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ADD commissioned this review in response to the prioritisation of gender-based violence as a sector-wide development issue. We wanted to collate insight from our gender-based violence work to inform our own practice and to support other agencies in implementing effective interventions. 

ADD look at multiple factors, and others specific to the situation of organisations of People with Disabilities (PWD), to generate certain conditions which inform the choice of capacity building approach. In particular, ADD Cambodia’s commitment to an empowering and participative approach which aims to build sustainable organisations of PWD is a direct response to many of the negative factors. It underpins the ADD Cambodia strategy, as they work to “….help disabled people (sic) have their own ideas and develop their own approaches”. This commitment is critical for working in a new context where international donors are increasingly withdrawing from the country, as they are defining it as a newly emerging middle-income country.

In previous research, meeting places have been favourably addressed by service users, but they have also been contested as exclusionary. In this participatory explorative study, we sought to perform a contextual analysis of meeting places in Norway based on a discourse analysis of three focus group discussions with 15 staff members. We asked the following question: how do meeting-place employees discuss their concrete and abstract encounters with service users and their experiences? We focused on service user involvement, which was largely analysed as neoliberal consultation and responsibilisation. Service users were positioned as resisting responsibility trickling down and defending staffed meeting places. Social democratic discourse was identified in the gaps of neoliberal discourse, which is noteworthy given that Norway is a social democracy. This relates to global concerns about displacements of democracy. We suggest that meeting places appear to hold the potential for staff and service users to collaborate more democratically.

Calls for evaluations in Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR), in particular those of a participatory nature have stepped up in recent years. Much of this shifting discourse has emerged in response to the fact that evaluations overall remain scarce. Furthermore, very little is known about the impacts of CBR in practice and if/how it benefits persons with disabilities and their families on the ground. Nevertheless, and despite the calls for participatory approaches, the few existing efforts are too often targeted at creating standardised evaluations frequently at the expense of voice, participation and flexibility. This paper reports on a series of critical workshops held in Jamaica with CBR workers and other stakeholders, the objectives of which included discussions and reflections on emerging issues in localised, locally driven and responsive participatory evaluation frameworks. The findings highlight how participants favoured a flexible, adaptive and iterative approach that was not rigid, structured or per-determined by outsiders. Instead, they favoured an approach that created a safe space for sharing and learning, prioritised their narratives, and that was directly linked to and that fed directly into action on the ground. The paper concludes with the call for critical, engaged and bottom-up approaches that move away from control-oriented approaches in CBR towards more experimental and adaptive problem and process-oriented approaches, that embrace complexity and that are consistently responsive to an ever changing context.

Disability & the Global South (DGS), 2016, Vol. 3 No. 2