with local stakeholders. Very few aid donors have staff to match the technical quality of DFID’s advisers but at present most advisers feel too overloaded to work to their full potential. DFID’s training was found to focus on office procedures, and there is very little training or induction aimed at helping staff understand or cope with the particular pressures of working in Bangladesh. Much more work needs to be delegated to local staff, who will require strong induction and in-service training.

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CHAPTER 2 OPERATIONAL LESSONS FROM PALS The major task of the PALS country studies was to review a wide range of DFID funded projects in order to see what lessons could be learnt from their experiences of using participatory approaches. This chapter presents these key operational lessons. The focus is very much at the project level and summarises the findings from the project case studies. The chapter begins with a discussion of concepts of participation found in DFID projects. It then looks at the issue of primary stakeholder participation. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to examining participatory approaches in the context of different sectors. The main sectors covered in the PALS country studies are health, education, natural resources (especially forestry) and public utilities. The purpose of this sectoral approach is to draw out key lessons for projects in different sectors in using participatory approaches.

2.1 The Concept of Participation in Aid Delivery The position taken in this study is that participation is a broad concept that is open to a wide number of different interpretations. Therefore, the study team has sought to discover the diverse notions of participation held within DFID and the implications of these for DFID’s overall goals as set out in the White Paper. No attempt has been made by the team to define participation precisely nor to judge DFID’s participatory approaches according to some ideal definition of participation. Participation is not a technical or scientific concept but rather needs to be seen as a principle for organising and motivating development policies and practices. The term ‘participation’ had already been current among British NGOs in the mid 1980s, and was formally adopted as an organising concept by DFID in 1992. Since then, it has featured prominently in several manuals, a Technical Note (1995) and in major sectoral reviews, such as that produced for forestry. The recent history of aid delivery has been marked by organising concepts which enter quickly into institutional life, are debated, flourish, and are then either forgotten, or absorbed into mainstream thinking, as newer terms come to prominence. Community Development was such a concept, and it was succeeded by Integrated Rural Development. The notion of Sustainable Development is another example. These short-life concepts differ from more durable ones in several ways. A technical concept such as GNP (Gross National Product), or infectious organism is likely to remain current for a longer time, and be less subject to divergent interpretations, while being more simply descriptive. Terms like participation tend to have a greater spread of meanings but they also have motivating power, to make people debate issues of quality, and direction. Both kinds of concepts are equally valuable. DFID’s Technical Note on Participation describes four core semantic elements of participation informing, consulting, a relation of partnership, and the sharing of control. Reading them from left to right suggested a least-to-most continuum. Other agencies, particularly NGOs have offered the idea of a ladder of participation, an escalator to good practice. But such matrix or ladder approaches, no matter how clear they seem on paper, do not give adequate guidance to the world of everyday application and decision-making.

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This study has found that participation as a motivating concept has been applied in a number of selected DFID projects both thoughtfully and forcefully. It has been energising, having helped give direction to policy, focused minds and helped project practice at ground level. But the study has also found that there is inevitable semantic drift, from level to level of the aid delivery system. When members of a project team at a forestry project workshop in Nepal were asked (in Nepali) to write down what they understood by the term, the responses varied from doing my job properly (from a forest guard), through notions of respecting other peoples viewpoints, (a young forest officer) to more nuanced and project-focused concepts about stakeholder involvement, rights, and interests, from project managers. This is not to suggest a failure of communication from one part of DFID, or a project team, to another. It is to point to the inescapable capacity of non-technical concepts, by their natures (part metaphorical and allusive) to be interpreted in several ways at once. In relation to participation this virtually guarantees diverging understandings. This should be kept in mind throughout this study.

2.2 Primary Stakeholders DFID is a national bilateral aid donor, not an NGO. It tends in practice to deal with secondary stakeholders - civil servants and NGO staff - and somewhat less with the primary stakeholders who are the direct beneficiaries. For this reason, primary stakeholder participation is less of an immediate operational issue for DFID than it is for its development partners in a particular country. DFID is understandably concerned that, in the programmes and projects which it supports, effective primary stakeholder participation is promoted, but it has only limited influence on whether this takes place. This is particularly the case with India and Bangladesh, where both DCOD and AMOD are much more concerned to promote the effective involvement of, and to create a sense of partnership with, secondary stakeholders and have little, if any, direct contact with primary stakeholders. Creating a meaningful sense of promoting primary stakeholder participation to secondary stakeholders is itself a substantial and potentially difficult undertaking. It reduces DFID to the position of seeking to ensure that primary stakeholder participation is a reality and having to trust that the partner organisations take the concept seriously and interpret it in the same way as DFID. One of the best examples of the successful implementation of this approach is from the Nepal UK Community Forestry Project which has no direct contact with primary stakeholders but works through the Department of Forestry.

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Box 2.1 Nepal UK Community Forestry Project One ‘deep’ participatory feature of this Community Forestry Project, to which the team attach great importance, is that they have not sought to work directly and in an unmediated way with user groups. Their mode of operation is to work with the Forestry Department staff, in a series of workshops, in such a way that the forestry staff then interact in a different way with local people. Forestry Department staff, who have a lot to do with village users, employ the action-reflection cycle, to good effect. Where previously forestry staff had seen themselves as guardians of national assets, in a relationship of control and domination with regard to villagers, they are being encouraged to think of themselves as offering villagers technical support in resource management, with the villagers carrying major responsibilities for the condition of the resources by which they live. The reasons given by the project for this approach are: 1. Villagers and forestry departments are Nepali citizens, who will have continuing relations into any foreseeable future. A five-year project is at best a visitor, with a privileged status, and operating with more generous funding. 2. It is relatively easy for a development project to obtain short-term compliance with its ideas, if it rewards local people highly enough, but this is neither advisable nor sustainable. The project is concerned to facilitate new relationships between forestry staff and villagers, which will manage the forests more sustainably while improving the livelihoods of user groups. In this sense, the project team can become role models and facilitate role changes in other stakeholders. (From PALS Nepal Study)

Nonetheless, the PALS country studies found a number of DFID funded projects which had achieved a high degree of primary stakeholder participation. These tended to be those implemented through NGOs or local municipalities rather than through central government ministries. Such projects have usually been concerned with a specific intervention at the community level - such as the construction of a rural water supply or slum improvement - rather than those national level projects concerned with institutional development within, say, a health or education ministry. In the latter types of project it was much more difficult to establish any direct link between the project interventions and primary stakeholder participation. For example, in India, the Cuttack Urban Services Improvement Project went through an extensive consultation process with primary stakeholders and Community Management Groups play a key role in implementing the project. The Nepal Rural Water Supply Project is a particularly successful example of effective primary stakeholder participation which was achieved by a methodology suitable to the local context and the fact that project staff belonged to the area. Similarly the CARE INTERFISH Project in Bangladesh appears to have moved from merely informing primary stakeholders to actively investing them with a sense of project ownership. In Egypt, the Support for Environmental Assessment and Management project staff engaged with local people directly and sought to involve them in the important decisions regarding environmental care in their communities; and the Adult Literacy Training Programme has been successful in convincing community residents of the importance of literacy and of the need for their active support in order to sustain the programme. In Ghana the Wenchi project is an innovative and imaginative approach to building the structures of primary stakeholder participation among poor farmers, and in Nigeria, the Benue Health Fund has obtained strong commitment from health professionals to refurbish local hospitals, and from rural communities to manage revolving drug supplies, in both instances on a cost-recovery basis. Many of the approaches used by DFID’s project partners have been both innovative and successful in ensuring that primary stakeholders have felt a sense of involvement and ownership of project interventions. There are many useful lessons from these projects which should be shared more

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widely within DFID. And although the PALS study has confirmed that in some cases the gap between rhetoric and practice is often quite substantial, it should be recognised that there are DFID funded projects experimenting with, and actively seeking to promote, the participation of those who might benefit from them. Box 2.2 Examples of Primary Stakeholder Participation in DFID Projects The Cuttack Urban Services Improvement Project • The project was designed through the involvement of the beneficiaries in a participatory planning exercise. The DFID consultants took the lead in organising the participatory project planning with the primary stakeholders. The secondary stakeholders were also involved in this process, primarily to facilitate the process with the primary stakeholders. • Since the project was pilot in nature, there was great scope to experiment with innovative methods from a widerange of options. To overcome the problems faced in the infrastructure development, the project management abandoned the practice of engaging contractors and came up with the innovative method of ‘community contracting’. Rural Water Supply Project, Nepal • The achievements of the Rural Water Supply Project management in adopting a participatory approach to rural water supply have been impressive, especially given that the project has had to follow a radically different approach to Phase I (where community participation was very limited) as a condition of continued DFID funding. Project staff appear open and willing to learn new approaches and methods. Meanwhile the high technical standards of Phase I have been maintained in Phase II. • The project follows a ‘Stepwise Approach’ to the design, construction and operation of village water supply schemes. This requires the community to respond appropriately at each level in order to gain entry to the next. A wide range of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) -type methods, including mapping exercises and focus-group discussions are used by the project workers. Wenchi Farming Systems Development and Training Project, Ghana • The novel aspects of this project have been the building of an NGO support network for small farmers and the formation of a District level Agricultural Co-ordinating Committee (DACC) of Government, NGOs, private sector and community based bodies as a mechanism for active stakeholder participation in the project. • The DACC is the critical mechanism in the project in that it provides the forum for greater local participation; it is the means by which collaborating institutions can be made aware of farmers’ needs and it affords NGOs and community based organisations (CBOs) the opportunity to make their views known and to influence district level agricultural policy. In particular the project has greatly facilitated the involvement of CBOs within the process of policy formulation at the district level. Support for Environmental Assessment and Management Project (SEAM), Egypt • The Team has ‘built’ a participatory approach into its operations and now sees this approach as central to its work. Recent SEAM literature and project documentation refers to such concepts as ‘ownership’, consultation processes, bottom-up responses, institutional strengthening at the local level, ‘community catalyst’ projects, and several other terms which suggest that the programme is actively seeking to promote a participatory approach. • In the SEAM project, the staff are of the opinion that formal involvement of the communities in all stages of the project from data collection to implementation will raise the awareness of the project to the critical levels that are essential for sustainability. As a result, other unrelated community activities have also benefited and local initiatives have been developed. A network of strong ties between project staff and the local authorities has developed and contributes to further attitudinal changes to citizen participation in development projects. Benue Health Fund, Nigeria • The Benue Health Fund uses a devolved decision-making approach, down to Village Health Committee level, responding to mini-projects proposed by rural stakeholders and urban hospital trusts. The fund has set up a legal framework within which a number of unspecified, but user-initiated outcomes should take place. 21

• The legal framework has emerged after extensive consultation in a number of stakeholder planning and consultation exercises with selected rural groups which have resulted in project proposals of an in Benue. • INTERFISH has evolved from a project focused on delivering extension on certain technologies through methodologies. This has enabled both staff and farmers to recognise and address their learning needs in • To achieve this kind of shared responsibility, all INTERFISH staff are themselves trained in team building, includes living in a rural community for two weeks and preparing a case study.

Since the Alma Ata meeting in 1978 and the emergence of Primary Health Care as a fundamental have increasingly influenced health care and development strategies, particularly in resource poor influence has become widespread as more and more countries confront the challenge of how to 1980s the concept of participation in the health sector was broader in its interpretation and sought the design of appropriate strategies. However, in the 1990s strategies to promote more active local to ensure the sustainability of health services. Moreover the health sector, with its dominant ethos acknowledge the case for more local participation. Universally the health sector is predicated on community participation, other than to support the service delivery function, have not always been

The health projects reviewed during the PALS exercise would appear to mirror these concerns and sector reform. A central tenet of these reforms appears to be the notion of partnership in health but instead actively seek to share this responsibility with both the private sector and with decentralisation and the establishing of structures at the local level as the vehicles for this more sometimes being used in a quite different sense, and is driven by the requirements of the central Community Involvement in Health Development; in the other countries there is no such guidance that the health sector actively addressed the issue of local involvement in any systematic manner.

sector, this was largely limited to informing and consulting. Furthermore participation was seen

almost exclusively in terms of health care delivery and was not widened into any suggestion of involvement in broader issues of health policy and health systems development. Even the impressive Ghanaian Government’s strategy document on community involvement limited the concept to this task. The Bangladesh and the Nepal studies reported similar conclusions. Government and their donor partners are desperately seeking ways to share the responsibility for health care delivery through devolution and this is now being promoted in the guise of community involvement. Indeed the Nepal study reported that the purpose of community involvement in health was to complement and support Government services. Local communities, therefore, are informed of Government policy and consulted in terms of being brought together in some form of workshop. Their involvement is seen as an input into existing health services and resources and it would appear to be strictly limited to this function. In line with current thinking on health sector reform, the concept of local participation in health is seen in largely managerial and fiscal terms. In both India and Ghana innovative district level health management systems were seen as key elements in a process of strengthening health services at that level and of creating the means whereby district systems could become less dependent upon the national government. The basis of this approach in Orissa State in India is an Information, Education and Communication system, while in Ghana experimental district level health management systems have been set up to spearhead the generating of more active local commitment to, and involvement in, health care. Furthermore, the main purpose of a more energetic policy of local participation is that of costrecovery. All of the case studies reported that this is a principal and underlying reason why national health systems are concerned to involve others in their responsibility to deliver health care services. Fiscal criteria are now the major driving force of health service development in many countries and local communities are seen as potential sources of revenue. Community participation in health is seen as cost-effective in that it reduces health service costs and spreads responsibility for delivery. Health services are now driven by targets, which include the level of community contributions, and efficient management systems are seen as the basic instruments for achieving these. However, during the PALS research, other stakeholders noted that the approach seems to be impervious to people’s poverty and not only to their inability (or varying abilities) to pay but also the other more critical priorities in their lives. Stakeholder participation in the different aspects and stages of health care delivery and health development is problematic in a sector which traditionally has functioned in a vertical and deliveryconscious manner. This problem is evident on two levels. At the level of secondary stakeholders there is inevitably an uneasy relationship between donor agendas and pressure to produce results and Government ministries responsible for the health sector. In Nepal, India and Bangladesh the studies all commented upon this problematic relationship. Energetic and dogmatic donors with policies for the health sector must keep pace with local capacities and be conscious of the critical importance of ownership. Health sector reform is a major plank of DFID’s aid programme but the pace at which this reform can take place must be consistent with local expectations. Some Ministries of Health and the larger NGOs might be able to keep pace, but the more resource-poor ministries and the smaller NGOs may not feel that they are playing an equal part in the task. DFID’s agenda is too demanding for them. DFID-supported health projects appear to deal exclusively with secondary stakeholders on the assumption that relations with primary stakeholders are handled by health service staff. Almost certainly, if secondary stakeholders do not feel at ease in their relationship with donors, this will influence the manner in which they in turn relate to the primary stakeholders in the health sector.

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On another level, all of the case studies comment on the generally unsatisfactory relationship between the health service and the primary stakeholders who are expected, or have been invited, to collaborate with health service plans. Clearly health service policy discussions are seen as the preserve of donors and their immediate counterparts and there is little evidence that they acknowledge that service users ought to be involved. (In this sense, health seems to have something to learn from forestry). The India study reported that the interests of primary stakeholders inevitably lost out to those with more political clout; while health workshops convened in Nepal usually had only a symbolic community presence. More positively, a Task Force on Community and Stakeholder Participation was set up in Bangladesh and held meetings at the community level in order to directly involve communities and not leave them to be represented by NGOs. These meetings were seen essentially as consultations at which health service staff could receive communities grievances and their suggestions for a more effective community level health service. Finally in Ghana the recent development of a district level health management system is seen as the basis for a more effective dialogue between the service and its users, but it is too early to form any judgement. The limited understanding of stakeholder participation and the even more limited nature of primary stakeholder involvement is reflected in the means which the health sector projects employ to promote this involvement. Consultation takes place mainly at the secondary stakeholder level and involves workshops, meetings, and PRA and Log Frame exercises with health staff at the district level. While such methods are commonplace, they seem largely to obey donor requirements at the design stage and are not the basis of future, longer-term involvement. In particular there is a dearth of ideas on how to engage effectively with primary stakeholders at the district level. The two basic mechanisms at this level appear to be some form of local health committee and local volunteers or community health workers (in fact, the innovative Benue Health Fund project in Nigeria has both PHCs and a hospital-based Project Advisory Committee which goes some way to utilising these). At this level, however, there is little evidence that the health sector distinguishes between different factions and groups and their rival interests, all of which will affect their inclination to become involved. The case studies confirm that, while mechanisms exist to satisfy donor requirements for consultation, national and district level health services generally are poorly equipped operationally to promote and support primary stakeholder involvement in health care and development. The health sector has yet effectively to come to terms with the nature and potential of stakeholder involvement and seems not to understand what it is or could be. While secondary stakeholder involvement is largely a function of the attitude and administrative procedures of donor agencies, the involvement of primary stakeholders is qualitatively different. Health service staff and donors seem unable to see this other than in fiscal and efficiency terms. The health development of poor people is not just a question of the provision of services. If Governments and donors are concerned to promote better health and to develop sustainable and locally supported health services, they will need to move beyond the perfunctory planning workshop and the abstractions of the log-frame and help promote genuine stakeholder mobilisation and involvement by means which are more appropriate to the task.

2.4 Public Utilities Public utilities are often major recipients of donor aid as governments seek to build and improve their infrastructure and to provide a better and more extensive service to customers. Such utilities 24

are by nature large bureaucracies with highly centralised decision-making processes and often little tradition of interface with the general public. Unlike many developed countries, there are rarely mechanisms for public utilities to engage in meaningful consultation with users and little, if any, accountability to the public at large for their actions. As such, these utilities present a formidable challenge in terms of the promotion of consumer participation and it was for this reason that several were included in the PALS country studies. This is apposite because a recent OECD Evaluation suggested that too little attention had been paid to issues of public participation in large scale infrastructure projects. Specifically, the following DFID supported public utility projects were included: • • • •

Egypt: Cairo Waste Water Organisation Egypt: General Origination for Sanitary Drainage (GOSD) India: Orissa Power Sector Project Bangladesh: Roads & Bridges (not exactly public utility but with similar characteristics)

In relation to the above public utilities, any notion of participatory development is almost exclusively in terms of secondary stakeholders; there was very little evidence of any serious primary stakeholder involvement. This is almost certainly to do with the essentially hierarchical and tightly controlled nature of the administration of these utilities and also the predominately technical content of their work. The organisational culture of these utilities is unfavourable, if not hostile, to the notion of external participation. The supremacy of technical knowledge, internal procedures and regulations, and a slightly arrogant distaste for engaging with people of a lower social order, all mitigate against the promotion of a new more favourable environment in which stakeholder participation might flourish. Essentially the concept of participation in the full sense of the term is almost alien to the professionals who staff these utilities. Participation is understood as part of the current development discourse but it is not a major concern. The general view would appear to be that, if participation can facilitate the utility’s work, then it might be a good thing; otherwise there is nothing to be gained. None of the above utilities has any kind of a budget for promoting participation and none of the senior or project level staff had had any experience with participatory approaches. Against this situation is the question of the mistrust that poor urban communities have for utilities which promise but often fail to produce adequate services. It is perhaps worth noting here that OXFAM in Brazil succeeded in getting urban slum-dwellers involved in the rehabilitation and remotivation of their inadequate municipal refuse collection system, through a variety of consultative processes with stakeholder analysis to the fore. There need be no unbridgeable gap between public sector service delivery and popular participation. However, efforts were being made in the above utilities to promote a more participatory approach based on, for example, the following methods: •

Awareness campaigns to inform the public of the work or a particular initiative of the utility and, in some instances, to seek their views. In Orissa and with GOSD in Cairo, such campaigns were the basic mechanism of trying to promote some involvement of local people or in GOSD’s case, school children.

•

Regular meetings between staff and local consultants as a way of trying to keep staff at least informed of a project’s progress (Bangladesh).

•

Log Frame exercises were a common mechanism for involving secondary stakeholders in initial project formulation and planning.

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More generally in terms of the participation of secondary stakeholders, there appears to be in both India and Bangladesh considerable controversy concerning the role of consultants - both local and external - in keeping stakeholders informed and in assuming some responsibility for involving them in decisions related to the project. In particular criticism was made of the control and monopoly of technical knowledge which consultants often have and of their unwillingness to share these with local stakeholders. Consultants were not seen as accountable to project staff, still less to local people. They were seen as agents of donor agencies as opposed to government stakeholders. Certainly in its use of consultants on public utility projects, DFID was criticised chiefly for not facilitating more easy access to decision making and planning. Of the four case studies, those of India and Bangladesh showed most evidence that secondary stakeholders and project level staff were concerned with the issue of their involvement in the DFID supported public utility projects. For the two Egyptian projects this was much less evident and the researchers had genuine difficulties in engaging staff on the issue. Furthermore, and despite the comment above, there was recognition in India and Bangladesh of DFID’s efforts to promote a more participatory approach, whereas in Egypt the matter was clearly not on the local sectoral managers’ agenda. In Bangladesh stakeholders saw their role as essentially reactive, as opposed to proactive, in relation to their participation in the public utilities - tyranny of technocracy - and argued that the issue of ownership lay at the heart of promoting their greater involvement. Donors in general face a mammoth task in seeking to introduce greater accountability and stakeholder voice in technologically complex operations and can understandably feel some sense of achievement when stakeholders are at least informed and consulted. It would appear that it would be a major up-hill task to push the participation one stage along the matrix and to give stakeholders some sense of ownership of the projects.

2.5 Forestry and Natural Resources Sector The vocabulary of participation intentionally evokes collaborative and unproblematic relationships, as does the term stakeholders. But in a world of rising populations and fierce market-share competition, the use of forests and other natural resources often incur conflict, when interest groups see their relations as antagonistic. Bribery and coercion have accompanied logging operations in many countries, and rural people have often found themselves on the wrong side of regulatory laws in their search for livelihoods, and the victims of forestry officials’ sanctions, including fines, beatings, and prison. Chiefs and political leaders are often able to derive direct benefits from the sale of forest resources, over the heads of, or behind the backs of ordinary people. Forestry Departments have usually been initiated and tutored by colonial governments to have a custodial and authoritarian view of their powers and duties, and are not free of the view that educated people know better than forest dwellers on most important matters. The movement towards community forestry, or collaborative forest management has been partly a movement to persuade forestry officials to rethink their institutional roles, and their perceptions of rural people. Where 25 years ago, a senior forester might have seen farmers and livestock herders as dangerous to the safe keeping of state forests, and the forests themselves as wholly and exclusively revenue earners for government, there has been a new generation of forestry thinking and activism. In Nepal, for example, Nepali and non-Nepali forestry experts proposed twenty years ago that rural people were competent managers of their own forests, and could be thoughtful conservationists 26

who could enter into a partnership with the state, whereby their livelihoods were assisted while the forests were maintained. The Nepal-UK Community Forestry Project (NUKCFP) has been concerned to assist the Forestry Department to retrain its staff, at all levels within a few Districts, in the newly emergent roles. This has been the result of a continuing dialogue between Nepali foresters, politicians, rural people, and aid donors. Many Nepalis have been trained in forestry in Britain, Australia, and elsewhere, and much of that studying has been paid for by aid-related technical training schemes. If these longterm relationships and debates are to be understood as forms of partnership, then the nineties are simply the most explicit phase in the evolution of DFID/Nepali forestry thinking and practices. Although NUKCFP studies and understands how rural people use their trees, it works only occasionally with villagers, but continuously with forest guards, rangers, and District Forestry Officers, in a training and facilitating capacity. All project documents are available in both English and Nepali, and the majority of the project staff are Nepalis. The sense of Nepali ownership among project staff is very strong. But from the Kathmandu office of senior foresters, the donor-funded projects are seen as privileged, and they are still regarded as the British project or the Swiss project. Box 2.3 Nepal-UK Community Forestry Project: forest user groups Among the interesting specific forestry innovations in Nepal, which might have wider global application are the general encouragement by several donors of forest user groups - that is, associations of villagers who have the right to manage and profit from local forests, under the supervision of the Forestry Department. The forest user groups have to produce a written Management Plan, which they prepare with Departments tutelage, and when this has been approved, they are a legal entity. Specific DFID innovations include funding forestry user group support programmes, on national radio, and help to the Federation of Forest User Groups.

Turning now to Ghana, there has been a DFID programme since 1993 known as the Collaborative Forest Management Programme (CFMP) which aims to explore and develop the potential for partnership between local people and the Forestry Department (FD) in all areas of forest management. This is far-reaching, and requires action in policy, the law, changes in operating systems, strategic planning, and rules for collaborative management. Among the goals now shared between DoF and local communities are: • • • • • •

conflict reduction increasing indigenous knowledge of trees reduction of encroachment control of illegal logging contracting boundary maintenance to local people collaborative forest management of NTFPs.

This progress is crowned by a new Timber Rights Bill which grants communities far greater say in how and under what conditions timber felling concessions will be made.

Box 2.4 Collaborative Forest Management Programme, Ghana

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In Ghana there has been a history of mutual mistrust between Forestry Department (FD) and farmers. The closer relationship has been between DoF and some chiefs and other political leaders. The FD is keen to enter into an improved relationship with rural people, and explicitly looks to DFID’s support as a way of improving troubled relations. At the same time, rural people are as yet not very clear about the project and DoF-led concept of collaborative forest management. They may be forgiven for this lack of clarity since, in one prominent example, the people of Akropong were encouraged to seek DoF training, to prepare a management plan, approved by DoF, to harvest some trees, and when they had done so and brought the timber to Accra for sale, saw it seized by a task force in the employ of the FD, on the grounds that the sale of this timber would be illegal. Three months later, and 30% of the sale revenue poorer, they returned home. Another local group had an agreement with the DoF to start exploiting the Esuboni reserves non-timber forest products on January 1st 1997, but by February of 1998 they had still not started to do so for fear the Forestry Department guards would arrest them. Clearly much clarification and explicit communication about newly acquired rights remains to be done. The Collaborative Forestry Management Unit has been working on the facilitation of enabling frameworks to ensure that incentives for local people are clearly articulated in the legal and policy spheres. But there have been successes, too. Among the five pilot learning sites, at which DoF hopes to explore the potential for a specific form of collaborative forest management, there is one at Fosu. A key feature involves the sharing of all information - reports, press releases, photographs and satellite imagery. Another feature is the idea of FD staff learning from local resource owners about their conditions of livelihood and their forest usage patterns. At first, in 1993-94, villagers were confirmed in their view that their land ownership was at risk from the state, but after a relatively long period of contact - several more years - they started to feel that they were having an influence on FD policy, particularly when a set of Interim Measures were adopted which involve the joint control of illegal logging.

It will be appreciated, then, that adopting a more consultative and collaborative attitude to forest management involves DFID and Forestry Departments taking clear positions on the extent to which local peoples’ rights to livelihood will be recognised and secured, against those of outside interests, national or international, which might if unrestricted, harvest timber by the most profitable means possible, with little or no regard for the long-term sustainability of local or national resources. A third project, again in Ghana, the Wenchi Farming Systems Development and Training Project, did not begin in an explicitly participatory framework, but this was developed after early difficulties. There has been a conscious goal to shift from a view of farmers as people to be taught, to one in which concepts of mutual learning, between agriculture specialists and farmers, comes into play. The PALS Report suggests that understandings of participation diverge at different levels - at senior official levels, one core meaning is not using force; in the middle of the official system, the idea of consensus decision making is prominent; and at farmer level the understanding is that seasonal calendars should be made, and records should be kept. (Similar divergences - but with slightly different content - were noted in a workshop with Nepali forestry stakeholders.) This study sounds a warning note on any naive belief that participatory training can remove longestablished perceptions about power differences. One stakeholder said: ‘In the presence of political leaders or chiefs, decisions are often taken with a hidden fear called respect. Thus decisions tend to satisfy the interests of the politicians/chiefs present. However, this hidden fear decreases with increasing urbanisation . . .’ The researchers went out of their way to support this view, and further add that at the end of the day DFID imposed solutions and a future agenda on this project. The secondary stakeholders NGO members and government employees - seem to have derived more benefit from this project than did farmers. One clear success of stakeholder consultation methods has been the formation of a strategy for the Renewable Natural Resources sector in Ghana. DFID decided to review its programmes in this

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sector in Ghana in early 1994, and presented proposals to the Government of Ghana in February 1995. The Government’s response was formed between February and September 1995 after a series of key stakeholder workshops, held with DFID funding. The Government was sufficiently appreciative of the benefits from such a stakeholder consultation process that it has now become a standard feature of Government procedures. However, in this and other participatory consultation exercises in Ghana the reports note over and over again that these exercises are costly in time, and in maintenance terms - vehicles, fuel, allowances, and Government is likely to request further donor assistance to continue in this new vein. There is, then, no simple kick-start from using participatory methods. The methods are not a one-off cost, and cannot easily be passed down by donors to either primary or secondary stakeholders.

2.6 Participation Issues in the Education Sector The PALS study included a secondary educational project in Nepal, two primary education projects in India and a rural adult literacy project in Egypt, a very small selection of DFID’s activities in this sector. Nor are these cases easily comparable. India and Nepal share relatively high rates of illiteracy. In India, bilateral aid makes only a very small contribution to national budgets, and a confident, highly educated class direct the educational policies at national and state levels. In Nepal aid is a much larger feature of government budgets, infrastructure is in most respects poorer than in India, and with the nation having only recently emerged from a long period of authoritarian rule, officials are aware of the fragile finances of the state, and are less prone to challenge aid donors, a fact which depresses policy dialogue. First, some broad conceptual issues. Because the term participation was current prior to its use in development, increasing participation in education normally refers to getting a higher proportion of pupils (primary stakeholders) into education programmes, and to seeing them leaving schools with useful qualifications. Educationalists also speak of pupil participation in education in terms of the nature of the communications between teachers and pupils: Is teaching entirely top-down, or is it more interactive? Can pupils be encouraged to be active in learning, agents as well as receptors? There is also the linked idea that to fully participate in a literate society, basic literacy is important, because so many decisions and procedures are initiated by literate people on behalf of everyone. But it is sometimes argued that poor people cannot afford to invest their children’s time in education if they cannot see some income-generating pay-offs in the foreseeable future. Thus, the question of who participates in education has subjective and contextual aspects, as well as Objectively Verifiable Indicators. Under what circumstances can the poor afford to take part in education? Going to school for three years may not be as obviously beneficial as planting a hectare of rice, or earning wages. In Nepal, DFID was brought into the Secondary Education Project at the suggestion of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and on the basis of a one-page concept paper from a senior Nepali educationalist. The ADB had already financed a Science Project of which some senior Nepali administrators had been very critical, but which had been saved from relegation by the pleas of Nepali educationalists. In the new project DFID was supposed to supply additional expertise. The project design involved the use of inputs to the reform of the Nepali education system by international consultants, making a series of short-term visits and working with local counterparts. Consultation with senior Nepalis (very few of whom were women) took place at appraisal, design and inception phases, and the project works to support existing Nepali education units. But it was not until mid term review that some of Nepali key syllabus preferences were addressed. A 29

stakeholder workshop and Log Frame procedures facilitated the mid term review. Asked confidentially why Nepali educationalists had not argued their case more forcefully to the British appraisal team, one commented ‘Beggars can’t be choosers’. This hints at the major differences between aid in Nepal, and in India. Box 2.5 The Nepal Secondary Education Project The Nepal Secondary Education Project has been systematically consultative about issues in education reform, and has helped focus debate among the Nepali elite on the meaning and value of higher education. It has even consulted school leavers about the value of the education they received and how it positions them in the labour market. And it has produced a national education plan based on widespread consultation with diverse interest groups. In a country which has had democracy only since 1990, these may be significant initiatives. But it would be unwise to conclude that these things have happened only because a British expert team encouraged them. Many Nepalis are themselves attracted, indeed committed, to the ideas of democracy and consultation which underpin the concept of participation. However, the education sector is not free from patronage and party politics, and the continuity of teacher training schemes has been threatened by staff transfers, including political changes of DEOs in more than 70 out of 75 Districts after one recent election. Less impressive was the pre-history of the project, where planning consultation was male-dominated, and remained at elite levels. The project design seems not to have foreseen how important it was to work out how textbooks printed in Kathmandu would be delivered to local specialist units, to appreciate the shortage of skilled secretaries, basic office equipment, and consumables. The weakness of this non-participatory planning may mean that the project will have continuing difficulties with seeing its goals realised in the follow through of vital components down to the levels where they are needed. Basic problems have included plans in which a particular teacher or inspector ought to attend three workshops over a year, and which fail to take account of both the musical chairs of staff transfers, and the fact that attending workshops may bore some people, or attract people for whom they are not intended. In an impoverished country, a free ride to a district capital may be a patronage perk, to be given to a party loyalist, rather than the person intended.

In India, the Government has been committed since 1986 to a policy of Education for all which promotes people’s participation in improving basic education, as well as health and nutritional information. In 1982 the Minister for Education in Delhi, Mr. Rao, sought DFID support for a primary schools building programme in the state of Andhra Pradesh, his home state. DFID agreed on condition the programme included a HRD component, aimed at training teachers to improve learning by making it more enjoyable, and children more actively involved. This became the APPEP. In Phase II, beginning in 1989, it became DFID’s biggest-spending educational project ever. It was not considered to be particularly participatory in any of the stronger senses. It depended heavily on design features from UK based consultants. The British Council was involved in building demonstration schools from locally available materials, but the Andhra Pradesh Buildings Division was not prepared to take up this design principle. The hoped for teacher-led initiatives in producing appropriate teaching materials tended, as pressures increased, to give way to DFID-designed off-the-peg packages.

Box 2.6 Education Projects in India

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The District Primary Education Project (DPEP) is a centrally sponsored national project, which is being implemented nationwide. In Andhra Pradesh planning started in 1995, DFID support started in 1996, and project implementation has just started. In this programme, the donors are supporting the sector, and take no direct role in project design or aid delivery. This is done entirely by the Indian government’s Ministry of Human Resources, and this division of labour is agreed in the TOR. Leadership comes from civil service officers who have field level specialised experience of education issues. In DPEP, Village Education Committees and teachers decide on the location of schools, with the help of DPEP engineers, design the buildings and oversee construction. The sense of local ownership is said to be much stronger than in the APEP project. However, as one key informant explained, it is very difficult to oversee, ensure and encourage participation of other stakeholders and come out unscathed, as more often than not there are clashes of interest, and political power and influence decide any matter at hand, rather than the strict application of project norms.

Most DFID aid reviewed by the PALS study involves support to different levels of state education systems, and so works with secondary stakeholders. In Nepal, DFID has delivered aid in secondary education through a British contractor team working intermittently with local counterparts, only some of whom had a wide experience of Nepal. This support to the Ministry of Education, while welcome to Nepalis as a financial input, and a stimulus to reforming action could have been more deeply and widely consultative, and could have met Nepali curriculum needs earlier. In Andhra Pradesh the initial primary education project worked to a similar consultant-led plan, but the more recent DPEP, while Delhi-directed, is committed to District-level implementation and allows strong elements of village user-consultation in school design, construction and location, and thus, it is hoped will lead to local ownership in the expanded sense.

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CHAPTER 3 PARTICIPATION AND PROJECT CYCLE MANAGEMENT This chapter sets out to examine the extent to which DFID’s requirements on PCM facilitate or obstruct the use of participatory approaches. DFID has invested heavily in recent years in developing PCM to provide a coherent, rigorous approach to project management throughout the organisation. The chapter opens with an examination of how participation is operationalised at various stages in the project cycle. There then follows a discussion of the appropriateness of the tools found in PCM, notably the Log Frame, for developing participatory approaches. Finally there is a discussion of the role of Office Instructions (which provides detailed instructions on the procedures to be followed in PCM) within the organisation and the impact this has on participatory approaches.

3.1. Identification, Design and Approval In participatory development interventions the planning phase in a project is essential for establishing links and building trust with stakeholders, learning about the conditions, circumstances and the priorities of those at the primary level, identifying possible projects and developing goals, objectives and strategies that are appropriate, realistic and sustainable within the particular cultural and institutional environment. This suggests an intensive period of consultation, listening and discussion, and sensitive research to establish a baseline for programme planning, monitoring and evaluation. Such a process might include social, gender, risk and stakeholder analysis, participatory needs assessment, workshops for consulting stakeholders, and similar exercises. Traditional project identification, planning and design within DFID has only marginally involved primary stakeholders. The Nepal education study, for example, found consultation at the project design phase had until recently been limited to brief interviews with relatively senior male civil servants, mostly in Kathmandu. Project proposals had often been prepared by programme managers and expatriate consultants, not local stakeholders. While DFID has more recently been employing the stakeholder consultation workshop as a tool for planning and engagement (e.g. WNAD - Benue Health Fund; Nepal District Health Strengthening Project), in identification, the participation of secondary stakeholders normally takes precedence over that of primary stakeholders. However, the PALS country studies included some interesting examples of innovative, participatory approaches to project design. Among the projects where there was an innovative degree of early primary beneficiary consultation were: Community Forestry and RWSP in Nepal, SEAM in Egypt, Wenchi in Ghana and CARE INTERFISH in Bangladesh. If these innovations are to be followed more widely, it means that consultation needs to be slower, more far reaching and involving a selection of stakeholders at the primary level and of the junior officials who have to make a project work at this level. It also means exploring ways of helping partners establish systems for monitoring the degree to which stakeholders are influencing the project design process. If it is the case that many projects are often over-designed by senior DFID staff and expatriate consultants, without sufficient lower echelon stakeholder consultation, it helps explain difficulties 32

Project in Nepal which was designed by a highly technical team of consultants with little consultation with Nepali women or junior health personnel. Sometimes, PCM procedures, DFID-speak, even though they know English. Could DFID be more flexible about accepting local documentation, and reporting conventions?

the multitude of findings and perspectives arising from stakeholder consultation into the project proposal format and the PCM system more generally, ensuring that stakeholder consultation has an projects on the extent to which stakeholders can influence planning and design. One of the greatest threats to stakeholder participation in the PCM is the frequent delay between partners and other secondary stakeholders from the approval process. DFID has a reputation in many quarters both for tolerating unreasonable delays in approval and for not offering satisfactory a precedent in which DFID’s own internal imperatives become the principal dynamic within the project.

responsible for project design may not be responsible for implementation. This disrupts the transfer of learning, and weakens the engaged social relationships on which good projects can capitalise. needed. This problem is often exacerbated when consultants are contracted to undertake project design.

If DFID is hands-on at the planning and design phases, it is hands off in implementation, which is largely seen as the business of partner organisations, consultants and TCO project managers. PCM system. For larger projects this takes the form of project reports by non-DFID staff, monitoring by field managers and other staff, reviews by interdisciplinary staff teams and other key

The PM includes a Log Frame for measuring progress against the project purpose, details the roles and responsibilities of all agencies involved in a project, as well as the reporting, monitoring and includes work plans and activity charts. Some of the guidelines on monitoring, reporting and reviews in the Office Instructions are entirely that these are management tools and not DFID policing activities, that they should ensure continuous learning and quality control and that mechanisms for participatory monitoring should be

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considerable flexibility on the frequency of monitoring and reporting. Often the monitoring strategies are quite informal, involving little more than meeting project staff or visiting project sites. Nonetheless, PCM procedures during implementation present a number of obstacles to participation, as follows: • Much monitoring is carried out by short-term expatriate consultants, and their reports are not normally available to all project staff. • The decisions on who shall carry out monitoring are often taken at senior levels, away from the project. However, degrees of consultation with project staff vary. In Nepal, the UK Forestry project has used Nepali consultants to monitor project tasks and received rigorous evaluations from seasoned experts, and this is also the case in Ghana. • The Log Frame is thought to be better as a baseline for assessing output performance, than as a reporting instrument for taking account of qualitative processes, where case-study reports are more useful. There is a tension here. There is a case for a DFID-wide re-think of the way it reviews implementation. The assessments of beneficiaries need to be given their proper weight, and should not be marginalised by PCM and Log Frame reporting procedures. Again, there is a tension between participatory development outcomes and the requirements of aid accountability. The two can be harmonised by developing more participatory methods of monitoring and evaluation which ensure client-based accountability to primary and secondary stakeholders while maintaining accountability to the tax payer.

3.3 PCM and the Tools of Participation PCM provides two basic instruments for promoting stakeholder participation. These are the Log Frame and stakeholder analysis. The Log Frame is used in several ways, as a predictive planning tool, a reporting device and a mechanism for checking progress during implementation. It tends to be understood intuitively by senior management and is well-liked by planners because it promotes logical clarity, task specificity and functionality in the project process and is particularly effective for clarifying objectives. The introduction of the Log Frame has, in addition, been beneficial to stakeholder participation in the following respects: • Firstly, the current usage of the Log Frame within the PCM requires that primary and secondary stakeholders are consulted which was not a requirement in the past. This is seen to be a major improvement from the period when Log Frames were written by DFID staff with no requirement to undertake stakeholder analysis or consultation. • Secondly, considerable efforts have been made in individual projects to use the Log Frame in innovative ways to ensure greater stakeholder participation, as in the case of NUKCFP. • Thirdly, the Log Frame is useful as a partnership tool because it shows clarity about the relationship between different elements of the project and how they relate to its purpose and goal. It provides a means of making project planning transparent to other stakeholders. However, there are a number of limitations with the Log Frame which became very evident during PALS. Many project staff often see it as an imposed burden. As an abstract, planning or reporting tool it encourages a linear analytical thought process that excludes people who are not well educated. This is not helped by the fact that not all DFID staff understand that the Log Frame can 34

be used flexibly. Risk analysis and stakeholder analysis are seen as more participatory and inclusive

The Log Frame can be used in collective planning and monitoring and in this sense provides an important opportunity for alignment of thinking between DFID and other key stakeholders. particularly apparent in the review of the Nepal District Health Strengthening Project (NDHSP). Further, Log Frames developed in participatory workshops are usually significantly redesigned by from donors. The NDHS Log Frame, for example, was substantially redesigned before being sent to SEADD. The Nepal study questions the legitimacy of asking stakeholders to complete a Log

The key issue is that particular groups of stakeholders may need tailor-made monitoring methods. A method effective at one structural level may be disabling at another. There is a need for a more as an internal DFID tool, and its use becoming a requirement for project partners, whether they are at ease with it, or not. A further danger of using the Log Frame as participatory tool, as opposed to among other stakeholders which severely reduces their ability to participate on equal terms with project staff. In such cases, additional tools for participation need to be utilised.

understand not only the abstract framework, but how to make it work for them in the field. They must have the interpersonal skills to facilitate stakeholder confidence and engagement; the

3.4 Office Instructions The PCM system, as set out in the OI, is at the very core of DFID’s aid delivery process, providing PALS case studies and DFID interviews suggest the system is often seen to be at odds with the ideals of stakeholder participation, for several reasons.

Many staff would like a less prescriptive approach to development interventions. Undoubtedly there is some room for flexibility. The Log Frame, for example, may be adapted during the project the sheer volume of directives and the pressure to conform leave staff reluctant to experiment. There is thought to be excessive front loading of the PCM, with a strong focus on project planning

‘Does DFID over-design programmes? - Yes: it tries to design programmes to please all stakeholders, in other words including all the advisers. At some point we have to stop the to move into delivery mode at some point.’ (Adviser).

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The fulfilment of requirements, especially the preparation of the PCN, the PM and the PEC submission account for the bulk of senior staff workload. Is this is the best use of staff? It diverts advisers and managers from networking, advocacy, engagement with project partners and strategic monitoring. The PCM can provide scope for qualitative outputs. For example, the Log Frame can include important participation objectives, such as empowering communities to manage their own services. But these objectives are often framed as ‘the social development’ component of a project and as such may be somewhat marginal to the project process. Further, the India study found that even when projects have qualitative outputs these are consistently overridden by quantitative ones, their data being easier to specify, record and analyse within the prescriptive format of PCM documentation. ‘With these tighter PCM procedures DFID has become rule/regulation bound. This makes work much harder. But tighter and more project documents is not as important as monitoring and implementation. The project documents are too perfect. Justifying projects socially, environmentally, etc., weighs on me personally. It fails to recognise that in the real world we can’t implement perfect documents. Our documents should say that these are the kinds of things that should happen rather than just prescribe. This also absorbs a lot of consultancy time. In reality, the accountability isn’t in the project documents - it should be in the monitoring. . . . The project memorandum is the procedure that weighs down on people the most.’ (Adviser ) In both India and Bangladesh the PCM’s emphasis on structure, framework and secondary stakeholders, is not well suited to promoting primary stakeholder participation and indeed, in a general sense, it has not done so. The language, procedures and structured direction of the PCM are simply not conducive to the participation of primary stakeholders. This also applies equally to many secondary stakeholders who do not have who are not familiar with such abstract procedures. In other words, it should be recognised that DFID’s OI are primarily concerned with internal DFID requirements and are not well suited to facilitating greater participation with other stakeholders.

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CHAPTER 4 TRAINING NEEDS AND PARTICIPATION Promoting participation and partnership within DFID-supported programmes has important implications for the way DFID works and hence for the skills of its staff. It suggests, for example, that staff must be prepared to relinquish control over implementation, to bear technical imperfection and delays with patience and to facilitate the involvement and develop the capacity and competence of others. INTRAC was asked to review the training and human resource needs of DFID in the context of the policy of improving participation and in achieving the primary goals of the organisation. This chapter draws largely on semi-structured interviews held with DFID staff in London, East Kilbride and the case study countries.

4.1 Competencies that Facilitate Stakeholder Participation Respondents were asked to identify the personal skills and competencies they feel are most important in facilitating stakeholder participation in DFID-supported programmes. The most common responses are listed in Box 4.1. It was acknowledged that promoting participation requires a great deal more than the mere application of participatory tools and methods. Indeed, specific methods and approaches, such as PRA, were hardly mentioned; although this could reflect a perception that such techniques and methods are the specialist territory of social development advisers or that engagement with primary stakeholders is not the direct responsibility of DFID staff. Much greater emphasis was given to inter-personal skills and to understanding of political and cultural context. Box 4.1 DFID staff views on core competencies required for facilitating stakeholder participation (not listed in order of priority) interpersonal skills negotiation and communication skills facilitation skills patience ability to listen respect for others trust cultural understanding/cross cultural sensitivity understanding of context ability to factor in time in daily schedule to spend with others capacity to share/delegate and work in teams interest in learning from others transparency ability to be innovative and deal with emergent issues human rights understanding understanding how organisations change/management of change willingness to take risks and make mistakes being at ease with different levels of discourse having a sense of when one is trespassing and when facilitating humility and empathy

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It is worth noting that no one mentioned gender awareness, or gender planning and analysis skills, even though gender is a major constraint to participation in most cultures and gender equity is an important social objective of many DFID-funded programmes. Interestingly, interviews with government and NGO partners in several of the case study countries revealed how important they consider the inter-personal skills of donor staff to be for good government/donor relations. It also emerged from the studies that sometimes the staff who make the attempt to understand and relate with local counterparts and are regarded highly locally are not necessarily the ones most respected by DFID colleagues. Box 4.2 Nepali views on donor personnel It was also significant that during interviews, Nepali officials stressed repeatedly how important they found the inter-personal skills of the donor staff for good government-donor relations. The personal qualities particularly mentioned by Nepali officials as facilitating greater partnership are fluency in Nepali, a good understanding of Nepali society, time to spend with people and openness and willingness to learn. This has implications for staff recruitment and training of staff both in language and facilitation skills. DFID staff who see their role as rigidly following the letter of Office Instructions whatever the context or situation are unlikely to make much progress in terms of creating genuine partnership with the Government of Nepal based on participatory principles. Participation requires staff who can adopt a flexible, open, innovative approach to relationships with secondary stakeholders. (From PALS Nepal report)

4.2 Views on Actual Staff Competencies and Recruitment Reflecting on DFID recruitment practice (as distinct from official recruitment policy), several staff remarked on the priority given consistently to higher academic qualifications and sectoral expertise. Nonetheless, while academic and technical skills may be highly valued within DFID and also give the organisation credibility in policy engagement, they are not necessarily consistent with the promotion of stakeholder participation or with the partnership agenda laid out in the White Paper, as suggested by their absence from the list of core participation competencies given by staff. The value within DFID awarded to academic and technical skills was perceived by staff as raising problems in regard to stakeholder participation. Disproportionate status and seniority is given at field level to those with an academic background, while operational skills and local knowledge are little rated. In the words of two advisers: ‘The people in the system are not geared to the delivery of quality aid - the people who have these skills leave the organisation’ and, ‘HQ needs to understand that in an operational environment you need operational skills and not policy skills, i.e. we need less academic people at the field level.’ Much of the criticism in this respect was levelled by administrative staff, TCOs and project managers against advisers and programme managers. Lack of staff understanding of the country context was thought by many to be one of the greatest obstacles to greater stakeholder participation in DFID-supported programmes. There are two dimensions to this issue: the first is whether DFID is recruiting the right people for the job of promoting stakeholder participation and partnership; and the second is whether the organisation is using staff skills appropriately. The issue of recruitment has less to do with changing official procedures, which do give weight to inter-personal skills and team work, and more with re-assessing their interpretation from the perspective of stakeholder engagement, as 38

the natural resources department has recently done. It is also worth bearing in mind that deploying people in jobs where they cannot use their skills can have an adverse effect on career development and morale. For example, rigorous project planning and approval often forces programme managers and advisers into administrative roles, to the detriment of policy innovation, advocacy and the operationalising of partnerships. As one DFID staff member remarked: ‘The advisers are qualified to do a technical job but have to get consultants to do it. I am being de-skilled. I cannot read or update myself because of the workload.’

4.3 DFID Training and Induction DFID prescribes staff competencies in accordance with their function, grade and core areas of performance, these latter being: managing work; working with people; personal effectiveness; knowledge and expertise; and managing finance. Some of the performance areas prescribed as critical for fulfilling DFID’s role of delivery aid could also be regarded as crucial for promoting stakeholder participation. These are working with people (working in a team, leading a team, helping people to develop), and personal effectiveness (communications, analysis and problem solving, negotiating and influencing, judgement and decision making). The TDU has developed a strategy for HRD within DFID in line with these competencies and has requested all departments to develop a business plan incorporating staff development plans and training needs. It is important to highlight that while the mandatory component in staff training is delivered in the form of courses, the TDU understands well the limitations of this approach, and regards courses to be but one option among many. The Unit’s Training and Development Strategy also cites coaching, secondments, job swaps, shadowing, distance learning, among the other methods, as having an important role in staff training and development. In-country training is also available to DFID staff, although it is normally initiated and organised by advisers or other senior staff and so is rather dependent on their personal interest in and commitment to training. In-country, project level training, such as in PRA and study tours, could make a major contribution to DFID’s capacity to develop primary stakeholder participation and training in change management, advocacy and similar skills would help build partnerships. In-country training offers two major advantages from the perspective of stakeholder participation and partnership: it is aimed at meeting the specific needs of the country office; and it makes it possible for DFID staff to be trained alongside project partners. However, it is notable that where these opportunities are available they are seldom taken up by DFID staff, but used to help build the capacity of local partners. In house, project level training within India was seen by staff as helpful in developing new skills. The point was made that its utility is very dependent on its timing. Staff overseeing projects that are close to the end of their cycle are unlikely to benefit significantly. In practice, despite the guidelines provided by the TDU, it would appear that DFID has given insufficient attention to HRD. Senior managers do not have clear responsibilities for the identification of HRD needs, which are therefore often neglected. Response to the request to develop departmental business plans has been poor, with the effect that few departments have a strategy for staff training and development.

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Staff were quite critical of the use of training within DFID and also of training content and institutionalisation of participatory values, attitudes and practices within DFID, this being an area of organisational competence understood by them as critical for increased engagement this is a role for senior management. In terms of content, the emphasis on internal systems and procedures, it was held, contributes little to the competencies, work practices, values and Furthermore, some staff felt that prescribed courses are perhaps not the most appropriate methodology for promoting participatory development approaches.

‘Staff have put a lot of time into centrally imposed training in Office Instructions and procedures. Training courses are not right, but [rather] in-house action-orientated training within the dynamics of the group and

‘There should be an allowance for in-service training on an annual basis. I need updating in my professional field and I’m not very experienced. How well knowledge is embedded in an organisation like DFID is very

‘DFID training teaches you how to fill in forms, but it doesn’t teach you to be honest to fill way that means something.’

the forms in the

participation, although induction and cultural learning were felt to be especially important for familiarising staff with the country in which they work and for facilitating stakeholder

The number of staff with field functions who have received no induction or training within DFID other than in office procedures is quite striking. Those who have received training in arrangements, some using their own funds and leave to attend courses in the UK unconnected with DFID.

or cultural learning. High staff turnover is a major disincentive to language training in particular: ‘. . . in DFID there’s no value given to speaking local languages and I wasn’t given disincentive’ (Field Management office). Workload is another major disincentive, leaving little time for training. Project budgets include an allowance for learning local languages, but few staff. Mention was made of the need to look specifically at the recruitment and training of skills: ‘DFID needs to look at the nature of recruitment into the administration track ... they need to

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Ultimately, staff seemed to have benefited more from on-the-job learning than from other methods, although it was stressed that such arrangements tend to be very informal. On-the-job training is time consuming for supervisors/line managers and these demands have to be met on top of normal workload - something that DFID fails to recognise. Several people recommended that more time be given to on-the-job training and learning and the role of line managers, supervisors, and advisers in developing the skills of others acknowledged more formally by senior DFID management. Some maintained, however, that taking people out of their work environment to attend a course is more valuable, in that it encourages greater sharing between different DFID sectors and departments and government offices. One innovative example of at-work training is the ‘fast track’ learning programme for Indian staff initiated by DFID India with support from the DFID TDU. This is intended to use action learning sets around specific work issues. However, lack of follow up support and a ‘champion’ internally has obstructed implementation. The PALS team was struck by how little use was made by DFID staff of in-country training opportunities provided by local organisations. The India study noted several internationally renowned centres locally that were not even known to DFID staff in Delhi. Further, it was felt that DFID could actually help strengthen the suppliers of local training services both for their own and others’ use. This lack of contact with local agencies is compounded by the poor knowledge of local consultants and resource centres generally.

4.4 Options For Building Staff Capacity Staff development and training can be approached through a variety of means. One approach is to send staff on training courses. There are three main options here: firstly, short courses which are open to, and attended by, staff from different organisations; secondly in-house training, in which the course is tailored specifically to the needs of a particular organisation and caters for a group of staff ; and thirdly longer-term academic courses, which aim to give staff the necessary analytical understanding and skills to make policy decisions. DFID has made extensive use of training through courses and the case study countries offer some examples of highly innovative programmes, such as the course in negotiation skills provided recently in India. Another way of providing in-service training is through on-the-job learning, which normally combines supervised practical work experience with taught courses, self-tuition, departmental retreats or seminars and other learning opportunities. For on-the-job learning to be effective, managers need to give time to coaching staff while they engage in their everyday tasks and routines. Upgrading the skills and competencies of individual staff is seldom in itself sufficient to institutionalise the desired work norms and practices within an organisation. DFID may also need to consider some of the organisational competencies needed to facilitate greater learning on participation and partnership within the organisation. These include: • developing better internal communication system for sharing information and experiences within the organisation; • creating a supportive culture which encourages experimentation and where people feel free to challenge each others assumptions;

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• accessing external learning where DFID encourages staff to develop a wide range of contacts with other agencies and networks; developing an organisational memory with more attention to debriefings from staff and • individual level; and • sharing DFID’s learning with other organisations. Many of these would need to looked at through a longer term process of organisational channel a process of internal organisational change or solve specific organisational problems, such as helping an organisation establish adequate financial systems. These organisational its own problems and its own solutions. They tend to deal with issues at the heart of an organisation such as its identity, purpose, values, culture and strategy. They emphasise the organisational structures and systems to the more informal ways in which decisions are made. They also recognise that a major part of organisational change is not just taking on the new development might include workshops for team-building, conflict resolution, strategic management, planning, and visioning, coaching and counselling activities.

themselves and study tours are often used to facilitate this kind of peer learning. Study tours entail visits to organisations, programmes or projects in which staff share and compare work. A more structured and systematic way of facilitating peer learning is through secondments, in which an employee in one organisation is placed as a staff member in another so on. Similarly, peer learning across job functions and disciplines can be facilitated by placing administrative staff in programme roles. Linked to secondments is the idea of exchanges Conferences, symposia and workshops (including events such as DFID’s annual retreats for advisers) fulfil a similar function in that they are essentially an exchange of ideas between people. In conclusion, it is suggested that there are several short term training measures which could language training incentives, in country training, setting up action learning groups, improved recognition of on-the-job training and senior advisers/managers roles in promoting and

In addition it became clear that a more holistic approach by DFID to HRD as espoused by the TDU would also meet some of the competency requirements as recognised by staff and the organisation in light of the need to assist DFID, as an organisation, model itself along lines required for it to be able to delivery aid through the participation of partners. This implies not

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procedures, systems, structures and normative framework of the organisation. (An internal report has been produced by the PALS team on DFID’s organisational culture, which is listed in the Appendix. This demonstrates that many DFID staff still feel that there is a great deal which could be done to make the organisation more open to partners and to make better use of existing staff skills and experience.)

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CHAPTER 5 INSTITUTIONALISING PARTICIPATION: MOVING TOWARDS PARTNERSHIP The White Paper on international development, published in 1997 made building partnerships with governments in partner countries central to the delivery of British Aid. As stated in Chapter 1, while partnership and participation are not synonymous they are nevertheless closely related and it is unlikely that partnership can exist unless it is based on participatory practices. Thus if there is to be a genuine commitment to partnership there must be a high degree of participation of secondary stakeholders in decision making about DFID interventions. Similarly, DFID should expect that there will be a commitment from its partners to developing more participatory approaches with other stakeholders. It also requires DFID to think about to what extent its own internal organisation and procedures facilitate the promotion of participation. In order to address these questions it is necessary to look beyond the confines of particular projects to the issue of institutionalising participation.

5.1 Institutionalising Participation in Public Sector Projects The majority of projects reviewed in PALS were in the public sector, and the studies found particular challenges in institutionalising participatory approaches among government counterparts, the key secondary stakeholders. A fairly typical example of this is the Agriculture Support Services Project in Bangladesh which showed the difficulty faced by so many public service organisations the need to rely on poorly paid and often unmotivated front line extension staff to implement a participatory agenda. It stressed the difficulty of relying on a traditional, hierarchical, government extension service to increase the participation of particular groups of farmers (in particular women farmers) who had not benefited from the service so far. The Collaborative Forest Management Study in Ghana, the Community Forestry Project in Nepal and the Agriculture Support Services Project in Bangladesh all show that a long period of internal organisational development and training is required before a public sector organisation will start to take community-level participation more seriously. Even when the majority of staff of such organisations like these see the need for primary level participation, actual outcomes depend on whether or not they get incentives to participate, and the historic distrust of many communities towards a government agency - a factor which is especially strong in the forest sector. If a project, for whatever reason, does not have a strong degree of local or national support from at least one of the key stakeholders, then attempts by DFID at institutional reform within the context of a public sector project are unlikely to be successful in mobilising such support. This is the situation described in the Bangladesh study of the Roads and Highways Department, in which DFID is funding a reform process within the Department aimed at improving the construction and maintenance of roads and bridges. The difficulty is that the institutional development component being funded by DFID only came about because it was a key condition of a World Bank loan to the sector rather than an internal demand from the Roads and Highways Department. However the PALS studies also included a relatively large number of projects whose successful implementation was a high priority of the government, and which therefore offered a far more 44

supportive environment for the development of partnerships. An initial positive indicator of local undertaken before donors come on the scene. Thus in Orissa, in the reform of the power sector, the State Government had already set up a Reform Project Organisation before assistance from DFID

Key limitations of developing partnerships through public sector projects are the tendency to work with only a small department or unit within a ministry, the prioritisation of achieving immediate ore intensive participation in decision making, project planning and implementation may incorporate a much carries the risk of establishing departments or cells within government that operate on highly participatory lines while all around the traditional structures of hierarchy remain intact Institutional reform in the public sector is a long term process and is not easily accommodated by the 3-5 year project cycle of DFID funded projects. Firstly, project managers, whether these be project. This does not allow much space to reflect on long-term sectoral needs or donor coordination even though there is evident interest and commitment to this among project staff. noted particularly in the Nepal study which looked predominately at public sector projects. It reported that:

almost continuously since 1971. But the delivery mechanism has been the five year project, with options to add on additional years. How might things have been different had the original

The report concludes that if DFID involvement in the public sector in Nepal is to aim towards greater partnership with the Nepali government, then a shift from discrete public sector projects to countries covered by PALS, notably Ghana and Bangladesh, sector investment programmes are already in place.

Sector Investment Programmes dialogue with secondary stakeholders and overcoming some of the limitations of a purely bilateral approach to policy influence noted in the previous section. Theoretically the sector approach, in than the project approach. It requires a long term commitment by donors and involves building up trust and common policy objectives between donors and a government department. Greater donor individual bilateral projects tend to have on overall government capacity - they tend to take up a great deal of senior staff time, covering similar ground with different donors.

and the Reforms in Budgeting and Expenditure Control (RIBEC) in Bangladesh, and the Health 45

Sector Reform and Formation of a Renewable Natural Resources Strategy in Ghana. The District Primary Education Project (DPEP) in India, while not strictly a sector investment programme, shared some of their key characteristics. A key feature of this approach is that once a SIP has been agreed, control shifts to the government; and that a consortium of donors agree, both between themselves, and with the recipient government, all the detailed arrangements for monitoring and evaluation and the procurement of supplies. This approach requires a much greater intensity of initial negotiation between the parties involved, particularly on overall policy objectives. Once agreement is reached, it is difficult for any one donor or the government to change its mind. The approach requires a high level of trust, not only between DFID, other donors and the government, but within DFID itself: DFID staff involved in the negotiations leading up to a SIP need to be mandated to negotiate on DFID’s behalf; and in these sorts of programmes DFID will increasingly have to live with situations in which there are always many more questions than answers. A major challenge for this approach is the need for a high level of agreement to be reached and sustained between the different parties involved in a SIP. Getting full stakeholder participation even at the project level is a relatively complex and demanding process requiring a lot of commitment and consistency to see it through, and SIPs tend to be even more demanding in these respects. A second challenge for SIPs is to ensure the continued participation of other stakeholders beyond the small circle of centrally-placed policy makers. For example, with the HAPP-5 in Bangladesh, the Project Planning Unit was very much involved, but operational directorates of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare were often not fully informed of what was going on. It is also difficult to ensure that primary stakeholders or organisations that represent their interests will be able to make a significant contribution to the negotiation. The challenge is not just to involve primary stakeholders at the initial strategy formulation stage, as was done in relation to HAPP-5 in Bangladesh, but to find ways of ensuring regular feedback from them once a new strategy is implemented. SIPs offer opportunities for developing long term partnerships between DFID and governments in aid-recipient countries. However, the study team found that in order to engage further at the sector and policy level, a number of difficulties with DFID’s current mechanisms for delivering aid need to be overcome. Some of these relate to DFID’s own internal management structures and organisational culture. These include high staff turnover, particularly of senior staff, which constrains the development of long term personal relationships and mutual understanding; lack of staff time for policy dialogue and donor co-ordination; the location of advisers and senior administrative staff outside of the country; rigid adherence to PCM requirements at the expense of innovation and flexibility. SIPs also raise profound questions for DFID about accountability which is a central dilemma for promoting participation and partnership within an official bilateral aid agency. The conditions and constraints inherent in the donor-recipient relationship are regarded by some as an important guarantee of accountability. The delivery of development aid involves a central dilemma: accountability in tension with trust. Ensuring financial accountability to the British public necessitates a high degree of financial control, while high levels of stakeholder participation and strong partnerships imply that much of this control must be relinquished to others. Advisers in the case study countries expressed a concern that the diminished control implied by sector investment programmes runs the risk of reduced financial probity.

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There is also the concern, expressed by some advisers, that some ministries and departments of government are simply not ready for meaningful partnership. In some countries there is significant variation in the potential for partnership by sector and ministry. The Roads and Bridges Project in Bangladesh provides an example of the very difficult institutional context in which some DFIDsupported projects operate. Donor co-ordination is being used in some cases as an instrument for organisational change. The World Bank is collaborating with other donors to ensure that organisational development is made a condition of funding. However, while conditionality may be a necessary safeguard against the misuse of funds, it is not apparent that imposing such terms is the best means of facilitating selective about which states it offers aid to, and that they will expect their partners to meet them half way on key issues. Future debates are likely to highlight the tension between participation and

However this tension can be reduced when it is recognised that participation is also about stakeholder participation weakens traditional upward accountability for donor funds. The essential difference is that proponents of participation are not arguing that accountability to accountability to the primary stakeholder, who are the targets of development assistance, can be increased. The tension or dilemma regarding accountability is not, or should not be, one of stakeholders (primary or secondary). It is to do with achieving the optimum accountability to both, in such a way that both sets of stakeholders are satisfied and whereby accountability to

5.3 The Management of DFID’s Country Programmes The previous sections have stressed the importance of institutionalising participatory especially in relation to policy dialogue and sectoral investment programmes. In particular, this demands from DFID long term commitment, strong country knowledge, flexibility and finding of PALS has been that the way in which DFID country programmes are managed and implemented does not, on the whole, facilitate the development of these characteristics.

The study team worked on the hypothesis that the organisation of country offices would affect the general character of aid delivery. However, in practice this has been hard to pin down, since each interesting distinctions are apparent. In SEADD and WNAD, policy and management are clearly separated functions supported by different categories of staff located in different countries. In policy development and advice. In India, there is a separation between the advisers based in the DCOD and the FMOs. In both cases, project management lies primarily with TCOs working out of

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cases combined with programme and/or project management and administration and fulfilled by staff based in country. The disadvantage of the SEADD and WNAD structures is that in Nepal and Ghana, for example, project managers often have good local contacts, and may speak the local language, but since they work at project level, have little broader policy advocacy role and cannot represent DFID to senior government on policy matters. These latter functions are fulfilled by staff based at some distance. Project management staff and consultants in both Nepal and Ghana commented on the stop-go effect on project activities caused by advisers who are based out of the country flying in for short, intensive visits. The schedules of out-of-country advisers sometimes clash with other demands on people’s time, and this is not helpful for local relations. Box 5.1 Views on Out-of-Country Offices ‘DFID London expect a lot at short notice from Government of Ghana staff. They demand their attendance at high level meetings at short notice without explanation or little understanding of ministry commitments. This is not a particularly good foundation for partnership. London should be able to plan enough in advance that they give adequate advance warning of arrival and of the people they want to meet with.’ ‘The image you are presenting by constantly flying in and out is not a partnership image . . . it’s very different to network at a distance and to keep pace with the kinds of pressures that are on people there.’ ‘I can never dig below the surface - I can never get close to the cultural and ethnic dynamics that influence what people do. . . . the problem is they’re there and we’re here . . . the distance makes it expensive to get projects off the ground if we are going to have the necessary consultation.’

On the other hand, some WNAD administrative personnel saw several advantages to being located in London. They noted the logistical difficulties of being based in and moving around West Africa, as well as the importance of being close at hand in Europe to influence the European Union. It was also observed that by not having a presence in a country DFID is showing greater respect and trust of partners. Some SEADD advisers have been responsible for excessive numbers of projects. The senior education adviser, for example, was at one time was responsible for 27 projects in 5 countries. SEADD advisers are valued internally within DFID and are very strong academically, but they rarely have time to develop good local partnerships in any one country, unless they have served there before. The effect of this is that SEADD advisers are quite remote from the point of view of secondary stakeholders. That said, there is now a health and population adviser based in Nepal who has the specific brief of assisting government in the development of policy. This is a unique post, the first of its kind in Nepal. It is apparent that in departments with out-of-country advisers one of the problems from the perspective of stakeholder participation and partnership is lack of essential in-country policy advocacy capacity. Some departments are reliant on ad hoc arrangements with the British Embassy or High Commission for senior advocacy support and policy dialogue, but this is hardly a strategic option and is often used only in crises. The absence of high level engagement with counterparts renders DFID powerless to influence reluctant government bodies to consult, plan and collaborate with their clients. As noted, people based in-country should, at first sight, have a comparative advantage over those in visiting relationships in terms of developing informal consultative networks. DFID Bangladesh, 48

has been advanced as a pilot within DFID in this respect. Nevertheless, it emerges from the study engagement with stakeholders than one might expect and that other organisational constraints, such as workload, high staff turnover, lack of team work and poor role specification are often more do not appear to enjoy any particular advantages over colleagues who manage and advise at a distance because they experience the same generic organisational pressures. To cite just one observed that due to the workload associated with project planning and approval, they have insufficient time to visit projects or project partners’ offices, build informal ties with partners, f DFID is to go to the expense of decentralising staff from London to field offices this will not have the procedures and paper work over improved partner relations and participation. A further issue was that in all the case study countries except India, the DFID office or problematic from the perspective of stakeholder participation and partnership especially due to the understandable security measures in High Commissions which mitigate against the sort of outside the High Commission this seems to assist improved relations with local partners. 5.3.2 Staffing

post often having greater understanding, experience and relationships in specific local contexts. The practice of staff on short term contracts could, however, often work against Even many permanent staff are moved frequently, reducing programme consistency, continuity, strength of partnerships and institutional memory. This was an issue consistently improved human resource development for local staff given their important role in supporting programme continuity, institutional memory and improved relationships with local

DFID is highly dependent on consultants for the implementation and management of its aid programme. The organisation has a long tradition of working closely with a range of managed large and complex projects. Despite this, many staff and other stakeholders were quite ambivalent about consultants, especially in relation to the objective of achieving greater although there were some impressive examples of programmes in often difficult areas where consultants had introduced participatory approaches and change management, many other partnership. As stakeholders themselves it was sometimes felt that the vested interests of consultants could hinder the participation of other stakeholders and undermine partnerships

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5.4 Participation and Organisational Change in DFID During the course of PALS many of those interviewed, particularly DFID staff themselves, highlighted the importance of organisational change within DFID. They argued that promoting participatory approaches within DFID has profound implications for its own internal organisation. Staff interviews revealed a major concern that a focus on individual competencies was only part of the task and addressing these alone would not be sufficient to bring about the required change. The observation was made that staff skills are often less important in facilitating or undermining stakeholder participation than the systems, procedures, structure and overall normative framework of DFID itself. Thus, it was suggested that it is not possible to achieve high levels of stakeholder participation in DFID-supported programmes when participatory approaches are not characteristic of the organisation’s internal culture. In other words, training needs in relation to participation cannot be looked at in isolation from wider organisational requirements. By the same token, the effectiveness of training is directly linked to broader organisational factors which either facilitate or obstruct the institutionalisation of participatory approaches. Staff mentioned a range of organisational issues they consider as constraining engagement with stakeholders and a few made a direct plea to INTRAC to look beyond individual training requirements to the organisational obstacles to stakeholder participation. The quotations in the box below show how some staff feel about DFID, when asked to reflect on participatory values. Box 5.2 Views on DFID’s Internal Organisation ‘ I would hate INTRAC to go back to Whitehall and make recommendations about this or that training course. It’s not training we need, but a whole new organisational culture and way of doing things.’ (Adviser) ‘. . . we’re not talking just about participation; it’s a whole process of change and we need to understand this. We need to have values of respect and trust and imbibe new culture. . . We are in transition and we must recognise this.’(TCO) ‘We don’t walk our talk’ (Adviser)

A second reason for broadening the scope of the research was that more could be done to institutionalise learning and training within the organisation. By way of an example, it was pointed out that DFID has invested a great deal in TeamUp, but that team work is poorly established internally. If DFID were to seek a commitment to the core values and practices associated with participatory development approaches, it would mean significant structural and systems changes as well as more conventional training and staff development. Interviews with staff in WNAD, Bangladesh and India revealed concerns about the working environment within DFID, which appear to undermine staff confidence and capacity to champion innovative work at the field level. Typical internal organisational problems include: • • • • • • • •

people feel that they are not valued (especially TCOs/out-posted staff) lack of team work fear of admitting failure anxiety about the critical comments of colleagues poor delegation and line management lack of role definition poor leadership and failure of managers to provide a mentoring role rivalry between desks, departments, sectors and individual staff 50

lack of HRD strategy isolation from colleagues no culture of learning

are observable in many large, hierarchical organisations, hence the challenge of scaling up participation in large organisations. These are clearly issues that DFID will need to consider how to

Such views are consistent with a holistic view of organisations as being made up of component parts: the internal structures, systems, resources and culture; the external links impact. These component parts interact with and are heavily influenced by, each other and by the context in which the organisation operates. Representing organisations in this way allows visible and tangible elements of its structure. It illustrates how the operational aspects of an organisation are closely bound up with each other and how each in turn is affected by the components of an organisation has unavoidable implications for its functioning in other areas. Because all these components are closely bound up with one another, it is impractical and coherence and consistency between these different components and an understanding that if work is done on changing or developing one component, it will have ramifications for the rest to give greater weight to participatory approaches and partnership it will involve internal organisational changes. Organisational structure, systems, procedures and norms can be how DFID should implement such changes but in the view of the PALS study team internal change will be essential for fulfilling the White Paper’s objective of building greater

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Appendix 1

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. now an INTRAC Associate - India and Bangladesh studies 6. Professor Peter Loizos, Department of Social Anthropology, London School of Economics - SEADD/Nepal and Nigeria studies Dr. Peter Oakley, Research Fellow, Centre for Development Studies, Swansea - WNAD-

PALS Country Study Teams India Hugh Goyder -Principal Consultant Dr. Brian Pratt - Principal Consultant Liz Goold (INTRAC) - Training and Organisational Issues Atreyee Cordeiro (PRIA) - Research Co-ordinator for PALS India Dr. Rajesh Tandon (PRIA) - Director of PRIA Jagdananda, Centre for Youth and Social Development (CYSD) Orissa,- Orissa study Anoop Das, CYSD, Orissa - Orissa study Gopal, Centre for Environmental Concerns, Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh - reports on AP 9. SEADD-Nepal 1. Dr. Andrew Clayton - Principal Consultant 2. Prof. Peter Loizos - Principal Consultant 3. Dr. Mahendra Bhattarai - Rural Water Supply Project 4. Schyam Shrestra, WATCH - Nepal UK Community Forestry Project 5. Dr. Shaliendra Sigdel, Nepal Administrative Staff College - Health Projects 6. Subarna Man Tuladhar, Nepal Administrative Staff College - Secondary Education Project 7. Dr. Narayan Kaji Shrestra, WATCH - Nepal UK Community Forestry Project 8. Yam Kumari Gurung - Rural Water Supply Project West and North Africa Dr. Peter Oakley - Principal Consultant Liz Goold - Training and Organisational Issues National Development Planning Commission, Republic of Ghana (Dr. George Botchie, George 4. Aforo) - Collaborative Forest Management Programme

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Centre for the Development of People, Kumasi, Ghana (Dr. E. Kunfaa, Mensa Bonsu, Tony 6. Adjei) - Health Sector Reform 7. Centre for Development Services, Cairo (Dr. Naglaa Shams and local research team) - PALS Egypt case studies Prof. Peter Loizos - Benue Health Fund, Nigeria Martina Hunt, INTRAC - Training and Organisational Issues in Ghana

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

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Appendix 2 List of Reports Produced for PALS The circulation of these reports is at the discretion of the DFID geographical department concerned. DFID - India (contact Phil Harding) Overview Report Training And Organisational Learning Needs Report Andhra Pradesh Primary Education Project (APPEP) Andhra Pradesh District Primary Education Project Andhra Pradesh Slum Improvement Projects Orissa Health Project Orissa Power Project Cuttack Urban Services Improvement Project Ahmedabad Sexual Health Project South East Asia Development Division / Nepal (contact Frances Winter) Overview Report Nepal UK Community Forestry Project Rural Water Supplies Project (Gurkha Welfare Scheme) Phase 2 Secondary Education Project Nepal Health Projects West and North Africa Department (contact Miranda Munro) Final Overview Report for Ghana, Egypt and Nigeria Participatory Approaches Learning Study of the Process of Formulating Renewable Natural Resources Sector Strategy in Ghana A Review of the Collaborative Forest Management Programme in Ghana Wenchi Farming Systems Development and Training Project Approaches to Community Participation in Health Development in Ghana PALS Egypt Case Studies Bangladesh (contact David Fidler) Overview Report Proshika CARE INTERFISH Fifth Health and Population Programme (HAPP-5) Agricultural Support Services Project Roads and Bridges Project Reforms in Budgeting and Expenditure Control Internal Report (contact Chief Social Development Adviser) DFID’s Organisational Culture: Reflections from PALS

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