Wellbeing Ranking: Developments in applied community-level poverty research - Softcover

9781853398469: Wellbeing Ranking: Developments in applied community-level poverty research

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853398462 ISBN 13: 9781853398469

Verlag: Practical Action Publishing, 2014

Well-being Ranking tells the story of the development of assessment methods since the rise of wealth ranking in the 1980s.

It looks at the results of well-being ranking exercises and how they help identify important differences within communities and monitor changes in well-being over time and describes the successful use of ranking tools over large populations and the value of using multi-dimensional models of well-being.

Wealth-ranking is a participatory tool enabling people to group their fellows into wealth bands, and thus identify the very poor. Now the method has been developed to include the broader aspects of well-being – such as social standing and health – that people value as much as material wealth. The book suggests that understanding differences within communities is essential for good development aid work and briefly explores the ideas used to make assessments of well-being at national levels. This book is essential reading for everyone interested in participatory methods, from researchers and students of international development, to field workers and staff of international development agencies.

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�ber die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Rowley is an international development professional with over thirty years' experience working for national and international NGOs, government agencies, bilateral and multi-lateral donors and commercial companies in the UK, Africa and elsewhere.

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Wellbeing Ranking

Developments in Applied Community-Level Poverty Research

By John Rowley

Practical Action Publishing

1 Introduction to wellbeing ranking: developments in applied community-level poverty research John Rowley, 
2 How wealth ranking was developed Barbara Grandin, 
3 The history of wellbeing ranking techniques John Rowley, 
4 Some practical examples and what users say about wellbeing ranking John Rowley, 
5 Methodological issues in wellbeing ranking John Rowley, 
6 Using participatory wealth ranking in a South African microfinance organization: the value of scale Anton Simanowitz, 
7 Wellbeing ranking, semi-structured interviews and practitioner bias: personality traits and participatory narratives Claire Heffernan and Federica Misturelli, 
8 Wellbeing assessment in practice: lessons from wellbeing and poverty pathways Nina Marshall, Sarah C. White, Stanley O. Gaines Jr, Shreya Jha, 
9 Wealth ranking to wellbeing: where next for development? Roger Williamson, 
10 Conclusions about wellbeing assessments and ideas for the future John Rowley, 
Annexes, 
1. How to do wellbeing ranking, 
2. How to do wellbeing groups, 
Search terms,

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: wealth ranking and wellbeing ranking

John Rowley

This chapter explains the origins of this book, its contents and intended readership. It provides an explanation of wellbeing and wealth ranking, and the key steps in carrying out a ranking at community level. The description of the contents should help readers to find sections that are most relevant to their interests, and although the book can be read from start to finish, the chapters can also be read separately and in a different order. This chapter challenges recent trends in international development and suggests that there is an increasing need for better understanding of changes that are occurring at community level. This is why methods such as wellbeing ranking are important and why a book promoting them is appropriate.

Keywords: wellbeing, well-being, ranking, poverty, wealth, development, health, happiness, local

How this book came about

The long process by which this book (Rowley, 2014e) came to be written started when Barbara Grandin's original 1988 manual on wealth ranking was out of print and it was difficult to find a copy. I wanted a copy because I use wealth ranking methods in my work as a freelance consultant working for international development agencies, and find it hugely valuable. It seems unlikely that there is any way quicker and simpler than wealth ranking to find out about and understand wealth and other differences within a community. Understanding these differences and how they change seems so important to people working in the international development aid sector that it seemed wrong that the key text about the method should be so difficult to obtain.

The publisher provided me with a scan of the text, but when they said they were planning to reprint Barbara Grandin's original manual, I suggested that it should be updated. They agreed and asked for an outline of a new publication. Then, as I interviewed people who had other specialist knowledge about wealth and wellbeing assessments, the book turned into an edited compilation. This is clearly a much better book than the one I originally had in mind, and has led to more work and worry about writing and editing than I could have imagined.

A note on context

Understanding differences in wellbeing is obviously important to people working in international aid agencies, and throughout the 1990s there was a lot of interest in what wealth ranking could do. It was a key part of the World Bank 'Voices of the Poor' project in 1999–2000; this is probably the greatest use of the method to have been sponsored by a large multilateral agency. During the first decade of the 21st century, the number of publications on wealth or wellbeing ranking has appeared to decline and there have been very few published since 2010. This may be indicative of a gradual loss of interest in participatory methods, or perhaps participatory approaches, within the development aid sector.

At the same time, there has been a significant increase in interest around ideas of wellbeing, and a range of models have been developed to look at the many dimensions that make up ill or wellbeing. The aid sector tends to look at its work as aiming to reduce poverty, but there is a broad acceptance that poverty takes many forms and is more than just an absence of material wealth. The recent broader interest in wellbeing assessments has produced a number of models that can be applied to a wide range of situations where there is no explicit poverty focus. Wellbeing offers positive ways of looking at work in the aid sector as a means of increasing wellbeing, rather than the more common approach, which is as a means of reducing poverty. Wealth ranking should not be seen as poverty ranking.

Wealth or wellbeing

The original wealth-ranking tool (described in Box 1.1 'What is wealth and wellbeing ranking?', see p. 3) initially focuses on ideas of economic wealth: the most common understanding of material wealth and the usual use of the words 'rich' and 'poor'. People who have tried to do wealth ranking know that, during the exercise, a wide range of other differences between people emerge; criteria for ranking people or households tend therefore to include issues of social, spiritual and emotional wellbeing alongside questions of health, happiness and attitude. There are examples of these findings in Chapter 4: 'Some practical examples and what users say about wellbeing ranking' (Rowley, 2014c).

Definitions of wellbeing tend to cover some or all of these components, so the phrase is vague and very broad. Attempts to assess wellbeing oblige people to come up with better definitions of the separate components that can be seen to make up an overall consideration of wellbeing.

Quite often, the different components of wealth and wellbeing tend to correlate, or at least appear together, in relation to particular people or groups. For example, those who are well off in one area of wellbeing are also well off in another, and being materially wealthy may lead to higher levels of other forms of wellbeing.

In this book, most references to 'wellbeing' recognize that wealth ranking or other assessments of 'wealth' tend to include the wider range of criteria such as health, prestige and happiness, which are in fact better described as aspects of wellbeing. Some of the work described in Chapters 3 ('The history of wellbeing ranking techniques', Rowley, 2014d) and4 ('Some practical examples and what users say about wellbeing ranking', Rowley, 2014c), however, is termed as 'wealth ranking' because this was the term used in the original reports.

The focus

The book focuses on the work of development aid agencies and many of the examples described are drawn from non-governmental organizations (NGOs). It covers ways in which wellbeing ranking has been used, and describes real experiences of the use of methods to assess wellbeing, from which readers will be able to draw their own lessons. Later chapters cover the development of wellbeing assessments using other methods, such as household surveys and questionnaires.

The book points out the value and interest in developing an understanding of wellbeing through the...

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