Timetable

1
Timetable

• 9.20-9.50 Presentation
• 9.50-10 Describing the methods
• 10-10.50 Trying the methods in small groups
• 10.50-11.05 Brief feed back
• Powerpoint handouts of the presentation will be
  emailed to you later in the day

2
What is participatory appraisal?

• Definition A method for obtaining information
  about local needs issues for working
  collectively to develop more relevant,
  community-based solutions
• Methods Mapping, sequencing, listing, comparing,
  counting, estimating and scoring, sorting and
  linking
• Also known as RRA, PRA, PLA, PAR, etc

3
Origins of RRA/PRA Chambers 1992
4
Appeal of RRA

• Accelerating rural change need for good and
  timely information
• Development experts confidence in their
  knowledge the problem. Solution incorporating
  local knowledge/s
• Anti-poverty biases of rural development
  tourism (e.g. spatial, project, person,
  seasonal)
• Insulation isolation of senior (male)
  practitioners
• Survey slavery (time consuming to administer
  analyse data often misleading)
• New focus on cost-effectiveness (recognising
  trade-offs between depth, breadth, accuracy, and
  timeliness)

5
Evolution of PRA for empowerment

• Applied social anthropology agro-ecosystems
  analysis farming systems research PAR
• RRA ? PRA
• New methods (e.g. mapping, matrices)
• Discovery that "they villagers/lowers can do
  it"
• Methodological shift from dominating to
  empowering, closed to open, verbal to visual,
  individual to group measuring to comparing
• Search for practical approaches and methods for
  decentralisation, democracy, diversity,
  sustainability, community participation,
  empowerment....
• Chambers 2003

6
RRA/PRA continuum
7
Key principles

• Offsetting biases
• Direct contact
• Reversals, e.g. from dominating to facilitating
  (handing over the stick) teaching villagers to
  learning from them
• Enabling participants to conduct their own
  analyses
• Optimal ignorance appropriate imprecision
• Triangulation (different methods, sources
  informants)
• Seeking diversity and difference (e.g. including
  historically marginalised)
• Critical self-awareness about attitudes and
  behaviour
• Rapid progressive learning (e.g. embracing error,
  continuous improvement,)
• Culture of sharing (NGOs, Govt. local people)

8
Visual methods

• Participatory modelling mapping
• Aerial photograph analysis
• Seasonal calendars
• Daily activity profiles
• Historical profiles trend analyses
• Time lines chronologies
• Matrix scoring
• Preference ranking
• Venn network diagrams
• Systems flow diagrams
• Pie bar charts

9
Members of a Womens Organisation in N. Pakistan
draw a map of their village 1995
10
Members of a Village Organisation in N. Pakistan
draw a map of their village 1995
11
Mixed group of villagers from N. Pakistan carry
out Wealth Ranking, supervised by VO leader 1995
12
Interviewing sampling

• Semi-structured interviewing
• Transect walks group walks
• Work sharing
• Wealth ranking
• Direct observation
• Focus groups
• Key informants
• Ethnohistories futures possible
• Matrices
• Traditional practices beliefs

13
Internal critique1

• Rushing dominating in the field (rapid and
  wrong)
• Lecturing instead of listening, watching and
  learning
• Interrupting and interviewing people while they
  are doing PRA exercises
• Imposing external categories values (cant
  learn from informants makes them appear
  ignorant)
• Gender bias (selection of informants
  researchers)
• Community meetings dominated by local elites
• Researchers reluctant to spend time in the field
  or stay overnight in villages

14
Internal critique2

• Taking local people's time without recompense
• Producing shopping lists of requests raising
  expectations which cant be fulfilled
• Using the label without the substance
• Putting methods before behaviour attitudes
• Emphasising the visual over the experiential
  product
• Accelerated PRA
• Rigid, routinised applications
• No recognition that good participation PRA
  requires institutional change by commissioning
  bodies

15
Participation - Paradigm shift OR
De-politicisation

• Co-option
• Display
• But Exit/misbehaviour co-option from below?
• Uncritical celebration of the community -
  insufficient awareness of diversity
  differentiation
• Language of emancipation disguises
  unreconstructed project of modernisation
• Personal reform stressed over political struggle
  (individualistic voluntaristic Christian
  metaphors of transformation)
• Empowerment generally not key issue for
  poor/disadvantaged

16
The 3 Tyrannies

• Decision making control
• The group
• Methods
• Those themes that are most apparent to us are
  the naivety of assumptions about the authenticity
  of motivations behaviour in participatory
  processes how the language of empowerment masks
  a real concern for managerial effectiveness the
  quasi religious associations of participatory
  rhetoric practice how an emphasis on the
  micro level of intervention can obscure, indeed
  sustain, broader macro-level inequalities
  injustice
• Cooke Kothari 2002, p.13-14