Has rhetorical commitment to ‘listening to the voices of the poor’ led to a genuinely participatory process of engagement? Is the World Bank co-opting the participatory research agenda and using participatory poverty assessments (PPAs) for its own ends? Can we wed standard monetary poverty assessments with participatory techniques?

A paper from the University of Oxford’s Queen Elizabeth House analyses participatory methods in the analysis of poverty. Showing that ‘participation’ is a term which covers a range of attitudes and activities, it finds evidence that cosmetic participatory research is often performed for extractive purposes without a commitment to empowering local people to have a greater say in policy processes. Assessment of recent research findings and comparisons with traditional monetary poverty assessments suggests scope for combining participatory and non-participatory methods to understanding poverty.

This paper starts by introducing the broad lines of the debate on participation, before focusing more specifically on participatory methods in poverty analysis. Emphasis is given to the results of the ‘Voices of the Poor’ study which involved poverty assessments from 23 countries. The overall results summarised people’s perceptions of well-being and ill-being using five dimensions: material, physical, security, freedom of choice and action and social well-being (enjoyment of good relations with kin and community). Consideration of these results and the methodologies followed allows for the discussion of strengths and the weaknesses of participatory assessments, as well as opening the way for new approaches integrating elements of both.

Findings in the paper note that:

• Even the most authentically participatory techniques have elements of arbitrariness: making sense of a complex reality always requires combining and structuring information – a process which can never be totally value free.
• While it is an article of faith among believers in participation that poor people are able to analyse their own reality for themselves, what happens if local knowledge cannot appropriately face challenges in quickly evolving environments or is otherwise inappropriate?
• Recent research experience in Uganda (where a PPA highlighted poor people’s perception of a deterioration in their well-being while a household survey showed a trend of rising per capita consumption) indicates the importance of understanding which reality is captured by participatory research (for example, long term versus short term trends).
• Ensuring that samples are representative and disaggregated by gender and region can help in interpreting and contextualising results.
• Including the poorest and marginalised in participatory assessments is a key challenge for these assessments, though one hard to overcome.

The paper challenges the assumption that participatory approaches are directly opposed to the collection of household survey data and emphasises the potential of combined methods for poverty assessment. Meeting the challenges of switching participatory techniques from the project context to the world of policy-making requires acknowledgement that:

• Assessments based on participation and consensus are built around (perhaps false) convictions that a shared interpretation of reality exists.
• Findings by any methods need to be triangulated with other types of assessments in order to calibrate their informative value. Using different methods can also improve quality of results: for example, questionnaires need to be based on substantial previous knowledge of the community, which participatory research can provide.
• Two questions must continually be asked: whose voices are being recorded and what does it mean to be a listener?
• Ideally it should be local people themselves who synthesise PPA results and feed them back to their own communities.

Source(s):
‘Participatory methods in the analysis of poverty: a critical review’, Working Paper Number 62, University of Oxford, by Caterina Ruggeri Laderchi, January 2001 Full document.

Funded by: Department for International Development, UK

id21 Research Highlight: 5 September 2002

Further Information:
Queen Elizabeth House
University of Oxford
Oxford OX1 3LA
UK

Tel: +44 (0)1865 273600
Fax: +44 (0)1865 273607
Contact the contributor: qeh@qeh.ox.ac.uk

Contact the contributor: caterina_ruggeriladerchi@hotmail.com

Queen Elizabeth House (QEH), UK

Other related links:
'Voices of the poor – crying out for change'

'Community participation: in whose interest?'

Voices of the Poor - World Bank

See also the World Bank PovertyNet site

MOST focuses on Poverty and Social Exclusion

See the UNDP Poverty home page

Eldis highlights recent poverty research