ABSTRACT
Over the last two years, the Leading Group Office for Poverty Alleviation and Economic Development in Backward Areas (LGOP) has worked with local specialists, the ADB and the UNDP, to develop a participatory approach toward village poverty reduction (VPR) through reforms to County Poverty Alleviation Planning (CPAP). The CPAP approach to poverty alleviation marks a departure from traditional top-down planning to the use of community-based methodologies in poverty mapping and the development of local poverty reduction interventions. 1 A programme of pilot projects has been used, primarily with the support of bilateral donors and LGOP internal resources, to build the capacity of LGOP staff and key decision-makers from national, provincial and local levels of government to adopt the CPAP framework. This framework features participatory strategies of data collection and poverty analysis; it aims to involve the target population in the identification of solutions as well as implementation and performance monitoring. Capacity to embrace the participatory foundations of CPAP remains the single most important constraint on the rapid and effective implementation of this innovation in national poverty policy in China.
