This article uses observations from a training session in Papua New Guinea to raise questions about the use and validity of ranking techniques in participatory research. They discuss the limitations and suggest solutions. The article also includes a response from Robert Chambers.
This paper focuses primarily on lessons from experiences in mainstreaming and up-scaling participation, which are relevant to the partnership and ownership principles of the World Bank's Comprehensive Development Framework (CDF). The paper explores its various themes in relation to the idea of participation as building ownership and partnership from the bottom up. Lessons learned from applying participatory appraisal methodologies, particularly in participatory poverty assessments, to help national-level policy makers design more appropriate anti-poverty policies, are examined.
This overview describes how poor people in the Consultations with the Poor project viewed wellbeing and illbeing, that is the good life and the bad life. The second part focuses on five cross-cutting problems that were shown to keep poor people trapped in poverty and the bad life: corruption, violence, powerlessness, incapacity and bare subsistence living. Finally there are recommendations for each of these areas.
This paper discusses the use of PRA applications in the area of education and addresses how useful participatory research is in this area. The author argues that the combination of participation and visual analysis a faculty for life analagous and complementary to linguistic and mathematical skills. He suggests that they should be part of curricula. Chambers also notes that balanced reversals in the flows of teaching and learning would be useful, with adults learning from children and policy makers from farmers.
Editorial looking at the potential traps of those who are not poor pronouncing on the realities of those who are. It highlights the differences in livelihood strategies and realities between these groups, and how little understood these are by professionals who hold power. Using Bindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda as an example it goes on to show how participatory approaches can enable poor people to express and analyse their individual and shared realities. In the end the question remains of whose realities, whose priorities, count?
Throughout the development decades, most professionals have been confident in imposing on others their own beliefs, and the policies and programs which follow from them. In many fields this certainty is now seen to be misleading.
Trip report covering: consultations with the poor, PRA networking, and an international PRA workshop