Participatory Rural Appraisal

1
Participatory Rural Appraisal

• Julia Preece, Centre for Research and Development
  in Adult and Lifelong Learning, University of
  Glasgow
• ALARPM PAR, 2006

2
Participatory rural appraisal

• Commentary on rhetoric and practice
• Describing the rationale and approach
• Discussion of general critiques/defences
• Critique of two case studies
• Lessons learned
• Applicability in different contexts

3
Rationale

• Antidote to criticisms of traditional research
• Issues of ownership, control, power relations
• Powerful outsiders investigating local
  communities with only partial knowledge of
  context
• Criticisms of top down economic development
• Response to development agency needs for quick
  access to socio economic data
• Community demands to be included in decisions
• Increasing emphasis on need to respect multiple
  voices, ethical issues around participation

4
Application in African contexts

• Both urban and rural health, agriculture,
  biodiversity, urban planning issues
• For example
• Desertification
• Low food production
• Declining productivity
• Fuelwood shortage
• Privileges status of locally developed
  technologies

5
The approach

• Holistic data collection exercise about a whole
  community
• Research process in the hands of ordinary people
• Involvement of experts as facilitators
• Practical goals
• Obtain detailed understanding and analysis of
  local context
• Local people prioritise needs
• Community action plan

6
Summarising the strategy

• Encourage use of local cultural values,
  organisations and knowledge systems for solving
  problems
• Involve community at every stage of the process
• Help local communities find solutions to their
  own problems
• Build community confidence and capacity

7
Wider umbrella of participatory research

• Range of terminologies include
• Participatory research
• Participatory action research
• Action research
• Collaborative enquiry
• Emancipatory research
• Participatory appraisal
• Shift researcher-led focus to mutual learning and
  agenda sharing

8
The process

• New form of engagement between development
  workers and communities
• Workers listen and communities articulate their
  local knowledge
• Shared process of learning and working together
  to look for solutions to identified problems
• Several researcher-facilitators
• Data collection techniques designed to be useable
  amongst people with low literacy levels
• Using a family of methods that involve
  group-based learning and planning, investigating
  an issue from several different angles

9
PRA stages

• Site selection and preliminary site visits
• Public announcement of activities through
  traditional structures
• Data gathering (community members recruited as
  co-researchers)
• Data collation and analysis over extended period
• Preparation of community action plan
• Adoption of plan and strategies for
  implementation
• Ongoing participatory monitoring and evaluation

10
process - continued

• Emphasis on group data, building up a knowledge
  base of whole communities through
• Visual activities
• Walks
• Discussions, role play, interviews
• Photos
• Seasonal calendars
• Diagrams
• Exploring how people live their lives, values,
  cultures etc
• Feeding back issues to the community for
  analysis, discussion and new ideas

11
Role of facilitators

• Initiate discussion activities, e.g.
• Walking through a particular area and identifying
  issues
• Inviting people to put themselves into
  relationship groups
• Invite individuals and groups to list/draw key
  events in the life of a community
• Encourage men and women to record their own
  seasonal and daily activities
• Create a map of how resources are sourced for
  daily household needs

12
Critiques of the process

• Experience of participation not always positive
  in terms of inclusiveness and ownership
• Composition of participants may not be
  representative
• Choice of technique may reflect Western cultural
  bias in terms of skills and context
• Nature of the data collected reflects goals of
  researchers, rather than participants
• Failure to acknowledge controlling role of
  facilitators
• Lack of transparency in reporting techniques or
  findings
• PRA organisers are rarely locally based
• No quality assurance to ensure discussions are
  coercion free, or critique of community claims
  themselves
• PRA is under-theorised
• Tension between academic agendas and community
  agendas

13
Responses to critiques

• No methodology is value-free
• How reliable are alternative methods in
  addressing concerns of power, ownership etc?
• Range of methods/tools should be adapted to
  circumstance
• Local peoples knowledge is more useful than
  official information
• Appropriate training of facilitators and piloting
  of methods should address the above concerns
• Analysis should be on-going, rather than short,
  one-off exercises

14
Question of ethics

• Whose voices are being taken seriously?
• To whom does the data belong?
• Whose interests are being served?
• Whose indicators are most relevant for assessing
  development?
• Whose analysis is most relevant, reliable?
• Who needs the information?
• Who is most likely to be empowered in the
  process?
• How much community time should one demand?
• How much data should be removed for analysis from
  outside the community itself?
• How much should one unquestioningly accept the
  status quo of community responses?

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Case study 1

• World Bank HIV/AIDS prevention study in Nigeria
• Goal collect information about STDs/AIDS to
  inform subsequent monitoring activities
• Process conducted by local authority AIDS action
  managers through village elders
• 16 data collection methods used over 2 weeks
• Findings reported bilingually to community
  meetings through participatory workshops

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Some issues to highlight

• Communities did not rank STDs and HIV/AIDS as
  their main health concerns
• Main concerns were wider development issues
  (water, credit, markets)
• Report recommendations focused only on HIV/AIDS
  issues
• Although the consultation process was adhered to
  as a strategy, the research team filtered out the
  issues that they intended to spend their energies
  on
• No analysis of how well minority ethnic groups
  and women were included in consultation

17
Case study 2

• American youth learning about ethnic gardening
  practices from older adults in poor urban
  neighbourhoods
• PRA as an educational/community action tool
• Youth trained as PRA researchers
• Educators worked with youth, ongoing reflection
• 6 PRA methods over summer vacation

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Some issues to highlight

• Shared learning educators from youth, youth
  from elders, elders and youth gained confidence
  and developed trusting relationships
• Age/ethnicity mix broke down normal researcher
  power dynamics
• Limited action planning, though new ongoing
  relationships developed
• Confusion by elders of role educator or
  research participant?
• Difficulty in balancing several agendas
  (educational vs research vs community action)
• Youth needed help to carry out some methods

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Conclusions

• Versatility of PRA as an approach and family of
  methods
• Opportunities for data collection partnerships
  and new relationships
• A way of uncovering hidden knowledge
• Need for facilitation, as well as research skills
  
• Tensions of ownership theory/practice using
  knowledge within/outwith community
• Effectiveness of action plans, without follow-up
• Situation for change rarely identified by
  participants
• Realism about research outcomes but there is
  improved understanding between all parties