Chambers, Robert

While change accelerates in rural conditions in the South, professionalism and bureaucracy are buffered against change. In their top-down mode they produce and promote standard programmes, packages and technologies. Rural development programmes in India for agriculture, canal irrigation, watershed development, and poverty alleviation illustrate how there is a mismatch between such standardisation and diverse needs and conditions. This mismatch is underperceived, and status at the cores is sustained, by misleading positive feedback from the peripheries.

With this pioneering book introducing participatory approaches in rural development, the author challenges preconceptions dominating rural development at the time. The central theme of the book is that rural poverty is often unseen or misperceived by outsiders, those who are not themselves rural and poor. The author contends that researchers, scientists, administrators and fieldworkers rarely appreciate the richness and validity of rural peopleÆs knowledge, or the hidden nature of rural poverty.

This paper was prepared for the Workshop on Scaling-Up NGO Impact, held at the University of Manchester, UK, 1992. Four main strategies for scaling-up or having a wider impact are assumed: working with government; operational expansion; lobbying and advocacy; and supporting community level initiatives. This paper investigates whether there is a fifth strategy, self-spreading and self-improvement, for scaling up impact. The core of the paper, and the example on which this speculation based, is experiences with rapid rural appraisal (RRA) and participatory rural appraisal (PRA).

This article explores some of the evidence, experience, and questions concerning the generation of numbers using participatory approaches and methods. The main focus is the generation of numbers from several or many sources using participatory approaches, methods, and behaviours which are to some degree standardised and predetermined. The article provides examples of participatory ways local people can generate numbers and how these number are usually aggregated by outside facilitators.

In this chapter the author seeks a basis for a radical pro-poor agenda for public management. He considers the role of the poor and the wealthy in relation to the state, and envisions decentralisation, democracy and diversity as the basis for national domestic policy.

This tip challenges the notion of receiving signed certificates at the end of workshops trainings or courses. The author identifies three things wrong with certificates: people are less interested in learning and more interested in receiving a piece of paper; certificates deceive and mislead as some people learn and change while others don't and; there is no control as to how they are used and abused. The author goes on to suggest and describe two solutions: the Pledge Certificate, and the Group Photograph and Farewell Certificate.

Robert Chambers argues that central issues in development have been overlooked and that many past errors have flowed from domination by those with power. Through analysing experience - of past mistakes and myths and of the continuing methodological revolution of PRA - the author points towards solutions. He argues that personal, professional and instiutional change is essential if the realities of the poor are to receive greater recognition.

There has been an explosion recently of methods to enable farmers to express, present, and analyze their knowledge and to share this with scientists and extensionists. Many of the methods evolved from agroecosystem analysis and entail farmers making observations, maps, and diagrams. These are now described as "participatory rural appraisal" (PRA) methods. PRA is an extended process of appraisal and analysis that can lead to local action by a community or group. Crucial to the successful use of these methods are the attitudes and behavior of the facilitator.