This 19-page paper, offered by the South Africa-based Community Development Resource Association (CDRA) [1], explores the transformative power of horizontal learning. Activities drawing on this communication approach include community exchanges, farmer-to-farmer learning groups, daily savings groups, seed-sharing festivals, and the like. These approaches are, according to CDRA's Doug Reeler, "yielding impressive results...[by] placing learning relationships at the centre of practice, paradoxically, as a living and human foundation for collective action."

To introduce the concept of horizontal learning, Reeler begins by exploring the following four interconnected principles:

1. Development and the will or impulse to develop is natural and innate - Reeler holds that the economically poor "are generally poor because of inner and outer hindrances to their natural impulse to develop, blockages to what they know and can do." He explains that, while outer hindrances such as unequal social and economic relationships can trap people in poverty, it is equally crucial to help people unlearn "fear, self-doubt, self-hatred and other deep consequences of deprivation, oppression and abuse". He stresses that "Unless they are free of these, no amount of smartly delivered capacity-building, skills or resources will make any sustainable difference."
2. Development is complex, unpredictable and characterised by crisis - "Working realistically with human development requires an orientation that ...works flexibly and lightly with plans that are unattached to specific outcomes, that meets each developing situation freshly, in its own right, that welcomes crisis as opportunity for transformation and one that values, above all, learning from experience."
3. People's own capacity to learn from experience is the foundation of their knowledge and development - "That these natural and indigenous processes and resources might be hidden, again points to a primary challenge we face as practitioners - helping people to consciously reveal, appreciate and strengthen their innate capacities and resources of learning. This is a foundation of real independence, inner confidence and sustainability."
4. Development is held in relationships - "We live, learn and develop within three differently experienced kinds or levels of relationships: relationship with self, interpersonal relationships with people around us and external relationships with the rest of the world....It is within each or all of these three levels of relationships that people are free or unfree."

While stressing that "working with horizontal processes has no easy formula, no project planning matrices to figure out and doggedly follow, and no guarantee of what will emerge", Reeler uses case stories from CDRA's work, and the work of colleagues, to illustrate that horizontal learning can be effective both as a method and as a strategy.

• Horizontal learning as method. Conversations among peers - rather than between peers and experts, teachers, or facilitators - "lend themselves to working with experiences, providing easier, freer spaces for peoples to tell their stories". The potential for openness in a peer relationship fosters connection not just on a "head level", Reeler argues, but "at a heart level, engaging [participants] more empathetically in process." It is on this level that storytelling in a peer setting emerges as a rich communication method, for Reeler. What he terms "organisational story or biography" can be used in peer workshop settings "to help organisations to understand their own life processes, assisting them to move out of the past where many get trapped, through the present and into their own, more conscious and emergent future story." In the absence of control by a facilitator (who can inadvertently instill a fear of judgment and a sense of intimidation and ignorance), "peer or horizontal learning methods show themselves to be liberating, capable of embracing the emerging and unpredictable unknown, open to working with experience and narrative, and fostering learning relationships and responsibility."
• Horizontal learning as strategy. Reeler suggests that peer learning relationships can develop into authentic forms of organisation and action, thus holding significant development potential. His core premise is that "the roots of a social movement initiative, and thus its sustainability" can lie in "subtle processes, qualities and depths of the close peer relationships that get fostered amongst people themselves within their own cultures." He illustrates this premise through several case stories. For instance, through the process of established savings groups of women in Cape Town, South Africa introducing newly forming groups to systems and methods of saving, a network of peer relationships emerged. Not only did the women develop the resources for (some) financial independence from abusive partners, but a sense of solidarity was created that has enabled them to fight domestic violence in their communities. "The stories of women belonging to these savings groups coming out banging pots and pans whenever they hear fellow savers being beaten up by their partners...represent a powerful cultural response rooted in peer relationships. Three of the groups, finding that they had formed a firm enough organisational foundation for entering the mainstream economy, were able then to apply, as organisations, for fishing rights."

Drawing on such stories, Reeler urges reflection on, and perhaps rejection of, the instinct to impose formalised structures and processes "to manage the change and hold the gains made" through horizontal learning. He explains that, "With the right kind of leadership and culture some formalisation and hierarchy can work, but the danger of squeezing out the life-force that gave it birth is great." What he hopes development practitioners will continue to explore is a "practice of respectful intervention that, rather than trying to deliver or direct development from above, can assist in unlocking it, by helping people to connect with each other and their own experience, generosity and resourcefulness, and thereby stimulating what is waiting and wanting to be born."

Editor's note: Doug Reeler indicates, in personal correspondence, that the CDRA is "about to embark on a 2-year research programme spanning horizontal practices in Africa, South Asia and Latin America to collect more case studies and to develop a dialogue across the continents, surfacing and answering some of the more difficult and challenging questions facing practitioners who are attempting these kind of approaches - and we are looking for collaborators."