I'm doing quite a lot of this at the moment, and on this installation I don't have root. In my case, there are extra complications, including multi platform code bases (Solaris and Windows) and some Clearcase voodoo involved.

I use a combination of PREFIX= and LIB= which others have mentioned. LIB= gives me a flatish directory structure that I can point my PERL5LIB to, and PREFIX deals with all the other files that make install installs. It is important to set PERL5LIB to be the lib directory if you are installing multiple modules with dependencies, as indeed on your final run environment.

When it comes to Module::Build, the mechanism is cleaner - you should just be able to set install_base= to the same place as you would set PREFIX= to. Module::Build does use its own install mechanism, and yes, you can put this under your own CPAN directory tree in PERL5LIB's path list.

Hope this helps