Many aid agencies advocate approaches to development which are people-centred, participatory, empowering and gender-fair. This volume of essays explores some of the middle ground between such values-based approaches and the methods and techniques that the agencies adopt. The selection offers critical assessments of fashionable tools such as Participatory Rural Appraisal and Logical Framework. It demonstrates how these are linked (conceptually and in practice) to the wider ideological environment in which they are used, and shows how they depend upon the skills of the fieldworker and/or organization applying them. Contributors argue that tools and methods will contribute to a values-based approach only if those using them have a serious commitment to a social agenda which is genuinely transformative.

• Contributors
• Preface Deborah Eade
• Beyond the comfort zone Jo Rowlands
• Dissolving the difference Hugo Slim
• Should development agencies have Official Views David Ellerman
• Bridging the macri-micro divide David Booth
• Capacity Building William Postma
• Operationalising bottom up learning Grant Power
• Organisational change Penny Plowman
• Beyond the grim resisters P Howard
• Sustainable investments B Thomas Slayter
• Critical Incidents M Raymond-McKay
• Tools David Wield
• Ethnicity and participatory development T Mompati
• Logical Framework Approach and PRA Jens Aune
• Critical reflections on rapid and participatory rural appraisal Robert Leurs
• Participatory methodologies E Ngunjiri
• The participatory change process P Castelloe
• Two approaches M Meyer
• Resources
• Addresses of publishers
• Index

Deborah Eade
Deborah Eade was Editor-in-Chief of Development in Practice from 1991 to 2010, prior to which she worked for 10 years in Latin America. She is now an independent writer on development and humanitarian issues, based near Geneva.

Jo Rowlands Jo Rowlands is Senior Global Programme Adviser on governance and institutional accountability for Oxfam GB.