It is intended that this section may give useful practical experience to people in other countries who are planning to carry out similar consultations. To aid this, examples are given of the way in which three particular components of the I-PRSP were handled in the consultations (including basic social infrastructure, education, and local institutions). These examples are used to illustrate how the process was carried forward from the point of developing the research questions and methodology at the outset, through the fieldwork exercises, data compilation and analysis, leading on to identification of the main policy messages and recommendations. A similar process took place for all the 15 themes covered in the research. Box two outlines the broad research areas that emerged from this process. The full research framework is included in a fuller version of this paper, available on www.VDIC.org.vn or from the authors.

# 3.1 Deriving a Research Framework from the I-PRSP

## **The methodological challenge**

Policy documents are written primarily with government leaders, decision-makers and planners in mind and are not easy documents for non-professionals to digest. By their content and purpose 'comprehensive' strategic documents (such as the I-PRSP and CPRGS) assume an understanding of the multitude of sectoral and inter-sectoral concerns, interests and policies and how these fit together in the overall strategy, and prior awareness of the particular institutional context of their formulation. The question is: how does one make macro-level policy documents such as these accessible and understandable to local people, so that they can respond to them in a meaningful way?

This was the first major challenge faced by the researchers, which led to interesting areas of discussion not only with respect to how to use the I-PRSP in these local consultations - but also more broadly in terms of how does government communicate policies to the poor. It was recognized that a sizeable proportion of the community participants would not be fully literate9, and would certainly not be accustomed to being presented with and asked to comment on government policy in this way. In some fieldwork locations, such as in the mountainous province of Lao Cai, some ethnic minority participants (especially ethnic minority women) would not even be fully conversant in the national Vietnamese language. At the same time, it was likely that many of the local Government leaders and officials involved would not be fully familiar with the I-PRSP. It was therefore necessary to find ways of condensing and simplifying the policy document in a way that could be effectively communicated and used in the fieldwork while remaining true to its original content.

The second major methodological challenge was how to develop an approach that would yield comparable results and findings from the six fieldwork locations on the one hand, while also remaining flexible enough to pick up on locally specific concerns and responses on the other. It was intended that the research questions should be forward looking so that the focus would be on analyzing the relevance and potential for putting the policies into action, rather than providing a

> 9 World Bank estimates from the Vietnam Living Standards Survey suggest that the national adult literacy rate is 84%, but that this masks differences associated with wealth, geography , gender and ethnicity. For example, the adult literacy rate for ethnic minority women is only 57%.

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