Jeremy Holland – författare

Local people can generate their own numbers and the statistics that result are powerful for themselves and can influence policy. Development practitioners are supporting and facilitating participatory statistics from community-level planning right up to sector and national-level policy processes. Statistics are being generated in the design, monitoring and evaluation, and impact assessment of development interventions.Through describing policy, programme and project research, Who Counts? provides impetus for a step change in the adoption and mainstreaming of participatory statistics within international development practice. The challenge laid down is to foster institutional change on the back of the methodological breakthroughs and philosophical commitment described in this book. The prize is a win–win outcome in which statistics are a part of an empowering process for local people and part of a real-time information flow for those aid agencies and government departments willing to generate statistics in new ways.

PRA approaches have opened up new ways in which policy can be influenced by those who are poor, weak, marginalized and excluded. With the increasing use of PRA practices by NGOs, governments and multinational agencies, the potential impact for poor people is phenomenal. This book demonstrates the far-reaching implications of such approaches.

The recent trend of participatory approaches presents challenges to those working in the development sector. Who Changes? draws together, for the first time, lessons and experiences from key development agencies around the globe on the institutional change needed to make participation a reality. The book explores the main issues and concerns of development professionals involved in PRA (Participatory Rural Appraisal) practices: adapting PRA methods from micro to macro organizations and the type of changes required by an organization to implement PRA effectively. In addition, the reader is provided with a checklist of practical considerations to guide them through this complex field: training programmes and training needs for all those involved in the participation programme, implementing projects from piloting stages to gradual scaling up, institutional change and the changing cultures and procedures of hierarchical organizations, and participatory monitoring and evaluation. Containing highly readable accounts and clear summaries by development workers from a variety of development settings across the globe, Who Changes? will be a valuable asset to all development professionals concerned with PRA approaches from fieldworkers to practitioners and policy makers.

This book situates current development research issues squarely within debates about development policy and social research and it will help begin the process of defining best practice in the use of participatory/ qualitative and quantitative methods of considerable interest to academics, practitioners and policy makers.