YOU ARE HERE:
Processes and Frameworks
As described above, the mere use of these tools in a sensitive and appropriate manner can cause shifts in perceptions as well as spark off participatory processes in different ways. However, the effectiveness of the methods themselves can also be further enhanced by adopting enabling frameworks and processes from the outset. To begin with, there is often a need to revise our own conceptual framework of who are the experts, what the role of the outsider is and whose knowledge really counts. This can be reflected in the "Johari Window", which illustrates how ‘experts’ in the development field have often assumed that the knowledge of development workers was greater than that of communities. For truly participatory processes to work, this view by and large needs to be reversed and the relevance of the knowledge that communities have needs to be recognised as the basis for the work.
Within this conceptual framework, or working philosophy, there are a number of other fundamental shifts in outlook affecting how we think of the processes and frameworks defining the way we work.
These include shifting:
From:
- Outside experts to local and outside facilitators
- Extracting information/data to giving up information ownership
- Local informants to community analysts
- Providing conclusions for localsto providing constructive questions
- Determined end-points open-ended
- Linear process to cyclical/iterative process
- Reductivist analysis to holistic analysis
- Standardised information to locally specific information
Rather than thinking about these community assessments simply as situation assessments prior to project design by NGOs, they often formed a starting point for longer interactive processes, where project responses were jointly identified and tried out, then reviewed in order to revise project strategies and approaches. Whilst the “Logical Framework” was a useful tool for some facilitators (in, for example helping groups turn around problem assessment trees into strategic project solutions), it was not used as a means of introducing standardised ‘indicators’ (as is often the case, in reproductive health work). Rather than providing NGOs with pre-defined objectives and indicators, linking organisations helped them work out their own objectives, as well as formulating ‘what it would mean to succeed?’ and ‘how that could be determined?’ at the local level.
In other words, the classical ‘intervention project’ framework (project design, followed by baseline survey, implementation, monitoring and evaluation), was set aside in favour of encouraging NGOs to work with their communities on the basis of their joint assessments, learn from their implementation, to then jointly review and revise strategies. In some cases, this could lead to more in-depth processes of evaluation in the longer term, though not necessarily. The important point was to adapt the process to the capacity and situation of the local NGOs and their communities, in order to make it appropriate and allow for effective participation. The project cycle figure, below, describes how the project cycle has evolved between HASAB and its partner NGOs in Bangladesh.
The experiences of the Alliance’s partners in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Sri Lanka showed that an essential role for NGO support organisations is thus to act as an interface between the often more rigid processes and frameworks of donor organisations and the more participatory and flexible working practices needed by local NGOs and CBOs. They also hold a responsibility for minimising the sense in which the more structured frameworks and contracting cycles of donors impose rigidity and ‘constraints’, and instead translating that into planning participatory processes in structured and well-sequenced ways, to allow for a definition of responses from the grass-roots up.