Browse by Theme: Inclusive Governance

On 4 December 2018 CARE International and British Council convened a workshop in Nairobi with the title “Doing Development Differently in the Global South” to consider how the Doing Development Differently (DDD) global community can better incorporate Southern voices, and how the principles of DDD – its approach to development practice and its aspiration to deliver better results – can be best actioned in the South. The workshop built upon several ongoing discussions across INGOs and the broader development community: primarily, what it would take to realise DDD when working with civil society; additionally, whether DDD and related agendas like Thinking and Working Politically have sufficiently incorporated Southern voices and may even need to be decolonised.

Co-authored by Rebecca Haines, CARE Senior Governance Advisor; Tam O’Neil, CARE Senior Gender Advisor; and Emily Brown, Oxfam Gender and Governance Adviser.

For many development professionals, political economy has become the gold standard of foundational analysis for programming. It helps us to understand how power and resources are distributed in a society or sector and is important for ensuring our programmes and campaigns avoid cookie-cutter technical solutions and are designed for real world impact.

Gender equality and inclusive governance are each acknowledged to be key cross-cutting issues vital for ensuring sustainable development. In two recent reports, CARE Australia examined the impacts and the lessons to be gained from considering how these two approaches intersect in practice. The studies draw on over eight years of governance programming in Papua New Guinea and have been analysed using CARE’s Inclusive Governance and Gender Equality frameworks.

About a decade ago, the development sector fell into the same trap the financial services industry did in the mid-1990s. We were all seduced by clever people selling clever methods we didn’t really understand. Only, we had a different acronym. Financial services had their CDSs (Credit Default Swaps), we had our RCTs (Randomised Control Trials).

In the first blog in this series, we showed how participatory power analysis, by identifying the marginalisation of specific groups, can help ensure that participatory local governance does not simply enable those who already have privilege and access to gain greater influence. But what happens after marginalised groups and the reasons for their exclusion are identified? How do we build concrete strategies to include the voices of poor communities and excluded women? In this second blog in the series, we look at citizen forums as a strategy for wider participation.

Denis Tumwesige used to make his living illegally cutting trees in protected forests in Uganda, until he got arrested. Instead of a jail sentence, the local officials connected him with CARE’s Forest Resources Sector Transparency (FOREST) project, which taught him about the importance of forest conservation. Denis then wrote a song about forests, which is a huge hit, and is routinely played on national radio. The song succeeded in raising awareness of forest policies. Here is what else the project achieved. 

Last week CARE Bangladesh hosted a week-long study tour for 25 participants from 10 countries in Asia, in partnership with the Local Governance Initiative and Network (LOGIN). This blog explores some of the key things that participants learned from CARE Bangladesh’s approach, in its World Bank-funded JATRA project, to empowering the poorest and most marginalised to participate in, and meaningfully influence, local government decision-making processes.