Supporting Value-based Participatory Planning

The next phase will be to pilot improvements in the training and coaching of facilitators in national community driven development programs in the following countries:

• Afghanistan
• Burkina Faso, and
• Ecuador.

Baseline studies and participatory monitoring and evaluation will be part of this program. The national institutes, NGOs, and facilitator trainers involved in the various countries will also have the opportunity to share their experiences and learn from each other, within the country and across participating countries, in a community of practice.

The pilots are being structured to provide governments, participating NGOs, the Bank, and participating donors with progress reports and evaluations.

Afghanistan: CEERD is working with the National Solidarity Program (NSP) team, the Ministry for Rehabilitation and Rural Development (MRRD) and its facilitating partners, to improve facilitator training in value-based methods. The CEERD work harvests existing practices that bring communities' diverse value demands to bear on their planning - appraising community value assets, deprivations and aspirations; tracks community value change and resistance during the NSP intervention; will appraise and enhance development councils' decision processes, and train and support ministerial NSP personnel and facilitators. In FY04, CEERD has implemented a value baseline survey in districts of Logar, Nangarhar, Rarwan and Wardak, and to be expanded across all ethnic groups (Badakshan, Bamiyan, Heart, Jozjan, Kandahar, and Paktia), and has trained MRRD personnel and facilitators in the appraisal methodology. Focus groups have also begun with Development Councils, on their formal and informal decision-making, including their interface with local and national government. Feedback will be provided on a continuing basis for facilitator training under NSP, and in FY05 training of facilitators will be a significant part of the program.

Burkina-Faso: Working with the PNGT 2 team (the national CDD project cited as being a highly successful value-based development activity) CEERD has designed and is implementing a participatory assessment of the project, bringing out the beneficiaries' perspectives and multiple values. Both Bank officials related to this project and local officials managing it see this piloting as a needed and welcome opportunity for both articulating the perspectives of the farmers benefiting from this program and increasing the exposure of the project to the development community outside of Burkina. In addition, the design of the assessment is such that persons in the project implementation unit will gain experience with qualitative research methods in order to enable them to better listen and respond to the persons they serve.

The National Land Management Program, the major community-driven development (CDD) project in the country has been selected as representing excellent local commitment to the value-based development philosophy. Here we are collaborating with the Africa region in supporting a beneficiary assessment of the project whereby the farmers will have their voice in the decision-making process amplified. This assessment is being conducted by a local institution which will provide expertise in the qualitative research methodology involved to the project executing institution so that it can institutionalize this participatory listening approach in its own ongoing monitoring and evaluation system and thereby nurture increasingly responsive and sustainable value-based development.

• putting of Second and Third Level Organizations (OSGs) that are controlled by Afro-Indigenous leadership in a more direct role of providing technical support to communities
• complementing grants for construction with capacity-building in value-based participatory planning and follow-up training, and
• sharing of experience between communities, to get the full benefits from the subprojects.

Other pilot candidates are: Bolivia and Indonesia.

Additional CT Demand: Community Radio Programming CE Support + CE Support for Legal Services for the Poor -- both of these would be linked to the PRODEPINE II Project, in the first instance.

For each pilot, it is important to understand how the following key VBPP functions and tasks are being performed, and where they are not being performed, how VBPP might contribute:

• Identifying Key Participants, including their different values and interests
• Identifying community divisions, ensuring that voices of the weakest and poorest are included
• Identifying the community's own priorities (scanning for values)
• Recognizing a community's bases of power
• Learning-by-doing
• Devising strategies and plans based on the group's priorities and both locally specific and technical information
• Identifying obstacles and opportunities in their context, which may have to be addressed in enabling frameworks
• Developing negotiating skills
• Developing systems for monitoring and evaluation
• Developing self-governance and constitutive processes through iterative learning by doing.

The overriding VBPP pilot objective is to incorporate a vision of development as a self-sustaining participatory process of value fulfillment leading to an ever-increasing enhancement of human dignity. The local community context should be the lens for interpreting project outcomes. This appraisal would be integral to an eventual VBPP handbook, and pilot experiences might be captured in a "Values of the Poor" study. The VBPP External Advisory Group looks forward to continuing to assist and help guide this work.

Value-based Participatory Planning (VBPP) meets a need for methodologies that recognize the resources the poor have at their disposal that validate their assets and capacities and enable them to draw on their own values and culture for their development. VBPP combines methods and tools that enable community participation in development based on the explicit recognition, identification, and clarification of local values. Community values are harnessed to the critical development tasks of setting goals, analyzing trends toward achieving those goals, assessing factors that shape project trends, creatively generating alternative future scenarios, and making concrete proposals that match project projections. Hence VBPP is a synthesis of sustained efforts to explicitly place the values of the poor at the center of development.

Value clarification is used as a means of measuring community goals in relation to outcomes, to guide future mobilization of resources, and to support the capacity of the poor to aspire. VBPP enables community members to take note of what is important for achieving their human dignity, and facilitates external agent support of projects whose sustainability is enhanced because of consistency with community values. In practice it can build capacities for local communities, organizations, and local governments to organize and build on their own values and strengths in sustained participatory planning, monitoring, and evaluation.

IA primary objective of CDD is to improve adaptive self-governance of communities along with communities' ability to influence other development participants including local government. The financing of subprojects provides iterative contexts and opportunities for such capacity building. CDD's goal must be to facilitate the development of problem-solving skills and sustainable governance processes and systems. Intense capacity building efforts must be directed toward the poorest and most disenfranchised of any community to enhance their capacities to participate in sustainable development projects. Critically, this capacity-building effort needs to explicitly recognize the community or group's values to help them guide their views of their own futures.

From these goals emerge shaping principles for CDD support of design and continuing support of pilot activities:

• There must be intense observation and reflection of the context. Values-based approaches are fundamentally contextual. Thus, a principle of context-sensitivity must guide interventions aimed at developing organizational capacity and actors who will conduct related functions. Efforts must build on local knowledge and culture.
• The focus must be on building systems and supporting sustainable processes and capabilities at the community and local government levels, not on building projects per se.
• Projects should have strong experiential learning features. That is, learning-by-doing should be central for communities and for local governments.
• At the community and local government levels, group authority rather than individual authority should be nurtured.
• Both locally specific and technically appropriate information must be used in project activities.
• Local institutions, with power to take action based on both technical and locally specific information, should be nurtured. Those institutions should be targeted for their capacity to contribute to the goals clarified above.
• For each context, it is important to distinguish between functions in the decisionmaking and larger social process, and the institutionalization of those functions. The institutions are cultural artifacts that are context specific and may not be transferable; thus the focus should first be on the functions that they perform.
• A key to continuing CDD support must be case appraisal consisting of disciplined comparative analyses using a stable frame of reference that can be applied across cultural contexts, allowing for functional analysis while accounting for the roles of conditioning factors on social change.