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Churches are often at the forefront in helping the poor and supporting communities, playing a role that goes beyond biblical teaching and spiritual support. This guide provides church members with material for discussion, designed to help churches to successfully manage their interventions, understand their role in the community, develop facilitation skills, increase confidence in their ability to carry out practical work and activities, improve relationships with other organisations and encourage openness and sharing of differing views. Drawing on key passages of the Bible, this guide consists of a brief introduction to each topic, accompanied by a set of questions designed to encourage group discussion

This paper uses a case study to argue that participatory approaches emerge from a complex process of negotiation where fieldworkers are subject to unique combinations of competing influences from the organisations they work for, the communities they work with, and their own personal characteristics. It suggests that fieldworkers can actively pursue personal agendas and can also be involved in changing the structures that condition their actions. However, the paper concludes that elements of the organisational structure can leave little room for fieldworkers to use their agency positively, and that managers need to address this in order to reduce the gap between the policy and practice of participatory approaches

An overall comparison between the two situations - 1986 and 1993 - reported here and in the previous report allow for some guarded optimism. Most countries provided some information on policies but varied greatly in the amount of detail offered. Special educational provision is more firmly located within regular education, at school and the administrative levels, than before and has greater legislative underpinning. Within the policy statements, themselves, the most common strands related to : developing the individual's potential, integration and necessary steps for implementation. Regarding legislation, most countries did include special needs provision in the same regulatory framework as general education; the most common reason given for excluding particular children was severity of disability. Much remains to be done and there is no room for complacency. Many countries face fiscal and personnel constraints, and maintaining let alone increasing existing investment in special educational provision will not be easy. A word of caution : even where resources are not the central issue, the pressures created by the general school reforms taking place in many countries may reduce the priority given to speical educational provision. However, progress has been made, despite the many difficulties.