Power Tools:
Tools for working on policies and institutions

Tools for Understanding Often the first steps in trying to change policies and institutions are to scope out current situations and opportunities and from this information to plan a course of action.

• Community trade-offs assessment - assessing different development options in terms of local worldviews.
• Family portraits - of how a given family organises labour and other assets.
• Getting started - what is involved in improving policies and institutions to benefit poor people.
• Stakeholder influence mapping - to examine and display the changing policy influence of various social groups.
• Stakeholder power analysis - understanding stakeholder relationships and capacity for change.
• The four Rs - framework to clarify and negotiate respective stakeholder roles.
• Writing style: political implications - Approach and checklist to analyse how pieces of writing challenge or support inequalities.

Tools for Organising Policy influence by less powerful people often requires strength in numbers. Effective organisations are relevant to members’ priorities, legitimate, active, accountable and low on transaction costs so that members find it worthwhile to participate. In other words, effective organisation is hard to achieve.

• Associations for business partnerships - to help smallholders engage with, compete in, and benefit from market economies.
• Interactive radio drama - use of radio to gain public participation in natural resources policy.
• Mechanisms for organisation - Organisational options for community groups (cooperatives, trusts etc).
• Organising pitsawyers to engage - for developing organisations and business partnerships for small-scale producers.

Tools for engaging Well informed and well organised groups of marginalised people are able to take on the individuals, institutions and policies that exclude or restrict them. Engagement might be through cooperative roundtable dialogue, or through resistance – many effective groups combine both strategies

• Avante Consulta! Effective consultations - Steps to empower communities in negotiation processes.
• Better business: market chain workshops - Workshops for direct and indirect participants in market chains to share knowledge and inform policy
• Connecting communities to markets - Tactics to market independently certified community forest products
• Ethical appeal - Use of ethics-based international agreements and standards to hold government and business to account.
• Media and lobby tactics - Tactics to get national policy to work for small-scale farmers.
• Speaking for ourselves - Steps for communities to express their priorities and constraints in professional development language.
• Targeting livelihoods evidence - Steps to link natural resources policy with poverty reduction strategies and to develop appropriate monitoring
• The pyramid - Framework to stimulate participatory assessment and target-setting in forest governance at national level
  

Tools for Ensuring Having voice is not enough – marginalised people need mechanisms for accountability to make sure that dialogue and promises translate into action.

• Accessing 'public' information - approaches and tactics to obtain and use information from public agencies.
• Good, average, bad: law in action - Framework for scrutinising and improving the practical outcomes of particular legislation.
• Improving forest justice - to improve the administration of justice in the timber supply chain.
• Independent forest monitor - Assessment of the opportunities for IFM to raise accountability.
• Legal literacy camps - Interactive sessions to familiarise people with legal concepts and current legislation.
• Local government accountability - Ways to help rural citizens bring local authorities to account.
• People's law - Advice on understanding and utilising law in land and natural resources campaigns.