Family Based Livelihoods Planning to Address Grass Roots Concerns

Moving from participatory approaches to family based livelihoods planning is an attempt to make development interventions more meaningful and significant by taking into account the aspirations and problems of each individual and increasing ownership.

T he development sector, mainly comprising the NGOs working at the grass roots, has evolved in the past decades in its working style, both in terms of implementation and planning. From charity based organizations to organizations following bottom-up approaches, the journey has been enriching. Organizations have explored the varied dimensions and aspects of the lives the poor lead. Over the years, the participatory approach has been widely accepted and has given satisfying results. The participatory approach, it is believed, makes up for the ‘reductionism of formal surveys’, and the ‘biases of typical field visits’.

However, the participatory approach, which focuses on the community of a concerned village as a whole for planning and implementation (as in watershed, land development, etc.), somewhere diminishes the very essence of ‘participation’ in certain respects. This is because participation is never uniform; even within a group or community there are different levels of interest. The community we are referring to here—also the ones with which Pradan works—is divided on the grounds of poverty, concerns and issues. Even though there may be a commonness or homogeneity among households, the problems faced by each household are unique. Participatory methods, at times, overlook this element of uniqueness in a hurried attempt to arrive at a ‘holistic’ picture. Development agencies, therefore, may be failing to take into account the dissimilarities in aspirations and the problems faced by each and every household. This article looks more specifically at such dilemmas faced by professionals in the field.