Staying for Tea: coming to you soon ¡en español!

Posted on July 25, 2011 by

ENGLISH

As I’ve been tracking the location of my subscribers, I’ve noticed a funny thing. I’ve got more readers of this blog from Cambodia, India, and Vanuatu than I do from Bolivia, Colombia, and Guatemala – places where I’ve actually lived…for like seven years! Strange, I thought, to have such extensive personal and professional networks in these countries and so few readers. Then, an epiphany, in large swaths of the world, it is fairly common to find humanitarian aid workers and community development professionals who have learned English as a second or third language. In Latin America, however, it’s actually a lot less common than you’d think. I’ve poked around a bit in the Spanish-language development blogosphere and the options aren’t many. So, I think there is a potentially large audience among my Spanish-speaking colleagues that would like to engage in the topics discussed here.

So, with the help of Gabriela, my wife who is Bolivian, we will soon begin publishing Staying for Tea in Spanish. Short posts, like this one, will be simultaneous. Longer posts will be published separately with links between the English and Spanish versions. I don’t yet have a way for subscribers to elect to only receive one or the other, so I apologize ahead of time for the spam. But, as you know, I’m not a particularly prolific blogger – this isn’t my job after all, just a thing I do on the side with no financial reward – so, the hassle should be minimal. I’ll appreciate your feedback and any suggestions how to make this (soon-to-be) bilingual blog a better experience for you as the reader.

___________________________________________________________

ESPANOL

Como he estado siguiendo la ubicación de mis suscriptores, he notado algo curioso. Tengo más lectores de este blog en Camboya, la India y Vanuatu que en Bolivia, Colombia, y Guatemala – lugares en los que he vivido …  como por siete años! Es extraño, pensé, tener una extensa red personal y profesional en estos países y tan pocos lectores. Entonces, una epifanía, en grandes áreas del mundo, es bastante común encontrar a los trabajadores de ayuda humanitaria y profesionales de desarrollo comunitario que han aprendido Inglés como segunda o tercera lengua. Sin embargo, en América Latina, en realidad es mucho menos común de lo que parece. He buscado blogs sobre desarrollo internacional en español y las opciones son muy pocas. Por lo tanto, creo que hay una audiencia potencialmente grande entre mis colegas de habla hispana que deseen participar en los temas tratados aquí.

Así, con la ayuda de Gabriela, mi esposa, que es Boliviana, pronto comenzaremos a publicar Staying for Tea en español. Notas cortas, como ésta, serán simultáneas. Artículos mas largos se publicarán por separado con vínculos entre las versiones en Inglés y Español.  Todavía no tengo una forma para los suscriptores optar por recibir sólo uno o el otro, así que pido disculpas de antemano por el spam. Pero, como ustedes saben, yo no soy un blogger particularmente prolífico – este no es mi trabajo, después de todo, es sólo una cosa que hago como hobby sin recompensa económica – así, el problema debe ser mínimo. Voy a agradecerles por sus comentarios y sugerencias de cómo hacer este blog bilingüe una mejor experiencia para usted, como lector.

Posted in En Español | 5 Comments

A Staying for Tea Story: India 2006

Posted on July 18, 2011 by

As the depth of my hypocrisy sunk in, I struggled to contain my emotions. “Tell her ‘yes, and I’ll be right back,’” I instructed my translator, as shame deepened the red of my sun-baked ears. Turning to my small entourage of colleagues, I asked them to follow me off the woman’s property back toward the two vehicles still running to keep the air-conditioned interior cool against the stifling heat. “Go back,” I told them, “there’s no reason for us all to be doing this. I only need the translator and one community development facilitator who knows this community and is known by it’s people. The rest of you can go back to the office or wherever else you need to be.”

It was early 2006. I had been sent to conduct a results review of a large humanitarian organization’s response to the Indian Ocean tsunami. It was a sort of audit of the accuracy of the organization’s reports of what it had achieved in the first year of it’s multi-year response. On this day, I was somewhere along the southern coast of India, checking on a random sample of wells that had been reported as rehabilitated after being flooded with contaminated sea water. My schedule was tight as I still had a number of other reports to validate that day, including the provision of several thousand hygiene kits and mosquito nets, dozens of fishing boats, and scores of bicycles for fish mongers.

A group of fishmongers providing evidence. "Yes, we got the bikes. Thanks!"

I can’t actually recall how I came to be such a caricature of the professional humanitarian aid worker that day, but there I was arriving at people’s homes in a cloud of dust, stepping down from a white Toyota Land Cruiser with a clipboard in hand, decked in ExOfficio, dark sunglasses, and an American baseball cap, surrounded by an entourage of local colleagues taking advantage of the “learning opportunity”. I allowed myself to be led onto people’s private property without so much as a hollered warning or knock on the gate, where we proceeded to huddle around their wells and conduct our tests. What a tool.

At this particular home, a frail woman emerged from the shack near the well we were examining to inquire what we were doing. She seemed gracious as one of the district office leaders engaged her in conversation. When it seemed to me that he was laughing and saying “no” about something, I asked the translator what was going on.

“She has invited you into her home to share a cup of tea.”

“What did you tell her,” I asked.

“Suresh* told her that you are an important visiter from America and that you are very busy working on the tsunami relief project. It is impossible for you to accept.”

Temporary shelters and playground

And that’s when I wanted to punch myself in the side of the head. Not a year had passed since I’d published “Staying for Tea: Five Principles for the Community Service Volunteer,” in which I explained that the first principle of good work in a community is staying for tea. I figured that if you couldn’t or wouldn’t accept an invitation from a community member to share tea with them (or whatever the local cultural equivalent would be), then something was either wrong with you personally or with your organization.

After shedding the local retinue, I returned with my translator and the local worker. I apologized and asked if I could humbly accept her offer. We entered her home. As she prepared the tea, we began talking about the tsunami. I explained what I was doing and what my organization had been doing. She began to tell me about her experience. As we sipped tea, she produced two photographs. One was obviously of her husband. It was framed and had been hanging on the wall. She explained that he had been working that day and was never found. The second photo she pulled folded from some hidden pocket. It was of a beautiful young woman, perhaps in her teens. As tears began to stream down her face, she told me how they had been together when the tsunami came and how their grip on each other had failed. I took the photo in hand and began weeping with her.

For a brief time, we shed our superficial roles defined by my work and became just two people, sharing grief over a tragedy, equal in our humanity, sharing together with generosity and grace.

From then on, my work got a lot slower. We spent more time walking from home to home. We knocked and explained what we were doing before marching onto people’s land to look at “our” projects. I accepted multiple invitations for tea. I began carrying around photos of my family as well as my late wife to reciprocate the sharing of personal stories. Work days went from 10-12 hours to 14-16, but I felt like a human again, and not so much like an hypocritical ass.

I still make mistakes and have to check myself from time to time, but I’m getting better at avoiding the worst abuses of my own principles. I don’t tell this story as a confession nor from feigned humility – it’s just that these things happen and we have to learn from them. It’s a good story for me to remember and retell.

*not his real name … I think. I actually don’t remember.
Posted in service ethics, Storytelling | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Staying for Tea – Conclusion

Posted on July 11, 2011 by

We should not be paralyzed by the fear of committing errors, but we should be self-conscious and think critically about how we go about serving others. 

This is the final post of a 6-part series republishing the original Staying for Tea article from The Global Citizen journal (2005). You can link to the other posts in this series here: [1: Stay for Tea] [2: Process Matters] [3: Focus on Values] [4: Check yourFilter] [5: Cultivate a Servant's Heart] [6: Conclusion]

Receive new posts in your in-box by subscribing today. Just click on the “Sign me up!” button to the right. You can also follow me on Twitter at AaronAusland and through Facebook at Staying for Tea.

.

Conclusion

Although these principles may seem somewhat obvious, I’d like to demonstrate with a real example how easy it is to forget the principles and serve poorly. There are so many opportunities to serve that we often get over-anxious to say yes. It’s easy to get excited and forget to ask some critical questions about what we’re doing. This is especially true when the service is connected with a church activity or Christian organization. We seem to forget that Christians have a history of making terrible mistakes just like everyone else. Good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes and joy in service cannot replace the thoughtful application of principles to our service.

Not Guatemala, but you know the scene.

I have a friend who worked in Central America helping to organize visits from church youth groups. She had one that took to throwing American footballs and coins out the windows of their van while driving through small communities. They took joy in watching the flocks of children clamoring after the van and crying out with delight at the money and strange misshapen balls. My friend, who had quite a bit of experience serving these communities, first asked, then pleaded, then admonished them to stop. The accompanying pastor reproached her for attempting to limit the youths’ expression of love. He chastised her for stifling their well-intentioned generosity and curbing their fun. As far as he was concerned, it was a beautiful thing to see young Americans eager to share their blessings with the poor children of Guatemala and having a good time doing it together. It should be reinforced and encouraged, he said, not tempered.

If you’re not sure whether to cringe or side with the pastor, that’s okay; that’s why I chose this example. It is neither extreme nor rhetorical. It wasn’t a disaster, and the pastor had a point – it is beautiful to see young Americans eager to share – but it demonstrates the dangers of not bounding our service by a few principles.

This is why I think this is a bad example of service. Its not that footballs and money are bad or unnecessary, but the way they were given was a dehumanizing treatment of the children. Rather than bridging the power differential between the wealthy and poor youth, the passing interaction only reinforced it. The need to have fun, take pictures and bring home amazing stories from an exotic place defined the agenda more than the values, resources and contextual reality of those being served, to which little interest was shown. Rather than stopping and taking an interest in these communities, the speeding vanload reinforced their isolation and unimportance. They didn’t even warrant a real visit; instead, they had stuff tossed at them in passing.

The youth group didn’t see the division, jealousy and strife among the children left in their wake, some of whom were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, some who weren’t. They didn’t reflect on the possibility that the attitude conveyed in their actions might have debilitating effects on the children’s views of themselves and of North Americans.

We should not be paralyzed by the fear of committing errors, but we should be self-conscious and think critically about how we go about serving others. Taking the time to submit our community service to a few principles should help us to avoid doing harm and, with God’s good grace, may help us be part of a positive process of transformation.

Posted in Faith Perspective, service ethics, Storytelling, Voluntourism | 1 Comment

Do INGOs pay a globalization penalty?

Posted on July 8, 2011 by

 

 

 

 

 

I came across this graphic this morning in the latest issue of the McKinsey Quarterly and wondered how it might relate to INGOs. (read full article here) I’ve worked for half a dozen INGOs and recognize some of the pain points noted here, in particular the creeping complexity and culture clashes that make maintaining alignment of direction and organizational culture, implementing change programs, and promoting innovation and learning more difficult.

 

The article highlights a number of weaknesses in high-performing global companies:

  • they are less effective at setting a shared vision and engaging employees around it than are their local counterparts.
  • they find maintaining professional standards and encouraging innovation of all kinds more difficult
  • they find it more challenging than local leaders do to build government and community relationships and business partnerships.

I suppose these findings aren’t surprising, but they do stir some thoughts. In all three areas of organizational health, globalized companies fare worse than locally-focused ones. According to McKinsey researchers, ‘at least 50 percent of an organization’s long-term success is a function of its health, [so] this globalization penalty should be a red flag for high performers with a rapidly expanding international reach.

The primary tension seems to be one of ‘balancing local adaption against global scale, scope, and coordination’. Does this sound familiar? It sure does to me. Another way to think of this is the tension between centralizing and decentralizing decision rights (leadership), technology, systems, standards etc. When should we standardize and when should we encourage diversity? When should the center control and when should it open its hand?

It all reminds me a bit of the central analogy in the book The Starfish and the Spider. There is surprising strength in decentralized organizations (or as the authors of the Starfish/Spider book would content – in leaderless organizations), but there are also tradeoffs to decentralization that limit how far it can be taken in an INGO. In my experience, however, it seems to me that the tendency is to keep the organization too centralized and standardized. Organizations seem better at calculating the savings of standardization and the centralization of key functions than at calculating its costs.  Some of the hard-to-monetize costs may be decreased innovation and creativity, decreased agility and responsiveness, decreased relevance and fit across multiple sites, and increased administrative load and complexity.

 

 

Posted in organizational development | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Fifth Principle of Community-Based International Development

Posted on July 4, 2011 by

Since you don’t have the power to steer a community, don’t pretend you’re at the helm. Since people with self-respect resist arrogant generosity, make sure to operate at eye-level. Since, unlike us, God does have the power to transform a community, we should be interceding passionately on its behalf.

This is the fifth post of a 6-part series republishing the original Staying for Tea article from The Global Citizen journal (2005). You can link to the other posts in this series here: [1: Stay for Tea] [2: Process Matters] [3: Focus on Values] [4: Check your Filter] [5: Cultivate a Servant's Heart] [6: Conclusion]

Receive new posts in your in-box by subscribing today. Just click on the “Sign me up!” button to the right. You can also follow me on Twitter at AaronAusland and through Facebook at Staying for Tea.

Principle #5: Cultivate a Servant’s Heart

Cultivating a servant’s heart has three pieces. First, since you don’t have the power to steer a community, don’t pretend you’re at the helm. Second, since people with self-respect resist arrogant generosity, make sure to operate at eye-level. Third, since, unlike us, God does have the power to transform a community, we should be interceding passionately on its behalf.

It Doesn’t Depend on You

It’s easy to take ourselves more seriously then we should. We like to think that a whole lot depends on us when it doesn’t. It is healthy to remember that we are not the parent, savior or master of the people we serve. Rarely are we their last hope. They got along without us before; they will continue to after we’ve gone. We may play a critical role in the positive transformation of a few, but on the whole, the trajectory of the community we serve depends little on us. In fact, it is more likely that they will have a greater impact on the course of our lives than we on theirs.

Since the welfare of the community doesn’t depend solely on you, it’s okay to watch some of your efforts fail. By all means do your best work, serve generously and wisely, employ the best theory and techniques, invest your emotions, time and money, plan carefully and attend to details, but after all this, don’t be broken when the results you sought elude you. Let it go and try again, taking consolation that it didn’t entirely depend on you to begin with.

Keep it real. People are people. Don't ever look down on the people you serve.

Operate at Eye-Level

Consider how easy it is to pick up on a person’s humility when you interact with him or her. I know that I personally resist the humiliation of receiving from someone who refuses to be at eye-level with me, who lords my need over me and self-righteously pats himself on his own arrogant back, wearing his charity like a merit badge. So, as a principle we should be careful to “keep it real” and hold our pride in check. Remember that people are people; some are more resource poor than you, but take care not to diminish the person for this. Don’t ever look down on the people you serve.

Be an Intercessor

It may be that our best service is done with folded hands and doubled knees. Many of us serve out of a conviction that God has called us to it, that service is a Kingdom value. If you are a person of faith, then prayer should be part of your service. Prayer recognizes our limitations and asks for help beyond what we can provide, which is to say a lot. In addition to giving a poor woman a microloan, plead before God for economic justice and prosperity on her behalf. I have put so much effort into designing projects and interventions, into writing grants and writing checks, into sharing time and love and money, but I am dismayed to reflect on how little I have asked of God. Perhaps I have been too arrogant or had too little faith. Or perhaps I have just not been mindful that I can ask a stronger, higher power for help.

Before we begin to do anything in a community, we should have already begun to intercede in prayer, asking God to act on behalf of those we serve. We should pray for ourselves as well, for purification of motives, for the cleaning up and shipping out of pride, for the strength, wisdom and humility required in service. We should thank God that we have a wealth of resources to give and share, and we should thank God that that we also have needs, that others may serve us. If we serve with faith, we must serve with prayer.

Posted in Faith Perspective, service ethics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Myth of the Plan

Posted on June 27, 2011 by

My wife doesn’t like science fiction or fantasy movies – she finds the effort of suspending her disbelief too much to enjoy herself. I’m a little bit like this when it comes to writing project designs or annual plans – it’s just too much myth making for me to feel like it’s time well spent.

The issue is this: 98% of the relevant information we need to write a good plan is unknown at the time we write it. We more or less know where we want to go, but the map we draw to get there is based on heroic assumptions about the terrain ahead well beyond our vision. We will certainly have gathered as much information as possible to help us create this map – government statistics about the project area, analyzed results from our own community surveys and focus group discussions, documentation from meetings with community leaders, and so forth. We may even have multiple scenarios mapped out to manage multi-dimensional risks that give our map a sense of flexibility to likely changes in conditions. But even with all this, a constant stream of unforeseen events, new information, and unpredicted behavior will quickly unravel our confidence in the assumptions on which our plan is based.

There is a saying, ‘reality always wins.’ Unexpectedly heavy rains will halve the planned number of community participants in workshops over the winter. A report showing the community’s school to be lagging will suddenly shift their priority from the health sector to education. The death of a key community leader will drain the momentum out of a whole line of activities that she had championed. Election violence will create security risks that will keep staff out of the community for three weeks. A string of unannounced donor visits will throw off an entire month of work, leaving staff playing catchup for the quarter. The head office will announce changes in the financial software and chart of accounts for the coming fiscal year that will require several members of the administration team to attend training workshops, and they will then fall behind on requisitions and payments, forcing delays in planned development activities. Two staff members will give birth and three will get sick in an oddly coordinated attack on productivity right in the middle of the annual planning season. The dollar will weaken unexpectedly and suck 5% of the budget out from under foot. At times it will feel like Murphy’s Law is in effect. Reality isn’t polite, it doesn’t wait for an invitation, it barges in. Reality always wins.

Double Jeopardy

We fall into the myth of the plan twice, once when we write the myth, and again when we try to manage to the myth. When we plan, we omit a reasonable cushion, making it unrealistic. When we manage, we apply an unreasonable rigidity, making it mythological. When things don’t go as planned – when reality doesn’t follow the myth – we make ever more heroic efforts to improve the planning process and increase the incentives to stick to the plan. That is, we make the plan even more detailed and rigid, falling further into land of make believe.

When Writing Plans. We write plans that fully utilize all available time and resources. This is foolish. Do we suppose that nothing will make unexpected demands on our time and resources or reduce our capacity? I did an experiment recently with a field team of development professionals. We tested their ability to plan their activities three months in advance – activities that were already based on the annual plan! They did alright the first month out, but by the time they got to the third month, over 30% of what they actually did no longer matched what they had planned to do. Yet most planning is done at least 12 months in advance, and project designs often have a 3-5 year time horizon.

Certainly we are not unaware that ahead in the darkness lurk beasts of the unexpected. Yet we are stoic in our planning, assigning all resources, finding a place for all capacity. Taking the offensive, we push hard to improve the planning process, attempting to capture the demons of uncertainty.  We adopt ever more detailed DME standards and templates that implicitly assume sci-fi levels of prescience. We start the planning process earlier so that our time horizon is even further out than before. Yes, we should think things through before we act, and yes, we do owe it to our donors to give a pretty good idea about how their money is to be spent. But most of the plans I’ve read over the years evidence not so much professionalism and responsibility as collective self-deception.

When Managing Plans. Here is where the more significant problem with the myth comes in. It’s one thing to make plans for a specific number of participants, and a specific number of purchased materials, and specific costs for things, and so forth – its another to prefer the myth of the plan over the reality of … reality. That is, when we apply rigidity to the plan and provide incentives to stick to it despite new information and changing conditions, we move into a realm of unicorns, fairy dust, and bad development practice.

The Straightjacket: bind the budget to the plan, then make it a performance issue to stay within the margins.

Here’s a typical practice: bind the budget to the plan through the logical framework, fence it in with margins on each activity line, and then make it an employee performance issue to stay within these margins. If you’re making widgets, this makes sense. Good project management is about the ability to follow a plan – accomplish scheduled activities on time and under budget … if you’re making widgets. If you’re doing community development, though, do you really want to create incentives to follow a plan that was written while most relevant information was still hidden? This may be good in some ways for the organization, but doesn’t’ necessarily make for good development practice. Why would we voluntarily put ourselves into such a straight-jacket? We need the ability to make mid-course corrections. Once the real terrain comes to light and we realize that our planned route that looked so straight and perfect on paper six months ago will actually take us across a mountain range of under-capacity, across a gorge of community disinterest, and through a labyrinth of political complexity, we will be sorry to have bound ourselves to the path.

Since I’ve been on the subject of ‘facipulation’ in my last two posts, it’s worth noting that binding development facilitators to a plan is a pretty good way to get them to start facipulating their discussions with the community. Ignoring new information from the community is a key facipulation skill. Finding ways to push off dealing with new events and conditions is too. Armed with the ability to say, ‘well, it’s not in the plan for this year, but we can talk about it in the next planning cycle’ is a great way to side-step reality when your organization’s plan is out of step with the community’s preferred future. Hear that? That’s the sound of your project stepping a rung or two down somebody’s participation ladder.

Good project management in this context requires a team, structure, and policy environment that encourages adjustments to new information and events. It requires creativity, agility, flexibility, and very good communication between staff, volunteers, community members, and donors. In mythological terms, we should prefer the creative agility of Hermes over Odysseus’ lashing of himself to the mast.

How Then Shall We Plan?

A good plan has three essential elements that define both how it is written and how it is managed.

1.  Shared Objectives. The community, the development organization, and donors should agree on the general objectives of working together. Not to be confused with the activities that will move them all toward these, the objectives describe the changes a ‘successful’ project would contribute to bringing about. This is the core of the plan – to work together to make this preferred future a reality.

2.  Agreed Methodology. The partners should also agree how they are going to move forward toward these objectives. This includes a starting set of activities, but it allows for some of these to be dropped and for others not imagined up front to be included as future conditions become known. It also includes, perhaps more importantly, a process for working together – how, who, and when will the partners negotiate the next steps together; how will they deal with new information and events; what will the process be for monitoring progress; and how will decisions be made about the scarce resources available to the partners as they move forward.

3.  Guiding Principles. Finally, a set of principles that will guide decisions as tradeoffs and hard decisions come down the road. What are the values and principles against which two forks in the road should be considered?

Posted in "Facipulation", DM&E | Tagged , , , , , , | 16 Comments

Participation Ladders 101

Posted on June 13, 2011 by

In my last post ‘Fa•ci•pu•la•tion‘, I shared a table from Robert Chambers, which is essentially a participation ladder with multiple dimensions. The good thing about ladders is that they are simple and easy to get. But, the reason I choose to share the table rather than a ladder is that the latter (pun intended) can only illustrate a single dimension of participation. (Or, if they mix dimensions, they lack conceptually clarity). And, of course, there are many different dimensions that can be emphasized.

In this literature review on stakeholder participation put together by Mark Reed for the Sustainability Research Institute,  four distinct typologies of participation are recognized based on (1) different degrees of participation (2) the nature of participation according to the direction of communication flows, (3) a theoretical basis, essentially distinguishing between normative and/or pragmatic participation, and (4) the objectives for which participation is used. These are all valid ways of looking at participation and building a conceptual model that distinguishes between types.

That said, there are a number of single dimension participation ladders that development facilitators should be aware of, if only for academic purposes. If you’re already familiar with participation ladders, you might want to skip this post – I’m not going to provide much commentary or opinion here – this is more of an academic introduction to these conceptual tools for those that might be newer to the field of international development.

based on Arnstein, S.R. (1969) “A Ladder of Citizen Participation", Journal of the American Institute of Planners, Vol. 35, No. 4, July, pp. 216-224

The first is from Sherry Arnstein. Primarily concerned with power, Arnstein created her ladder in 1969 to illustrate how citizens could be included in political and economic processes from manipulation to citizen control. So the emphasis here is the degree of participation, but set in a framework of the relationship between the state and citizen – or for our purpose, the development organization and the community. According to Arnstein, the bottom two rungs are actually non-particiaption. Rungs 3 -5 are degrees of participation that represent “Tokenism” while rungs 6-8 are degrees that represent “Citizen Power”. Thus we might use this ladder as a framework of inquiry into the nature of the relationship we have with the communities in which and for whom we work. Is our relationship primarily one of consultation? Do we have a partnership? Perhaps the relationship exists across several rungs of this conceptual ladder depending on the activity we are engaged together on – annual planning and budgeting may be closer to rungs 3 and 4, while preparation of a community event closer to 6 and 7. Here is a link to a thorough discussion of Arnstein’s ladder that illustrates each rung with examples. It was originally published in 1969, the same year the ladder was published, so it is dated, but also really interesting as a result.

The second ladder is from Roger Hart, and also emphasizes degrees of participation. Hart is a professor of Environmental Psychology and is concerned about how children experience place and how spaces are designed for free play. Given that most urban design doesn’t often really think from a child’s perspective, he is also concerned about how children are enabled to participate in community development and environmental care. The ladder he developed for UNICEF in 1992 has been used widely by development organizations that work with children and youth.

In fact, just last week I was talking with a young (20-year old) development professional from Bogotá, Colombia who works with a large child-focused development NGO about how he understands his role in enabling children and youth to increase their participation in the political and social spaces available to them, and he referred to Roger Hart and his ladder  of participation. I was quite impressed. I was even more impressed to watch him facilitate a meeting of teens who were discussing how they were going to organize a large (5000+ participants) march in the city to celebrate the International Day of Peace in September. (Quick shout out and kudos to Marlon – I hope your English is up to reading this.) Here is a link to the Free Child Project’s discussion of Hart’s ladder.

Ladder on left based on Hart, R. (1992) Children's Participation from Tokenism to Citizenship. UNICEF Inoccenti Research Centre. Florence, Italy. Ladder on right based on Pretty, J. (1995) "Participatory learning for sustainable agriculture", World Development, Vol. 23 (8), pp 1247-1263.

The third ladder is based on the work of J.N. Pretty whose work mostly focused on sustainable agriculture. Again, his ladder focuses on degrees of participation from manipulation or token participation to self-mobilization. Pretty’s ladder uses words that make us consider the nature of the participation (the incentives and purposes behind it.) For example, rung 3 – participation by consultation sets the organization’s needs up as the incentive to participate – it needs to consult with the community before moving ahead on its agenda. Rung 4 – participation for material incentives recognizes that one can generate incentives for the community to choose participation, but then does this not weaken the legitimacy of it? Here is a link to IAPAD’s summary of Pretty’s ladder.

You have noticed by now the pattern of starting with manipulation of the participants and their inclusion as tokenism and ending with action initiated and controlled by the participants. The fourth ladder presents a slightly different framework.

based on Kanji and Greenwood (2001) Participatory Approaches to Research and Development in IIED: Learning from Experience, IIED. London.

You’ll notice immediately the alliterative use of the Latin prefix ‘co-’, meaning joint or mutual. The concept highlighted in this ladder is the nature of the action done together as a reflection of the nature of the relationship. Thus at the bottom rung, work is done together in an unequal power relationship whereby one partner complies with the demands of the other (we can assume here that it is the community complying with the organization’s agenda) – whereas at the top rung, the work is done collectively as equal partners both within the community (working together among themselves) and with the organization as one of many equal partners in the action.

(I should note here that although I found this framework in Kanji and Greenwood’s 2001 IIED publication, they recognize the source of this framework as Andrea Cornwall from 1995.  Cornwall is a recognized expert on participation methodologies, but I was unable to track down the 1995 source these authors site, so I’ll leave the source of this ladder as the IIED publication. If any of you can track down the original source from 16 years earlier, you win some kudos in my next post.)

There are many other participation ladders out there, and each of these has been adapted many times as people see fit to alter the wording, add or remove rungs, or combine the best of several together. For example, Jennifer Lentfer at How Matters provides a nice adaption of the Hart (1992) and Pretty (1995) ladders with a nice summary for each rung from a conceptual framework of project ownership in her recent post ‘Sorry, but its not YOUR project‘. Again, I like the simplicity of the ladder framework, but I like more the ability to present several dimensions of participation at once in a table. Participation is by nature multidimensional and it’s good to make explicit the dimensions or polarities you are thinking about – the flow of information, the nature of control, the source of activity, the roles, the relationships, the actions taken by each party, etc.

Posted in "Facipulation" | Tagged , , , , , , , | 6 Comments