Many aid agencies advocate approaches to development which are people-centred, participatory, empowering and gender-fair. This volume of essays explores some of the middle ground between such values-based approaches and the methods and techniques that the agencies adopt. The selection offers critical assessments of fashionable tools such as Participatory Rural Appraisal and Logical Framework. It demonstrates how these are linked (conceptually and in practice) to the wider ideological environment in which they are used, and shows how they depend upon the skills of the fieldworker and/or organization applying them. Contributors argue that tools and methods will contribute to a values-based approach only if those using them have a serious commitment to a social agenda which is genuinely transformative.

CONTENTS

Introduction: development methods and approaches; should development agencies have official views? 

Beyond the grim resisters: gender planning

Sustainable investments

Organizational change from two perspectives

Operationalizing bottom-up learning in international NGOs - barriers and alternatives

Ethnicity and participation

Capacity building - shifting the paradigms

Capacity building - the making of a curry

Critical incidents

Bridging the macro-micro divide

Dissolving the difference

Logical frameworks assessment and participatory rural appraisal

Critical reflections on participatory rural appraisal

Tools for project development

Participatory methodologies

Participatory change process

Two approaches

Resources