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 genuine and rich descriptions provided by local people regarding their situation and conditions. This may not seem contentious, but there are trends among international development agencies that seem to promote simple global statements of what development is, and what should be addressed and changed by development aid work. There is a tension between the one-dimensional measures of approaches such as the Millennium Development Goals, and the complex and specific measures that emerge from assessments of wellbeing. The book looks at ways to address this tension.

Who the book is for

The book will be of most interest to people working in the development aid sector, including social development consultants, community activists, and those who design, assess, monitor and evaluate community-level initiatives. Some of these readers might use the methods described in the course of their work. Others may find it helpful as background information, and in finding and using other methods to assess wellbeing. It may also be relevant to researchers doing relatively small-scale research in the areas of wealth, poverty, inequality and assessment of wellbeing.

This is not an academic text and it will not contribute to the substantial work dedicated to the study of wealth according to its many definitions. However, some students of wealth, poverty and development may find it helpful to see how some of these elements can be assessed in real situations.

What the book contains

The writers in this book are mostly practitioners, despite their association with academic institutions, and are writing about their experiences of working with wealth and wellbeing methods.

I was particularly pleased when I tracked down Barbara Grandin, who agreed to contribute her recollections of the time during which the method was developed and the original manual published. In Chapter 2, 'How wealth ranking was developed' (Grandin, 2014), she provides some background to the development of the method, including the lack of tools available to assess economic questions at a time when a great deal of anthropological research was focused on social issues.

I have also drawn up a short history of the development and use of wealth and wellbeing ranking, and this is presented in Chapter 3: 'The history of wellbeing ranking techniques' (Rowley, 2014d). The chapter looks at the evolution of the thinking around wellbeing, as well as the use of assessment methods. This seems to follow a trajectory whereby participatory tools were initially received with enthusiasm and used by increasing numbers of people, then used more and more poorly and, gradually, abandoned. The overview of the history covers the possibility of using both quantitative and qualitative methods in tandem to reinforce each other. This would appear to be very sensible in theory, but seems to be rarely done in practice.

In Chapter 4, 'Some practical examples and what users say about wellbeing ranking' (Rowley, 2014c), I have collected observations on using the method from authors in the journals RRA Notes and PLA Notes, where practitioners discuss their work with some frankness. These are the views of the people actually trying to make development projects work, who do not need to publish in addition to doing the routine reporting of their jobs. I found that the tone and content of the articles was almost always self-critical, but useful to people who wanted to try out the tools in their own work.

The history and the records in PLA Notes raise a number of methodological issues related to the practicalities of carrying out wellbeing ranking. I have put these together in Chapter 5, 'Methodological issues in wellbeing ranking' (Rowley, 2014b), which will be of interest to those who are keen to know exactly how the methods have been used and tested. Although the way a tool is used is often important, with participatory tools there are also questions around the attitude and approach of the person using the tool.

In keeping with the tone and style of PLA Notes, I have adopted a more personal and reflexive approach in Chapters 4 (Rowley 2014c) and 5(Rowley, 2014b). The content, also in line with PLA Notes, is offered for readers to pick through and find items or observations that are helpful to them. The more personal tone is a deliberate contrast to the more objective and academic style of the other contributors.

Anton Simanowitz describes his work with participatory wealth ranking in Chapter 6, 'Using participatory wealth ranking in a South African microfinance organization: the value of scale' (2014). His work has a particular place in the history of the use of wealth ranking, because it includes one of the most convincing cases of extending wealth ranking from the local community level to a wider application across very large numbers of households in a large number of communities. This appears to resolve a major issue that can arise when using participatory methods, which are often seen to provide results that are relevant and useful to the community in which they are developed, but become less relevant outside their original context. This issue is particularly important for assessments of poverty where comparisons between regions and countries are required and transferable results necessary. Simanowitz makes clear some of the conditions and skills required to deliver high-quality results that can be transferred from one location to another.

Claire Heffernan and Frederica Misturelli explore these issues in more detail in Chapter 7, 'Wellbeing ranking, semi-structured interviews and practitioner bias: Personality traits and participatory narratives' (2014). They present evidence on the ways that personality factors and professional backgrounds affect the results of semi-structured interviews. The importance of these issues and the dangers of bad practice are often discussed, but there is little concrete evidence of the impact of personal bias. These authors' findings suggest that interviewers need to be extremely careful in their interviews and in interpreting their work. It may be that being aware of bias and looking for it is easier to achieve than eliminating bias from interview work.

In Chapter 8, 'Wellbeing assessment in practice: lessons from wellbeing and poverty pathways' (Marshall et al., 2014), Sarah White and her colleagues describe how they have taken forward work on the development of models of wellbeing, by developing and testing a multi-dimensional model in rural communities in Zambia and in India. This is real research in real communities, and a model is developed from local understanding of wellbeing. Two crucial areas are covered: first, that the multi-dimensional model can be useful in bringing out areas of ill-being and wellbeing that might not emerge with a narrower focus on poverty; and, second, just how much work and attention to detail is required to test a model and interpret the results. The authors also discuss the issues involved in finding a way of describing wellbeing that is locally relevant and applicable over a wide range of locations and situations.

Roger Williamson in Chapter 9, 'Wealth-ranking to wellbeing: Where next for development?' (2014), look at the changes that have occurred in thinking about wellbeing in the time since Barbara Grandin published the wealth-ranking field manual. They review a range of high-level tools used to assess poverty, including those used at national and international levels such as the Millennium Development Goals. The different tools are assessed alongside the thinking that surrounds them, and key issues in their use are brought together and presented. Williamson observes that problems can emerge from treating wellbeing as a simple concept, or focusing on a single aspect such as happiness; from adding up the components of wellbeing to create some composite score; or from imagining that the assessment of wellbeing takes place in a politically neutral environment.