The Inclusive and Deliberative Elaboration and Evaluation of Policies (IDEEP) is a tool created in partnership between the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and the International Movement ATD Fourth World.

Context

The UN Guiding Principles on extreme poverty and human rights, adopted by the UN Human Rights Council in 2012, include an explicit commitment towards the participation of persons in poverty in public life:

“States must ensure the active, free, informed and meaningful participation of persons living in poverty at all stages of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of decisions and policies affecting them.”

Yet, ten years after the adoption of the Guiding Principles, people in poverty remain too often excluded from policymaking processes and from the design of projects that affect them¹. This is despite the strong involvement of persons with lived experience in other policy domains such as disability and mental health (ibidem) and, more generally, growing attention paid by policymakers to consulting citizens through different means². Part of the problem may be that effective participation of people in poverty is perceived to impose a heavy burden on decision-makers. Participation requires substantial time and resources to account for active facilitation, to build mutual trust between participants and policymakers, and to provide an environment attentive to differentials in power. Without these prerequisites, involving persons in poverty leads to ineffective participation at best, or instrumentalisation at worst.

Where participation has been tested, its design has often been inadequate: processes have benefitted from too little time, or participation has been conceived of in its weaker forms of “informing” or “consulting” beneficiaries of projects rather than its stronger forms, like by seeking their involvement or collaboration. In other cases, community-driven projects may have been overly reliant on certain actors or may have provided too little support to communities. Thus, the record of participatory processes is mixed, and scepticism has sometimes been expressed about its benefits.

Meanwhile, poverty continues to be understood narrowly, as a purely socio-economic condition rather than as an experience that is characterized by a diversity of dimensions. With some notable exceptions, existing evaluations that seek to assess the impact of a policy on poverty tend to focus exclusively on quantifiable indicators such as income or access to employment. The experience of poverty, however, goes beyond these dimensions. The participatory research coordinated by ATD Fourth World and the University of Oxford in 2017-2019 across six countries highlighted nine dimensions of poverty, far beyond the three dimensions of material deprivation, lack of income and lack of decent work that are generally understood as constitutive of poverty³.

Aims and objectives

The tool for the Inclusive and Deliberative Elaboration & Evaluation of Policies (IDEEP) aims to guide decision-makers to ensure strong involvement of people in poverty in the design, implementation and assessment of projects or policies that have an actual or potential impact on them, thus ensuring that the various dimensions of poverty, including those that are “hidden”, are taken into account. Without uncovering those hidden dimensions, anti-poverty policies and programmes will remain largely ineffective or even counterproductive. The IDEEP requires processes to be deeply participatory and deliberative. It aims to ensure the direct and meaningful involvement of persons experiencing poverty, who exchange ideas and experiences with other key actors in view of arriving at a common set of strategies.

Beyond the legal obligations that require people in poverty to participate in the decisions that are likely to affect them, this participation is essential for at least three reasons. First, by investigating the possible impacts of an intervention with persons who have a lived experience of poverty, the assessment can uncover potential effects – blind spots – that may be overlooked by policymakers, thus improving the design of the intervention and its effectiveness and reducing costly errors. Second, participation – when conducted as co-construction rather than mere consultation – may have an empowering effect: by involving persons experiencing poverty in processes of co-construction that go beyond tokenistic participation, their agency is enhanced. Third, participation allows solutions put forward by people in poverty to be taken into account in the range of policy options, thus leading to a broader panoply of answers to policy questions and helping to escape path dependency and to overcome bureaucratic routines.

Participatory policy assessments can lead to policy decisions that are better informed, that are empowering rather than disempowering, and that are more imaginative, enriching the toolbox of decision-makers. The IDEEP is a set of guidelines designed for policymakers, administrators and organizations, including development agencies, international financial institutions and local organizations. Based on a review of existing literature and case study research, described in more detail below, the IDEEP proposes a methodology for involving persons in poverty in the elaboration, monitoring and evaluation of policies, projects and programmes; it provides guidance on the conditions that are likely to enhance this participation; and it offers questions that may be used to evaluate the given policies, projects and programmes from the perspective of the “hidden” dimensions of poverty. Although it should be adapted to a variety of contexts, it provides guidance to actors who wish to incorporate the lived experience of poverty in their design or evaluation processes, and to combat poverty in all its dimensions.

Scope

The guidelines included in the IDEEP are not intended to replace existing policy assessment tools (whether sustainability impact assessments or social impact assessments relying on econometric tools, or human rights impact assessments relying on the normative framework of human rights); instead, the aim is to complement them and to offer a different perspective by providing a reliable, qualitative, and deliberative approach to capturing the lived experience of persons in poverty.

The scope for using IDEEP in the policy cycle is theoretically broad: the tool can be used to guide deliberative exchange and learning in the elaboration, monitoring and evaluation of various types of policies and programmes that are likely to affect people in poverty at local, regional and national levels. However, some types of policies and programmes are particularly fertile ground for deploying IDEEP: wherever decision-makers are determined to fight poverty and improve the lives of the poorest and wherever these intentions materialise as technical solutions designed by policy experts, these are ideal conditions for testing the methodology proposed in this guide. Some examples of policies and programmes that are likely to benefit from inclusive deliberative exchange are as follows:

• Local level: A village council in an East African country decides to upgrade the village’s old fish market by replacing it with a modern market infrastructure.
• Regional level: A development bank rolls out a food assistance programme after a natural disaster hits a Caribbean island.
• National level: An EU country modifies the eligibility criteria and application procedure for a housing programme.

Materials and methods

The groundwork for the elaboration of the IDEEP included both desk research and case studies conducted using a participatory approach. The present document draws on a review of existing literature, including scientific articles, legislative documents and so-called ‘grey’ literature. In addition, three case studies were carried out with the following objectives: (1) to empirically identify and uncover the ‘hidden’ dimensions of poverty that remain problematic or unacknowledged in the three cases; (2) to test and refine the deliberative method proposed in this document; and (3) to formulate possible evaluation questions that may guide policymakers in the deliberative elaboration or evaluation of policies and programmes. The results of the case studies are provided in the Annex to this document (including a brief description of the policy/programme, the hidden dimensions uncovered through the deliberative exercise as well as key resulting recommendations), with key findings and insights included throughout the report.

Outline of the IDEEP guide

The present guide is structured as follows. Chapter 1 defines what is meant by ‘participation’ of people in poverty and discusses the rationale and reasons why it is necessary in the fight against poverty. Chapter 2 presents the nine dimensions identified in the Hidden Dimensions of Poverty project, led by co-researchers from the University of Oxford and ATD Fourth World and published in 2019. Chapter 3 introduces the notion of deliberation and proposes a process for the deliberative elaboration and evaluation of policies and programmes, based on the thirty-year long experience of ATD Fourth World with an approach known as the Merging of Knowledge. Chapter 3 also lists a number of conditions that are likely to improve the results of participatory, deliberative exercises, as well as an evaluation framework that translates the hidden dimensions of poverty into specific evaluation questions to be addressed through deliberative exercises.

 

 

1. Speed and Reeves 2023, p. 2
2. OECD 2020
3. See Chapter 2 of report