This paper reflects critically on issues of North-South collaboration and participatory research arising from a project on participatory and sustainable local-level environmental management in the peri-urban area surrounding Kumasi, Ghana. Rapid immigration, uncoordinated conversion of farmland to housing, intensified resource exploitation, and declining water quality and availability are particularly pressing problems there. Collaborative research arrangements with local partners as well as sustained participatory relations with selected village communities were central to this project. More generally, the paper reflects on institutional issues relating to the dichotomy between research and development assistance projects, and their implications for project evaluations.

This paper seeks to explode a number of myths about women's absence from wars and conflict; it considers some problems about their vulnerabilities in these circumstances; and offers some feminist perspectives for addressing these problems. The paper considers the conflicting demands made on women in periods of war and revolution, and argues that differing historical processes result in different post-conflict policies towards women. There is, however, a commonality of experiences that universally marginalise women in the post-conflict and reconstruction phases. Even when women have participated actively in wars and revolutions, they are heavily pressured to go back to the home and reconstruct the private domain to assert the return of peace and 'normality'. This paper contends that the insistence on locating women within the domestic sphere in the post-war era may be counter-productive and located in the historical construction of nationhood and nationalism as masculine in terms of its character and demands. With the dawn of the twenty-first century and the long history of women's participation in wars, revolutions, and policy making, it may now be possible to use the symbolic importance given to them in times of conflict to articulate a different perception of nationhood and belonging, and to create a more cooperative and less competitive and hierarchical approach to politics and the reconstruction of nations and their sense of belonging.

Many readers will be familiar with the work of Robert Chambers, including his six 'biases' of the development professional--namely spatial, project, person, seasonal, diplomatic, and professional--and with his suggestions for overcoming them. Many will also be familiar with the challenge of putting his advice into practice, notably on short-term assignments. The question asked here is whether the consultant can do anything constructive about those who are 'last' on the development ladder; and in so doing render the invisible just a bit more visible. This article provides four illustrations taken from the author's experiences in Mozambique, Malawi, Bangladesh, and Zimbabwe. All involve attempts to partially apply Chambers' ideas. All are modest in ambition, scale, and scope. The main purpose of describing these cases is to stimulate discussion of the possibilities of incorporating the ideas of participatory and inclusive development processes within the unpromising confines of the two- or three-week assignment.

This article shows how local understandings of development can be researched empirically by reference to experiences presented from three drawing workshops performed with children in the Ayacucho region in the Peruvian Andes. The children were asked to draw pictures from their community, as they would like it to become in the future. Their drawings are analysed by using an adapted form of Grounded Theory, and further interpreted as expressions of local development discourses. Although the three villages are located within the same area and share a violent history of war and instability, the research shows how each community has its own interpretation of development.

Through an analysis of how Bangladeshi NGOs have become institutionalised, the author examines patterns of bureaucratisation and professionalisation to argue that NGOs are part of a process of incorporation that mediates opposition to gender and other structural inequalities. Two important tendencies--the growing partnership between NGOs, the state, and donor agencies, and the discursive shift from social welfare and redistribution to individualism, entrepreneurship, and self-reliance--exemplify these processes. The paper shows how institutionalisation, accompanied by the conflation of civil society and NGOs, masks the loss of member-citizens' voices, channelling opposition through NGOs in ways that often compromise their interests.

Regional diversity, diversified farming styles and endogenous development are hot issues in the current political debate on European agriculture. This article presents a historical overview of development experiences and elaborates on the emergence of environmental co-operatives in Dutch farming. They are unique ‘field laboratories’ for innovations toward sustainable rural development. The achievements in terms of environmental gains and social cohesion are coupled with cost reduction for the farmers and the state