ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasises the importance of attitudes and behaviour in building systems of participation, or indeed destroying them. It draws lessons from over the last 20 years across Africa and Asia, where participatory tools and approaches are used for creating alternatives. Interacting with numerous people across the world, Robert chambers’s work in this period has been to develop and share ideas about participation and to pull together academics and practitioners in ways that have been unusual, creative and transformatory. Participatory Poverty Assessment was created by local communities; a big contrast to the standard practice where Non-Governmental Organisation staff led the exercise. There are also important legacies from such participatory processes, where attitudes and behaviour are challenged. New ways of thinking and doing can easily unravel. New imperatives from hierarchical organizations can impose old frameworks that stultify and constrain with great ease.
